Flashback (Flashback) A Thief and an Artist (Johanne)

[Wrenmae]

Date: Spring 22, 505 AV

Anticipation tasted salty in his mouth, baptized sea-air filling his lungs with that intangible feeling. The Otani crested waves with eager energy, rising along the temporary spines of waves and falling along the dips in their sensuous bodies. The land loomed like a distant promise, the kiss of firm space beneath tired feet. Wrenmae had sailed to Denval with Tannus at his request, kept confined to his room till the call for land and port had gone up among the men. Perhaps the fallen Etaeful did it to spare the boy the reminder of his handiwork, men with listless gazes and hollow stomachs. Sickness carved a presence on their rigid bones and sun-taut skin, and Tannus had once seemed worried the ship would not make its destination.

Arms dangling from the side of the ship like appetizing bait, Wrenmae nearly jumped as nail caressed the back of his neck.

"When we make port," the airy tone of his captor and companion breathed, "You will have your freedom for two days time...after which I expect you at the docks."

Wrenmae shivered as that finger was followed by a hand, eerily pale and clutched possessively on his shoulder, "Don't make me come for you, boy. You have nowhere to go, marked as you are."

He swallowed back a response, the bite of sea taking his irritation from him. Denval loomed and with it, a brief reprieve from the fallen Tannus. As the ship swept into port, men seemed carved of wood as they leaped from the ship to secure the ropes and riggings. Three had died on the passage over to unexpected illness. The captain had called Tannus bad luck and would not admit him passage back to Alvadas. The ethaeful had only paid his passage and disembarked, leaving Wrenmae to take his own meager belongings and to step into the streets.

Denval towered above him, but nowhere near the hub of population Alvadas had been. Unfamiliar roads, routes, faces, and words crowded his young mind as the storyteller dashed from corner to corner. He sniffed out his lair, like a beast might, marking the passages and alleys as he passed them.

His stomach growled, a reminder Tannus had not left him with coin for the stay...meaning he'd have to rely on his usual methods of creating wealth to get much of anywhere.

Steeling himself, he made his way into an alley to drop his belongings behind a pile of refuse. It wasn't the best of hiding places, but he hadn't the time to find a better one and hunger gnawed at his innards like the scrabbling of a small animal trying to escape.

With practiced eyes he watched and waited...

Marks always revealed themselves in the first few moments of observation.

He'd just need to be careful.

Two days in Denval, a place as alien to him as the moon might have been...

Perhaps Tannus was testing him again.

[Johanne]

The streets of Denval seemed dull and listless to the girl with birdcage ribs and wonder in her eyes. Johanne had been born with a longing for the maybes and the whys, the dreams and the hopes, the despairs and the emptiness. On her flesh that day were ink stains on her fingers and pieces of parchment she had crafted with her own ten long fingers herself, stuffed deep down into the bodice of her simple grey dress.

Her mentor at the tattoo parlour had given her respite for a day, knowing how she was tiring of the needles between her fingers and the colours of ink spreading like a rainbow between flesh. Her mentor, Hayden, a young man of barely twenty seven summers, had become something of an older brother to her, a port of shelter in the storm that was her family. She had told him all about the papers and the books she longed for: all about the ink she wished to master, and the stories she wanted to craft. He had understood, and yet he wasn't going to let his hard-working apprentice go. Tattooing, he said, was just another art, an art that she would learn to love. And she did, she did love it. But the young teenage girl longed for the seas and the sky, and so he had let her roam Denval for a day, as if she were a tourist and everything was new.

They weren't new, though. They were the same streets that entrapped her. She had begun to think that she would never find anything new, any stories worth telling, in this small forgotten town.

Her feet carried her to the water, as ever. The docks were ever-calling Johanne. It was there that she could sit, think, breathe, believe. It was swinging her long, limber legs over the wooden quay that she could see stories and words reflected in the water. She walked down the sloping streets, tripping on cobblestone, her eyes on the horizon, with all the leisure of a fifteen year old girl who had nowhere to be but inside her imagination. The sounds and smells of Denval did nothing to arouse her from her daydreams: they were too familiar, too stayed, too much of her mother.

Her eyes on the horizon, Johanne did not look down in time to see the loose stone on the ground, a large one that she caught her foot on. Yelping, she stumbled, managing to catch herself on the corner of a stone wall, where an alleyway trailed off into the darkness between homes. A stinging immediately ran through her palm: she had cut herself on the brick, the collision splitting her skin open (a foreshadowing of later years, perhaps). "Petch," Johanne muttered to her palm, and revelled in the way that none of her mother's scolding followed. "Petch petch petch." And she laughed the sting away.

Flicking her eyes from her wound to the world, she spotted the shadow of a man, a boy, a thing in the alleyway, skulking behind a mound of refuse. Johanne stayed silent, though her shoulders tightened and her breath quietened. A man in the shadows was always an ominous beginning. She stayed still, leaning against the wall where she had stumbled, and tried to pierce the blackness with her eyes. She said nothing.

And waited for the story to begin.

[Wrenmae]

The alley's shadows were their own cloth, sown of silk and gossamer smooth, they billowed around the young man as he bent over his bagged life. Nimbly his fingers navigates the canyons and crevasses between fabric and other, rougher material. Tugs tore more darkness from the void, and the shadow gained features it hadn't before...a cape, a hat, the trappings of an eccentric, or performer. Down and out he dipped, spun with a serene sort of grace...a giddy half-step.

And he came upon her not unlike the waves upon naive shore, crashing into their innocence and dashing it to nothing. But it was only speed by which he overtook her, a clatter of booted heels against cobblestone and the wind of a figure passing her. Wrenmae was in the street, dappled sunlight slanted along Denvali architecture glancing off the curious character he cast. Wide brimmed hat and cape, boots and gloves, he was the image of a stranger, punched with mismatched fashion and dramatic flair.

"People of Denval!" The boy cried out, his lungs wrapping around the billowing of his voice and almost tripping, "I come from Alvadas with little more than you see upon me. Hear me...hear me speak of tales beyond and show some mercy...if the gods so move you."

Grinning, he dashed forward, leaped, and landed with a twirl of cape and hat.

"Once there was born a man to a caravan of traders who called all of Mizahar their home and never slept beneath the stars in the same place. In this life he grew to adulthood, never knowing peace from wandering." He turned on Johanne, completely oblivious to the fact she'd been watching him before. Instead, he caught her in his gaze and blushed, smiling and waving her to approach. He waved at everyone to. If he was going to have a bed this eve and food to fill his belly, he'd have to be convincing.

"Truly, it was not till he was of age that he began to question where his family called their home. He called upon their elder, a man of man seasons whose beard would brush the ground when he sat." Kneeling, he sequestered an invisible elder, looking up into what he imagined to be wise, old eyes, and asking the question of his character. "Elder," he said, "We travel from moon to moon, never knowing peace or rest...do we have no land to call our home? No place to travel to?"

He wheeled, standing and nearly stumbling over, his cape almost too billowing for him to have fair balance. "My son," He dropped his voice, taking on the resonance of one much older, wiser, slowing down his exuberance proved the greatest task and his thin chest heaved with exertion. "You will find the meaning of home, I think, if you leave from here and seek it on your own."

"So!" He whipped out of the crouch of the old man and straightened again, fiercely grinning, "The young man set out to find his home and traveled to many places, saw many things. He fell in love with a young woman, the daughter of a knight in Syliras and it was there he settled down."

Wrenmae took a breath, "They bore three children to the world and for a time, the man was happy. He had a family, he had a home, Surely, he felt, this was where he truly belonged, the city he was born to live in." Not many gathered, finding his erratic method of tale weaving almost intimidating, but Wrenmae continued...his livelihood deepened on an impression first, skill after. The words fell through his head like unmatched puzzle pieces, fitting together only in an instant's time.

"But as he grew old and his wife passed away, his sons pursued lives of their own and the man felt empty, saddened. More and more he felt alien and removed from his own home and finally, he took his old pack and set out on the Kabrin road, determined to find the caravan of traders who had raised him."

He strode up to Johanne, spun around her, continued speaking...each word was a new possibility on his tongue. He spun realities from nothing and loved every moment of it. "From Ahnatep to Riverfall he roamed, Alvadas to Sunberth and beyond...he sought, he looked, and finally he found his people on the wide Cyphrus plains. He presented himself before the elder again, asking for guidance. The old man had lived, and his beard, as his knowledge, had grown ever longer. The once young man asked why his home had felt so cold, why the joy he had felt faded."

"Son." Wrenmae bent himself over into the guise of a wrinkled old man, pushing his hat low over his eyes, "Have you learned so little? Home was where your children were, your wife, your life. We travel the road and call no place our home because it strays no father than those within our hearts. Welcome, my son, welcome to your true home...and you will always be family here."

He paused, trailing on the words.

"And so the once young man took up the trading mantle again. He traveled back to Syliras and one of his sons joined him as well. They say their line continues today, city to city, and across the wide Suvan sea. Your home, people of Denval, will be where your lives are made and your love is maintained. If you and the gods be kind, a coin or two for sake of food and evening's rest is all the thanks I need."

[Johanne]

OOCI hope you have enough to reply to. I know most of this was reaction. The only problem with threading with Jo is that she generally doesn't approach people out of the blue. Let me know if I should edit.

The shadow wore a hat, a cape, and the eager grin of a boy perhaps the same age as Johanne herself. Spinning out of darkness, the boy rushed past her frame where it leaned, tall against the brick, blood dripping precious moment by moment to the cobblestone ground.

(Barely noticed and barely missed.)

The shadow darted to and fro, into the center of the street, where older, wiser men and women wandered burdened by domesticity and the communal societal mindset. The darkened cape, belonging better on a villain than a boy, whipped the air against Johanne's cheeks as the wearer sprung by. And without a second thought, the aspiring writer forgot the reflection in the water, and followed the boy who fancied himself an eccentric.

With a voice that longed to be as loud as his daring soul, he cried out for the citizens to gather round and listen to a tale. He came from Alvadas, a city on the other side of the continent, so some of the sailors said: where streets were as wicked as the gods. He may not have the attention of the Captain, but skulking by the edge of the gathering crowd, he may have noticed the skinny girl with timid eyes and smooth fingers, reaching for a story, longing to pluck the words from the air and tie them to the page. The performer boy may have heard the lightness of her laughter mingle with his dramatics when he spun on his foot, and swished his cape, like a daring buccaneer. Johanne, at fifteen, longed for boys like this. Just to hold hands. Just for them to tell her stories. That he was telling stories in a strange city to him was something, in her eyes, to be greatly admired.

The story began much like any other might: a man beneath the stars, and no home to call his own. Johanne had never heard anything so tempting. Blushing in return, she took mincing steps closing to the eager young man, his dark eyes connecting with hers. She hardly moved closer to him at all, but where she stood, she was sturdy. She would hear the tale to the end.

The crowd chuckled when the storyteller affected a hunchback, his tone besmirching age with mockery and caricature, but Johanne did not. She stayed still, her smooth, unmarred arms hanging down beside her form, her eyes dancing from the strings his words pulled.

"You will find the meaning of home, I think, if you leave from here and seek it on your own."

Her heart singing in its birdcage, the mumbling adults and the chimes that passed became inconsequential. She had never longed for travel. She had simply longed to find the place with stories and with the tang of belonging, of home. And here, a boy her age, had travelled across Kalea to bring her stories, to tell her that home lay somewhere beyond these walls. The story was so clearly meant for her. (Even when she was older, and Wrenmae long gone, she still preferred to think this an act of the universe that this story stirred her heart so.) The whirling movements and affected voices of the boy became not a mockery, but an enthralling display of the story come alive from her page into the imaginations of the viewers: this is what she wanted people to see in their heads, if she could ever write something worthwhile. She wanted them to be as dizzy and out of breath as a young performer playing two characters at once.

Johanne whirled with the boy as he spun circles around her, watching his deep eyes come alive as the words spilled from his lips like water. She was not seeing the storyteller anymore, but the man, searching endlessly down the Kabrin Road, to find those he had lost so long ago. The ending left the silence rattling in her lungs. Too soon the words would stop. But his voice echoed in her mind, so alive as the stars. Her home would be where her life was made and her love, maintained. The words echoed upon her own lips, whispering to herself, while the other adults flicked their token coins to the boy, a pool of them collecting at his feet. And when they dissipated, she was still there, still dreaming, still memorising those final words: to be written on parchment when the night came.

"Where her life was made, and her love, maintained. Where her life was made, and her love, maintained. Where her life was made, and her love, maintained. Where her life was made, and her love, maintained..."

The storyteller's tale had ended, but her involvement in it had not. Beneath the streets of Denval, Johanne stood alone with the young boy: but all she saw was the traveller looking for a home. She smiled to herself. He had found one on The Road.

[Wrenmae]

The sweat on his face was victory, his ragged breath, triumph. In this unsightly language of muscles and syllables, pain was as much instruction as it was reward. Wrenmae bent over the coins that had been tossed at his feet, counting them one by one as he passed them from the plucking hand to the holding hand. There was just enough currency to fancy a meal for the night, not nearly enough coin to buy him a room. The revelation came when there were still three more coins gleaming on the cobblestone street.



Defeat ran in waves beneath his skin, and Wrenmae sagged for an instant or two before pushing the last coins into his left hand and stuffing them unceremoniously into his cloak. He stood with such rapid movement that the brim of his hat caught the edge of Johanne’s nose, knocking the wide brimmed accessory aside in a wide tumble. Moments died and were born anew between he and Johanne, the traveler and the storyteller…and in one sense, they were a bit of both. He was dangerously close to her, enough that he could imagine feeling her warm breath on his face with such clarity that he fooled himself into feeling it. Four steps backward was prompted, but there was no frown to compliment the retreat with any meaning but surprise.

It was a she, not because of extra shape in her hips, or breast but because of the evidence in her face. There was softness there, a curiosity in her eyes. Her face was female, delicately sculpted with gentles slopes and rounded edges where his own was rough cut and jagged…or at least by comparison. She was the only one left from the crowd that had once gathered and he offered her a shy smile, a gift for her patience or perhaps her interest in remaining even after the story had faded into memory.

“Hey,” he said, an introduction so lacking in dramatics it was almost starkly unique by virtue of his previous behavior, “Erm…I mean, thank you for listening to the story…erm, My name’s Wrenmae. Wrenmae Sek.”

His hand followed words mechanically, thrust out toward where he imaged a hand of hers to go, preemptively intercepting it for a handshake…whether it came or not, his arm would vibrate there for a few moments before falling back at his side. A rosy hue rose to his cheeks, but Wren would be quick to blame it on the cold…regardless of its absence

[Johanne]

Her eyes still closed, those final words echoing endlessly in her mind, being written and written against the paper backdrop of her thoughts in sprawling ink, she barely noticed the young storyteller bend and gather the fruits of his labour. To Johanne, he barely existed, though there had been a moment at the beginning of his tale where she had longed for boys like him to stay with her.

No, as soon as he had begun to weave his tale, he had ceased to exist as a living, breathing man: he had become an image, a symbol, a story. It was strange how one tale told for coin and food could make such an impression on her young, unscarred heart. And yet it had. She did not see him scurry close to gather up the coins. Only when his hat was knocked from his head did her eyes snap open and see the young taleweaver for what he was.

"Oh!" she gasped, and immediately a pretty blush spread across her pale freckled skin. "I'm so sorry." Even as he scrambled back, she bent down and grabbed the hat from the ground, dusting it of the refuse of the streets before extending it back to him. She could not look him in the eye, he was too mythical for she, and she would confuse him with the characters of his tale. He had become all of them; and they had become him. It was strange, the nature of storytelling. If only she could move people with her ink as much as he had moved her.

"Johanne," she said, softly, still looking determinedly at his boots. She did not see the soft smile he extended, nor did she return one, though her cheeks remained pink with embarrassment: embarrassed at what, she could not say. "Johanne Verkir." Without looking him in the eye, even now, she took his hand, rough against her own smooth skin, and shook it softly. It was barely a handshake, more palm-to-palm, holy palmer's kiss.

She held her hand there for a moment, before dropping it. A moment of silence hung between the two teens, the two shy ones who hid behind words and characters, before she was moved to fill the emptiness with words. "Thank you for telling that story. It was beautifully told." Digging her hand into the pocket of her dress, she withdrew a single silver miza, extending it on outstretched palm. Finally looking into his eyes, she blushed mightily, but did not look away. "This is all I have, but here..."

[Wrenmae]

He took the proffered coin delicately, as if plucking a single shining dewdrop from the clutches of a spider's web. It was quick, almost jarring and he regretted the speed immediately, it must have seemed like he was trying to get rid of her.

Wren blushed, looking pointedly down at his feet. When it came to crowds, he excelled in the art of performance...why now did he so royally petch up simple interactions!? She was a girl, wasn't she? His own age...or at least appeared to be.

Why, by the gods, was he so nervous?

"Erm, Thank you," he said to the ground, cursing the misdirected subject of his gratitude, "I'm glad you enjoyed it." He looked up sharply, trying to force his eyes on hers, broke, and looked past her down the street.

"Oh petch..." he mumbled, "I'm sorry, you're being so nice to me and I can't even look you in the eye!" He chuckled nervously, a bit too long and a tad too harshly, more like a warning bark than any real mirth. Shaking his head, he began recounting the coins in his palm. Still not quite enough for a room at the inn, but he could save a little for later performances and maybe have enough for a bed.

"Err, Johanne?" He asked quietly, stuffing the coins into his pocket with a jangle of turning shapes, "Do you...erm, do you know any places that stock hay around here? I don't mean to...sound homeless, but..." he trailed off, shrugging, "I don't have enough for the inn tonight so I thought I'd ask if there was somewhere comfortable I could bed down for the night." He bent, rapping his knuckles against the cobblestone. "These make for poor mattresses or pillows..."

[Brandon Blackwing]

JOHANNE

XP Award:

• Observation +3
• Socialization +2
• Detection +1

Lore:

• Wrenmae Sek: the storyteller

Notes:
Wren: your grade has been withheld due to retirement
Great begin-of-a-thread! It could have been so much more, probably

Please edit or delete your request in the request thread.
Comments, questions or concerns regarding your grade? Why not send me a PM?

credit goes to Adelaide Sitai