A Brief Respite

[Dylan Willis] She doesn't wish for it, and it wouldn't have been granted even if she had.

One has to imagine that he can hear her moving down the hallway, or that he's otherwise aware of the presence of sentient life forms in the area around him. If he could reach out and so thoroughly warp the threads of the Tapestry, if he could punish another person so thoroughly that it literally drained another Awakened's store of energy to keep him from nearly killing him, then he has to have latent knowledge of what's going on around him.

Yet he lies in wait, exactly where she left him, back against the wall like some sort of spy waiting for the coast to clear before he pokes his head out. When Kage returns to her blisteringly warm apartment she can see that everything is as she left it, including the nameless 'crow. His unblinking eyes are upon her as she comes across the threshold, and when he speaks, it's in a conspiratorial whisper.

There is no sign of the handgun on his person. His trust in her must be terrifying.

"Are they gone?" he asks.

[Wharil Choc] Wharil doesn't move. That is, he doesn't change locations. He moves plenty enough. In fact, he can't seem to stop himself. Earlier it had been his jumping leg and tapping toes. Now his hands swung in front of him, coming together and falling apart over and over again. It made him look impatient as they waited.

He glances over at Ashley. Then away. Then he glances back at Ashley, this time with more of a purpose in mind.

"So what do you think?"

[K. R. Jakes] "They're not here," is Kage's rather simple response. They're not here, in the apartment; they're not here, with her. That she knows of. They could be just behind her, for all she knows; she hopes they aren't. She should've shut the door.

Kage is standing just a few steps into her apartment, and she has had to turn her head to the side to regard Dylan, still where she left him, still precisely where she left him, his back against the wall, his gaze just as branding as ever it was. She stays still for a moment, looking at him in her brother-in-law's clothing. Wolf in sheep's. "What do you want to do right now?"

Kage walks into the kitchen. For a slice of pumpkin bread, and -- is the gun really still there?

[Ashley McGowen] Wharil performs some sort of intricate dance of nerves to her right, and by contrast, Ashley stands still, with her eyes fixed on the door to the building. After a few seconds she lifts an arm and rests her elbow on the gate, her breath coming in short puffs of vapor that gradually space farther apart as the adrenaline leaves her system.

He glances in her direction and she looks over at him when she catches the motion out of the corner of her eye, then away again. Then back when he speaks.

"I don't think Kage is going to have much luck with him. But if what I think happened did happen, he's very dangerous and I won't be able to get away with just letting him go, so I sincerely hope she does."

[Dylan Willis] They're not here.

He exhales, as though he's been holding his breath this entire time, and takes a full step away from the wall. He does not move stiffly, as though holding the same position all this time were something that was physically taxing. Despite his weeks of living on the street, despite likely having to survive by stealing and digging through Dumpsters, he still has a dangerously powerful physique.

Hadn't the thought occurred to Kage the night she found him that he could hurt her with his bare hands? That had been before she realized the full extent of his magical awareness, before she realized he could strike out from the ether and cause a full-grown man to bleed from the nose.

She goes for the kitchen, and he follows. It has to be painful, being back in this apartment after feeling the sharpness of winter around her, like holding one's hands too close to the fire after building a snowman.

"Are you staying?" he asks, without answering her question.

[Wharil Choc] He continues his little arm swinging motion, and nods in agreement.

He nods for a long time.

"She's up there right now trying to calm him down. Trying get him to relax after we...after Jacques riled him up. She's got a half an hour. She'll probably lead him into some kind of meditation. Or try to. The point is, he'll be a lot more calm in half an hour."

Wharil turns, facing the fence and the apartment building beyond. Which window was hers, he wondered.

"And he'll be a lot less prepared."

[K. R. Jakes] "The same as before," she says, meaning presumably that she is going to stay, to try and help him out of this state he's in. That she's not going to leave immediately, anyway. "Does that matter to you?"

That question: more because she is looking at him sidelong when he follows her (burning, burning) into the kitchen. The gun is still there, and she tears off a piece of pumpkin bread, tears that in half, puts one piece on the counter for him and chews on the other piece. Then she starts running water, fills a glass, drains it, fills the same glass, holds it out to Dylan.

If she's thirsty, just being around him, he must be thirsty -- right? But that question: just in case his answer is hinging on what she says.

[Ashley McGowen] "If he's just in a Quiet, people come out of those. Though I'm curious as to what happened to bring this all down on his head. Jacques made it sound like this happens a lot." And, reminded that the Consor was there earlier and seemed as though he might go back, she frowns and swivels about, trying to catch a glimpse of him.

When she doesn't see him anywhere on the street she returns to her original position.

"Suppose it's good to be reminded of how easy it is to step across that line."

[Wharil Choc] "From what I understand of the man? He was the go too guy. maybe the pressure was just too much. Orphan's don't get the support they need from each other, I don't think. Don't know if he was getting any kind of support from anybody.

"Kage said he was asleep for days. It could be that he'd already tried to deal with the quiet somehow, and failed. I can try to check his mind, see if he's really losing it or just...stuck. But I can't do it while he's trying to kill me, y'know?"

[Ashley McGowen] When Wharil suggests that Dylan might not have been getting support from anybody, Ashley's only response for a few seconds is a smirk. Then he moves on to whether or not he could check Dylan's mind.

"I could too, I'm pretty well versed in that," Ashley says. "Having him subdued will make it a lot easier, though." Her mouth thins. "I really wish there were more of a push to get orphans into a Tradition for this reason. This might not have happened."

[Wharil Choc] "Never too late to start." He says, still fidgeting against the gate. "Nothing like being proactive either. Oh! Speaking of which: You got plans for our girl Enid?"

[Ashley McGowen] There's a long pause that stretches after Wharil asks about Enid, at the end of which Ashley lets out a sigh and shuffles her feet in the thin layer of packed snow near the gate. "I'm trying to stand back and let Enid choose where she wants to go. I think her conviction will be stronger with any eventual choice if she's allowed to explore the options. She showed a lot of interest in studying with you, and I trust you to inform her properly."

"I would mentor her if she asked, though. She's very bright, and she doesn't annoy me too much." That last isn't said with the sort of levity it might have coming from anyone else.

[Dylan Willis] Kage leaves pumpkin bread on the counter, and it is not quite like a buzzard or a vulture that he descends upon it, but he does pick it up and eat it quickly, as though he realizes that he needs fuel for whatever it is that is waiting for him out there, as though he may very well not eat again for some time if he walks out of this apartment by himself.

The water glass comes his way, and the bread is ignored for the moment, or perhaps forgotten about, in the wake of sating his thirst. He looks thirsty. She's had to have seen him drink before, as though he were attempting to put out some terrible inferno within the pit of him, and it's no different now: he slugs back the contents of the glass without care or concern for the fact that Kage had used it before him, and pauses to breathe before handing it back and answering.

"It does," he says. "I'm not leaving you here."

[Wharil Choc] There's that nodding again. The incessant agreement that seems to come part and parcel with his constant shuffling.

"She's killed already. She needs discipline. And she needs to know how to make up for that. That's just my view of it, really. But you bring up a good point. Conviction goes a long way. I don't know if she has it in her to do what we do. Meanwhile, she's got that inquisitive nature and hunger for knowledge and understanding that would probably make a great hermetic.

"There's another, y'know. I don't think anyone's even approached her yet, but she's clearly awakened. She goes to the university. Name's Emily. That's all I really know."

[Ashley McGowen] "I met Emily, once. But I haven't had a chance to corner her yet." Half of a smile quirks a corner of her mouth, in that wry joking-but-not sort of way she has. "Enid knows her, though. I'll try to see if I can find her."

"As for Enid...she doesn't seem to have that sense of spirituality or the big picture mentality that you guys usually seem to have. The killings she did were a crime of passion, they were a purely personal thing." She shrugs. "Nothing to suggest that she couldn't learn those things, though."

[Wharil Choc] "Hm. What about this one? Kage? Assuming she wants anything to do with either of us after today, that is."

[K. R. Jakes] How polite and normal: the young man (who may've been handsome, once) hands the glass back to Kage once she's finished with it. She refills it, and hands it back to him. The water is white, a rush, a roar, but the oxygen levels even out eventually.

It matters, he says, and he's not leaving her here. This statement is met with the same [chord] trepidation she'd met his use of the word 'we' when he said that they had to go, they had to leave now, because They were coming, the Ones, and he'd stopped some of them before, and she wasn't safe.

"Oh. I see. I really appreciate your concern," she says, for lack of anything better. It's been a long day. There's a pause... and she takes another piece of pumpkin bread, worrying it with her fingers, eating a crumb [because crumbs are necessary in fairytales, otherwiseotherwiseotherwise]. "Do you remember what I asked you ... When we first met?"

[Ashley McGowen] "Kage...I actually have met her a few times, years ago. She was in a cabal with a man who mentored an old cabalmate of mine, and I heard him mention her being semi-recruited for the Singers for a while." Ashley smiles a little. "I can draw you a diagram if you need me to."

She waves a hand. "So I'd assumed Orphan because of her relative ignorance when it came to Marauders, but...I don't know. I'll try and talk to her once this is all done with, though."

[Wharil Choc] "She's old. Well, not old but older. More experienced, more set in her ways. Might not be as easy. And there aren't any Choristers in the city as far as I can tell. But we won't know that for sure until we all get together."

There's a pause that follows that, brief but palpable. Once again he turns, leaning with his back against the gate and tapping on the iron of it.

"We were all hoping Dylan would be the one to arrange that."

[Dylan Willis] The rest of the pumpkin bread has an incredibly short life span. It disappears in the amount of time it takes for the woman, his shepherd--if he thinks the Tradition Mages are demons, if he didn't even seem to acknowledge the Consor, what does that make her?--to refill the glass, and when she turns back around he takes the glass from her, summarily draining it a second time and gasping outward when he's finished, air ignored in favor of hydration.

It's handed back with about as much fanfare as he's done anything else thus far, and he reaches up to wipe his mouth with the back of one large hand. He has worker's hands, rough and strong, as though they are his livelihood, something that Dylan Willis the man did not take for granted. The knuckles are starting to heal from whatever had split them open several weeks ago, leaving scars in their wake.

Does he remember what she asked him when they first met.

He frowns, his head canting to the side in a surreal, almost inhuman motion, eyes unblinking. Has he blinked since she touched his face? It doesn't seem as though he has. It's almost as though he's afraid to close his eyes, as though whatever is happening around him is too much for him to risk letting it go by unwitnessed.

He's got to be getting used to it by now. Maybe that's where the madness is coming from: it doesn't alarm him anymore.

"You said a lot of things," he says. It's the most coherent sentence he's uttered in two weeks.

[Ashley McGowen] "Yeah, I thought about trying it too, and then I had someone else complain to me about how I was 'trying to impose Hermetic order' on everyone else and how I was close-minded and..." Ashley waves the complaints away, vaguely annoyed at the memory.

"Even if I had, though, I think I'd have run into the same problems Dylan did. Those being that our type are impossible to unite in a time of peace. It's not so bad now, but there'll be trouble if a real problem ever does show up."

[K. R. Jakes] "I asked you two things. I asked you what you saw on the path," she says, quietly, and her eyes are filling up with conern again (shadows), just filling up with trouble, "and I asked if you wanted me to ... To try and find your name. To see if... maybe there was a way out with that. Do ...you remember?"

She isn't hesitant, not precisely. She's just quiet, seeking again, searching his face, tuned in.

[Dylan Willis] Does he remember.

Does he even seen those shadows in her eyes? Does it even register as concern? She'd asked him what he saw on the path, and he had told her more in two words than he had in the entire conversation that had preceded it. He'd told her that everything was burning. That was all he'd said, and she hadn't pressed him for further information. They'd just walked, and in the end, when they came to the front gate, he had followed her over the threshold.

He's still following her. His trust in her has grown exponentially since Thanksgiving night for her feeling as though she has done so little for him, for her beginning to feel as though her sanity is slipping to match his.

For several seconds all he does is breath, quickly and quietly. He is not at ease. Even when he sleeps he is not at ease. His eyes fly open at the slightest provocation. He's stared at her several times when she's come in to check on him. He stares at her when they're talking. He stares and it's questionable whether he sees.

His nostrils flare, and he takes a step forward. He's got her backed against the sink again.

"I remember," he says. He inexplicably glances over her shoulder before looking back at her. "Do it quick before they come back."

[K. R. Jakes] This, again. He's coming far too close for comfort (the same apartment is too close for comfort, Kage; the same city is too close for comfort. There is absolutely, positively no comfort to be had from Dylan), and the slender young woman is straightening her spine. Pausing, but not at all for very long, then sidestepping Dylan, stepping back. He's in the kitchen now, and she's in the threshold. The back of her neck is crawling, and she rubs it, burrowing her fingers in the nape of her hair, twisting.

For a second, her eyes leave Dylan, but only for a second. They return, and holds up both hands. "Stay there, please." This is just as calm as anything else she's said, just as low with concern and worry and trouble. "Do what quick," she says.

[Dylan Willis] When she steps away, he does not pursue her. He turns to keep her in his sights, but he does not consume every two paces she makes with one of his own, even before she holds up her hands in a clear Stop motion. She asks him to stay back, and so far as she can tell, he intends to listen.

He isn't leaning against the counter or the sink, isn't holding his hands in his pockets or his arms across his chest like someone engaged in normal conversation with a normal human being. There is tension in his form again, tension that doesn't seem to go away unless she's got a hand on him, tension that doesn't even seem to go away when he sleeps, and he watches her carefully, eyes open and shining with mania.

Do what quick.

"Look," he says. It's a relaxed, present tense verb rather than an imperative. He isn't ordering her. He's answering her. "I've tried to find it. At first I thought it just wasn't there, that they'd taken it from me, but maybe I just can't see it, or... or it's hiding. Maybe you're right, maybe if I have it I can keep going."

There are no colloquialisms, no turns of phrase, but the underlying feeling is there: it can't hurt.

[K. R. Jakes] [So: Can't Take My Eyes Offa You, doo-dee-doo, doo-doo-doo... Practiced Rote, Spending Quint, Vulgar w/o Witnesses Effect: 5-2 = Diff 3. WP!]

[Page from Mei] Forums are now functional. Enjoy!

[Dylan Willis] [This man is Dynamism cranked to 11. That heat is his Resonance gone haywire, his world morphed into a Hell of his own making. Whatever Paradox took him here is gone now, wicking off his back like rainwater. His days are profoundly numbered; whoever he was once is dead, is gone, is not coming back. That dead man was a Visionary, was a leader. Now he's a traveler, a lost one, punished for what he thinks he's done.

His name is lost. His identity is lost. All he has is the search, and a direction.]
to†K. R. Jakes

[K. R. Jakes] "Okay," she says, slow, careful. Her hands are still held up. "Just be still, stay there, and I will see what I can see. Maybe," she says, and doesn't finish that.

Now. Kage is an Orphan, but, as Ashley knows, she was once (maybe) going to be a Singer. That is how she thinks of the Celestial Chorus, too: as Singers, as a Chorus. Never Celestial. Not ever. What Ashley does not know is that, when Kage was semi-recruited toward that tradition (or Simon's other, perhaps), she'd already been on her own for months. She'd already begun to settle into a paradigm. Still, your past influences you, and your past influences influence your present.

She doesn't sing, not really, but there is something lovelily melodic about what she says, in an accent that is skewed just a little bit from what it would normally be, an accent that is hers:

"Γενηθήτω φῶς
Ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα
Κύριε ἐλέησον
Γενηθήτω φῶς"

How she perceives what she sees, and what she hears, and what she feels (like a hand against her heart, like a hand against her nape; like a heat in her blood, like flushing, and reading out whatever oracle just may come from the quiver) is likewise influenced. She speaks, sings, and she Looks at Dylan, and there is a Story there. There is a story in his Patterns, multiple stories, and they're all twined together -- brightness and darkness, fate's tarnish, blacked out, mirror, and oh

oh no. Kage takes her time looking at Dylan, but not too much time. No, definitely not too much time. "Oh," she says to him, that's all, in a voice shaded by passion. "I'm sorry. No good luck yet," and she'll blink. Blink it off. Blink it out of her head. Blink, blink, blink it all away.

[Dylan Willis] The language she Sings in is not English, is not a language that the man in front of her has ever known or has ever understood or has ever had any interest in knowing or understanding, but he recognizes it for what it is. He recognizes it for Working. He recognizes it as an attempt to help, to glean some information from the ravaged ruins of his brain, and he does as she had asked him: he is still. He stays there.

It's blisteringly hot in this apartment after all the magic and countermagic that has occurred over the course of the last several hours. People walking past in the hallway are going to feel nervous, or hungry, for the rest of the afternoon, and the neighbors are likely beginning to wonder if the young tenant in this apartment has her heat cranked all the way up, if something odorless is burning. The heat is unnatural, unholy even, and it lingers in the places where the older of the two Orphans has Worked.

When Kage reaches, she finds... nothing. There is nothing within this man's skull, nothing within his Pattern or his Mind or his Essence, that can help her determine anything other than his Fate, than the fact that he is very much adrift wherever he is. Her nerves are exposed, she's frazzled, she's had this maniac living in her study for over a week and no one would fault her for being at the end of her rope, and yet she still tries.

He does not come at her when she is vulnerable, when she is extending her senses beyond her own sphere of influence. He does not move towards her when she looks at him again, blinking, apologizing. He stays by the sink where she had slunk away from him, powerful hands at his side, sleeves shucked up to his elbows as though he had been preparing himself for some monumental task. That terrifying gun of his is still in the cupboard, yet that makes him no less dangerous.

His eyes are unblinking as he watches her, yet he appears to comprehend what is being said to him even if he is having no discernible reaction to having no identity, no past, no sense of where he's supposed to be or what he's supposed to be doing. There is no distress or fear in his person, at least no more than had been there when he had been warning Kage about Them. For all he knows They are going to be back any moment.

"That's okay," he says, his low voice rough. A beat, and he starts out of the kitchen. He's still barefoot and unprotected, his jacket and combat boots left in the study. "I'll just have to keep going without it."

[K. R. Jakes] That's okay, he says, and Kage: well.

Kage closes her eyes completely. Where is the sea with never a shore? Because she looks at what is left of the man They keep calling Dylan, and it breaks her fucking heart. She inhales deeply, exhales all at once. When she opens her eyes, they're (luminous) wet and dark (don't cry). She rubs her palm across her left eye, and that's fine then. "No," she says, and there's this: Kage is still poised, still composed. She is still in control, she still wants to help, she is still resolved into this image of a woman who wouldn't back away (don't stop) from something difficult. "It's really not okay. I need to think."

There's no point in using Michael Willis' name.

"What do you want to do right now?" She'd asked him that before. She's asking him again. Keep going: that's obvious. She's hoping for more.

[Dylan Willis] No, she says, and it stops him at the threshold, has him staring off down the hall for a moment before turning to face her again, far too much time having passed between when those tears stained her eyes and when she brushed them away for him to have caught them. Perhaps it's for the best that this man, this shell of a man, isn't being confronted with anyone else's emotions, that she is able to maintain her poise and her composure even now.

Maybe it would be best if she backed away, if she just abandoned him as a lost cause and let the Mages affiliated with the city's Chantry deal with him, but she hasn't. Maybe after this afternoon's display she won't.

It's really not okay.

He takes a step towards her. There aren't that many steps between them to take, and he seems to recall her having told him to stay back just a few moments ago. So he doesn't come any closer.

"We've got to get out of here before they come back," he says. "That's what I want to do right now. I want to get out of here."

[K. R. Jakes] "I want you to find what you need," Kage says, quietly. "Please." A pause.

Kage does not know anything about Dylan Willis except that he was a Visionary, that he was an Orphan, and that this is his fate. That he's not coming back. That he has a father who needs him. That he has Tradition mages looking for him, but it took them a while. That he has a gun. That he has a body like maybe he knew how to turn that body into a weapon.

What Kage knows about the nameless crow is almost as scant, and yet. Yet. Kage's attention is for what he is now. She knows some of what he is proficient in. She knows that he is punishing himself, that he is lost, that he needs to go forward. She knows that he is listening to her, but she doesn't know why; she doesn't know what he sees when he looks at her. She knows that he doesn't sleep heavily and she knows that the only time she has seen him close his eyes was when she touched his face. She knows that everything's burning, and that he's irrevocably broken. That there's a Her. That there's something he thinks he did. Something he's being righteously punished for.

"I don't think you can keep going without it. Well, you can keep -- walking. But you're just going in circles. There's no ... There's no point. If you want me to stop talking, just say so, and I will be quiet. You said it earlier. It's no good without the whole. Don't you want to be ... whole again, too?"

[Dylan Willis] He could have killed someone today. If it weren't for the half-blind young woman outside in the hallway, someone may very well have died today. The two Tradition Mages who came to her door in search of a man who no longer exists are just as powerful as the fugitive she has been harboring for several weeks, have proficiencies in different Spheres than he has, but if anyone can help him, they seem to be better equipped to do it than Kage is.

Yet she speaks his language. She has been able to break through the flames and the fog surrounding his world and communicate with him on a level that the others were not able to, and she uses the words that he uses.

He listens when she speaks, and he doesn't come towards her again.

A look of concern comes over his features, of uncertainty. It isn't quite like when she asked him his name, when he became agitated trying to remember something that wasn't there. He doesn't look agitated. He looks lost.

"I don't know if I can be."

[K. R. Jakes] "I can think of one way, maybe," she says, low and quiet and ardent (love). "Maybe two. Maybe. Just remember, say 'no,' and I'll just -- I'll stop speaking. I won't do anything unless you think it's okay. But okay: you think you're still going forward, but you're not. If you're not whole, it's no good. I think what you need is to ... step onto another road. And the only way I can think of for you to get there is ... by letting go. By stepping off this path. Do you understand what I mean? What do you want me to do?"