[flashback] stir with mighty song.

by **Caelum** on November 11th, 2011, 3:11 am

PermissionsSundry granted by Ravok's own Verilian.
*Sequel to and all our orisons.

Beloved,

They tap at my wrists, all the blood of me drop by drop, until it talks to me in tiptoes and cries to heaven in my mind. It sounds so clear for the space between one beat of the heart and the next, but then it vanishes like light in afterimages. It winks out, no, it is snuffed out. The syllables gasp smoke and my mouth makes soundless songs, symphonies of gibberish and nothing; and I want them to, darling. Oh, how I want them to offer these men lungfuls of heartlessness.

Yet more than that I want to offer them the full fist of but one word, one syllable, one sound of the celestial language they are so driven to hunt.

Then I could watch heaven mangle them too.

- - -

but with all my education
I can't seem to command it
and all the words are escaping
and coming back all damaged
and I would put them back in poetry
if only I knew how
I can't seem to understand it

and I would give all this and heaven too
I would give all this and heaven too
but I could not give all this and heaven too
not heaven too

so I was screaming out a language
I never knew had existed before
- florence + the machine -

Timestamp: 90 Fall 508 AV

"You crazy, heartless bastard!" Bridget Angelou shrieked.

Tongues of flame flickered in the hearth as she grabbed at the iron grate, wrenching it loose to fling it with an echoing crash against the far wall. Ashes fell like snow, flaking in the air to turn it smokey and hazed; but Bridget, she paid no mind. She was on her hands and knees, having dropped there with a crack, reaching into the fresh sprouting embers to snatch at the corners of burning pages and pull them out.

Watching this was Caelum who had, a few moments ago, been called the crazy one.

Littering the floor between them was a tattered trail of parchment, each piece shredded with furious deliberation. The pattern it left on the cypress wood floorboards began at the toes of his boots and ended on the hearth stones. While Bridget cursed and fumbled at still smoldering ruins of the journal, attempting to fish pieces out and coming up with little more than coals, Caelum smiled to himself.

"Caius would be proud," a desert dry voice remarked from behind the ethaefal.

Eternally caught off guard despite the blast of daylight from the towering windows, Caelum whirled to find himself face to face with Alander Jin. Lips peeled back in a smile that was ultimately more of a baring of teeth.

Alander raised his eyebrows in response, mercury and soot hair glinting in the light. Bridget released another shriek, this one more muffled than the last, and delivered a resounding kick to the stand containing the fire tools. The flames in the hearth snapped and snickered.

"You think he would be pissed," Alander concluded, shrewd eyes caught in their study of the prisoner's countenance. It could, such beauty, steal a soul, the Ahnatep expatriate believed. How fortunate none of us bastards have one, Caius had remarked half a season ago. A sigh left him and he side stepped the stone faced Caelum to prowl on lazy steps along the path of destroyed papers. "You honestly need to start paying him more attention, Kasb'el."

Surprise flickered across Caelum's face and he knocked out a hip, leading him into a turn. This was performed so as to maintain both Bridget and Alander in his line of sight. "It is day," he pointed out on a mumble, every word land locked.

"So what? Skin slips with day break and Kasb'el bleeps off into never-never land? This -- " Alander dropped into a corbie's crouch, the tails of his coat sweeping the floor, and he reached out to pinch up a particularly large piece of paper. It was squinted at and twisted about in heavily calloused fingers. "This was particularly good. Wasn't it?"

"Petching bastard burned my translation, Jin," Bridget cut in, every word a storm cloud swollen with rain. No drops were yet dripping down delightful, chubby cheeks, however.

Only Alander Jin was occupied by looking between a ragged shred of parchment with half a series of symbols scrawled on it and Syna's exiled lover who had gone still as the dead. What color the day had doused him with was drained, all the blood of him, drop by drop.

Alander began to laugh.

by **Caelum** on November 15th, 2011, 2:34 am

"Fix it," Bridget demanded while sweeping past where Alander yet crouched on the floor, chuckling into a fist like a madman and silver lined ribbons of hair hanging thick over his shoulders. The young woman planted herself before the paling ethaefal and shoved a hand up in to his face, displaying the reddening ooze of forming blisters littering her fingertips along with a few dangling strips of half scorched paper. "Fix. It."

Caelum cleared his throat and tore his regard from the huddling projectionist to Delucia's apprentice. "Your hand or the translation, Miss Angelou?"

Bridget raised her eyebrows, pausing far more than hesitating. "Both," she pronounced emphatically, all of the certain surrounding her words belonging to a soul who had owned others in chains the whole of her life.

Caelum knew better than to mistake the tears in large, brown eyes for anything but anger and frustration. Pain could not squeeze a cry from this girl, her's or another's.

"There is but one of those he can fix, Bridget darling," Alander drawled while shooting back up to his feet to swing about and delivering a rather dramatic kick to the corner of a soot smeared binding. It slid across the floor to crash with a puff of ashes against the feet of the hearth.

Caelum forced himself not to look at Alander again.

"He's pale," Bridget announced while giving both her hand and the paper scraps a little shake. It forced Caelum to blink, lash tips blazing embers in the sunlight. It was due to long practice that he did not step back, but rather held himself still as breath trapped in a drowning man's lungs.

"Why is he pale, Alander?" Bridget's head tilted to the side, shrewd eyes narrowing as her hand and the papers they held wilted a few inches down.

"Because he can only fix one," Alander said in a more amused echo of himself, the humor in his voice betrayed by the black creeping out of strange eyes as he came up behind Bridget to study Caelum himself. "Just one," he said softly.

Bridget, of course, could not see what Caelum could; and though her revelation came, it was far from the only one to be had.

"He did it," she whispered, hand and papers dropping like a rock into the grave. "He did it. Holy gods in heaven. The celestial language. You.. How much?" She rocked up to tip-toe, catching the ethaefal's sad, sad eyes. "How much? A sentence? No.. No.."

She whirled in a rustle of skirts, lace dragging through trails of leftover soot. It left nothing between Caelum and Alander who offered a smile no one, later, would ever believe to have been apologetic.

"A syllable," Alander said. "He wrote a single syllable. Didn't you, Caelum? One you cannot write again. Or maybe you came close, too close. Regardless you burned it."

Disgust marbled his words, building up their temper skilled as any actor. That was what Bridget heard as she dropped again to her knees, scrambling up what scattered pieces remained uneaten by the laughing hearth flames.

Caelum, however, saw what Caius Delucia's girl did not. He saw the gratitude in Alander's eyes. The gratitude for having destroyed the papers before they could no longer be undone.

Alander leaned in while Bridget mumbled to herself, to them, to no one who was listening. Beeswax, desert wind. Caelum swallowed and when Bridget jumped back up, papers clutched to her chest, gown ruined by ash to announce, "We must work on this!" He wondered if he had heard Alander right.

That soft, almost hopeful mouthing of words, too dangerous to even put an ounce of voice to:

The sun also rises.

by **Caelum** on November 18th, 2011, 9:57 pm

The scent of iodine and alcohol floated through the room, astringent and overwhelming. It left Bridget crinkling her pert little nose, head turned in a veil of gold brushed curls as she worried a scrap of scorched paper between her fingers. Caelum bent over her other hand where it rested on the table top, sun splatters reflecting off the gloss and throwing light off the curve of his horns.

A skinny set of tweezers was pinched between Caelum’s fingers, in the other set a wad of iodine soaked muslin gauze he was using to wipe down and sterilize it with. The set of his expression was intense with focus, attempting to block out both Bridget’s rambling and the stutter and spin of Alander’s pacing footsteps. He rolled his right shoulder and let his eyes sink to a close while pushing a long gathered breath out. He was trying to shove with the air all of the riot of his thoughts around rising suns and the intentions harbored in truth behind Alander Jin’s flat eyes.

“Why is it that if he could write it once, he can not write it again?” Bridget was demanding of Alander, peeking up from the ragged scrap in her uninjured hand at the projectionist’s incessant motion. “He – Ow!” She caught her breath and threw a glare at Caelum who, accustomed, failed to look up and continued with his work carefully plucking and peeling bits of ash and paper and grime out of her fire blistered palm.

“Do you honestly imagine he has been withholding the celestial language from us this whole season?” Alander raised his eyebrows at his business partner’s present love interest. Love, Caius had laughed, Honestly, Alan. “Caelum, have you?”

“No,” Caelum replied while pinching a bit of fresh killed skin free of Bridget’s life line. His eye roll was audible.

“It is a matter of memory,” Alander went on to instruct, soles of his boots scuffling as he kicked charred bits of journal binding toward a corner, his hands clasped behind his back. It gave the impression of a young man playing at ball. Of course, how young or old Alander was continued to be a mystery to most. “His memory is full of holes like a sea sponge.”

Caelum set the tweezers aside to douse his hands in a sprinkle of alcohol. A small glass vial of crushed orange root was lifted from the hand tooled box containing medical supplies and he shook out a liberal amount into a pre pared bowl of ointment. Worm root was next, slivered off with a little knife that too was cleaned with carbolic; and he lifted an ash wood spoon – ash wood being known for its purifying properties amid certain Taledera hedge wizards – to thoroughly mix up the goop.

“I would not be surprised if it took him another season just to recollect what he wrote, let alone how,” Alander said.

Caelum’s hand jerked, causing the bowl of ointment to skitter a few inches across the table. Bridget scowled at him and Alander tsked under his breath; but the ethaefal had received that message, at least, loud and clear. He swallowed and began to apply the ointment in a thin, spreading layer across Bridget’s palm.

“Caius is not going to be pleased,” Bridget decided. “Maybe we should take measure to, ah, speed him along.”

by **Caelum** on November 20th, 2011, 2:40 am

A cat darted across the room, paws sliding against the polished wood and the jingle of a bell announcing her arrival. The heavy tread of approaching footsteps followed, tolling down the corridor where water light reflected off the windows. Alander looked up from his meandering perusal of the scattered char and ash of ruined progress, whatever he had been about to say left unspoken. Bridget turned her head toward the door, thin eyebrows drawing together and the paper quivering in its pinch between her fingertips.

Caelum, meanwhile, was watching the cat. He kept his head down, the ointment on his fingers absorbed drop by drop by his skin. Why was there a bell? The cat never wore a collar. A collar could strangle her, could keep her locked in four feet and fur rather than allowing her the racial right of her transformation into the pale flesh of a young woman. All the same tinkling music sounded low as the slender, white cat crept from its duck beneath the hang of curtains toward the table and Caelum's feet. It drew a broad path around the dust of Bridget's skirts.

"Caius," Alander's smile was off key, bemused as the captain of the Hanged Fate darkened the door.

"Caius!" Bridget's smile was melodic, beaming as she drew back her doctored hand and made to rise.

Caelum shifted his weight, scraping the legs of his chair to an angle. It was an automatic motion, much like his push up to his feet. It was instinct to try to hide his bond mate and instinct as well to meet Caius Delucia standing. Standing, after all, was how he had long since promised himself Caius was going to have to bury him.

Faint pulses of fright and dread rippled through his bond to the cat, shivering out along his limbs.

"What is this?" Caius asked by way of greeting, hands propped on the slant of his hips as he took in the disaster of the still smoldering hearth and the debris tracking the floor. Inkwell eyes blinked once and long before he turned his regard on those gathered, offering a crook of a smile from a face that could have been crafted in the Ukalas to Alander and Bridget.

It faded when he looked at Caelum.

"Crazy, heartless bastard burned our translation, darling," Bridget's cupid mouth formed a pout, but the glint in her eyes and the sweep of ash stained skirts declared her intelligence. Distracted, self absorbed, but not without intellect. Caelum watched her walk away from him through the lengthening shadow of Alander Jin where he stood, hands clasped behind his book, with an expression of resigned humor.

"Look," Bridget murmured once toe-to-toe with her lover. The hand Caelum had just completed cleaning and dressed was lifted to display for Caius who, after studying it for a beat, looked over Bridget's head at his prisoner.

"Why did you burn the translation, Caelum?" He asked politely.

The bell jangled as the cat slipped closer to Caelum's feet.

by **Caelum** on January 15th, 2012, 5:58 pm

"Frustration," Caelum cleared his throat of ink and iodine while the weight of all their gazes settled upon him.

Alander was whistling, low and ribald, while ambling through the open archway into the adjacent room. His arm brushed Caius' in passing, but the captain did not turn heavy lidded eyes away from Caelum.

"It was a real translation," Bridget touched lips to the air by her lover's ear, her good hand resting against on his arm. Hazel eyes tilted sideways, watching Caelum out of their corners. "It was something, Caius, and he burned it. He's still against us."

"Wouldn't he be?" Alander's dry words crawled in from the other room, punctuated by the tinkle of glass and the musical pour of liquid. "The god of peace is dead!"

It was funny, somehow, laughter bubbling up beneath the expatriate's voice like ill colored storm clouds swelling with rain. The corners of Caius' mouth twitched toward a smirk, eyes dropping to Bridget who exhaled a laugh.

"You're useless, Alan," the young woman rolled her eyes, the gesture so laden with irony that it was almost audible.

While they spoke, Caelum turned his focus inward. The visualization of the muscles and bones, tendons and tissues constructing his left arm from shoulder stretched to fingertips emerged in his mind. From his scapula to his phalanges and the weave and stretch of deltoid and bi and triceps brachii about radius and carpals, he with utmost care began the delicate process of detaching his soul.

Sensation seeped from his fingers, leeched free of knuckles and palms and the numbness spread while astral fingers expanded and straightened themselves free of his body. By the time his elbow tingled and went out, he was projecting his astral arm backwards and down, brushing the whiskers of the cat crouching at his heels and whispering across the silk sheet of her fur.

He was trying to shoo her back, away, beneath the table because he knew very well he could not protect her.

A sickness had begun to gather in his stomach, stale and nauseating. He was overly familiar with that expression masking Caius' face, the taint of all the captain's otherworldly beauty further corrupted by what wicked thoughts made themselves manifest in his mind.

Caelum doubted any sun, rising or setting, could spare him from Caius Delucia's concept of mercy.

"How did you do it?" The captain ambled forward, moving out of his lover's grasp and away from the idling return of his business partner who frowned when no one was looking and drank deep of his brandy.

"And what exactly is you did?" Caius lifted his eyebrows, the soles of his boots settling into leftover smears of ash.

The cat growled. Caelum's astral hand flattened on her head. Fear and anger coursed to him through their bond and he exhaled.

"I can't command it, Caius," the ethaefal explained. "It isn't what you think. It is like, like," he struggled, the scholar, for words that might not just clarify but would persuade, would save them. "Spring rain falling. It's everywhere in me, but I can't see anything through its mist."

"And you lose track of time," Caius prompted, stepping closer.

"He forgot to eat," Alander drawled, sagging a shoulder into the door jamb.

"And you forgot what you wrote?" Cauis' eyes never left his prisoner's face. Mutely, Caelum nodded.

The sun was starting to lower through the windows. It grew new shadows at their feet and as the moment yawned it took everything Caelum had not to look at Alander, not to betray his thinnest but most real hope.

The sun also rises. What did that mean? More than what was immediately apparent. Alander Jin was not the sort of man to serve up poetry sugared trivialities. He never uttered a word he did not intend, that had no purpose. Bastard was forever self possessed.

"What was it, Caelum?" Caius questioned quietly and it clicked. Caelum's eyes widened with realization, words tumbling together mismatched as beads from a necklace in his mind. Rising sun, black sun. Rising Sun, Black Sun.

There was no way, no how he could give Caius Delucia so much as a hint at the celestial language.

Not anymore.

Caius was talking and the cat was hissing. Caelum's astral arm retracted, nerve by nerve reattaching itself to his physical body. Slivers of pain tingled in his elbow and he found himself staring across the light of the setting sun at Alander Jin.

"It isn't enough," Bridget's voice rose. "Caius, darling --"

The cat howled when Caius snatched her up by the collar, bell jangling and he cursing as claws ripped at the skin of his hands. Alander gazed steadily back at Caelum and tilted his chin a notch to the side.

"Write it down," Caius commanded. "Caelum, I'll have no more of this idiocy. You'll fucking write it again. Ow, hell," he flinched against the cat's sinking teeth.

Feline panic fluttered in Caelum's stomach, ripping his eyes away from Alander to where Caius was wrestling with the cat. Cora. His lips parted, cold coming over him like the mist of a cruel, spring rain. He opened his mouth and Caius drew a blade. Steel gleamed in the light of the setting sun.

Caelum said nothing and his lips thinned into a hard line.

A sigh left Caius and Bridget snorted as her lover eviscerated the cat with a swift, sinking swipe of his knife. The yowling, pleading, desperate screech came to an abrupt halt as entrails and blood, organs and thicker things plopped to the floor to rest amid the soot smeared remains of Caelum's journal.

Cora's corpse thudded into the embers of the hearth, red, red blood splattering as pain gasped and winked out within Caelum. The bond was cut, severed and shriveling. Bile rose in the back of his throat and sunspots pirouetted across his eyes.

His mouth remained shut.

- - -

And I wanted to, Syna. I wanted with reverberating ambition to sink the entire fucking city with a syllable. Only I didn't. I kept my tongue behind my teeth as if a cat had it and what irony, isn't it? They laughed at that too while the stench of burning fur singed the air. I was sick, but my mouth remained shut.

I just don't know anymore whether I did it for You or for myself.

by **Lazybones** on January 19th, 2012, 8:59 am

Thread Complete!

Notes: This was a really wonderful short story, and unbelievably well written. I absolutely adore your execution of an Ethaefal. I am a little in love with your writing.

Caelum

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