Solo The Things you Keep

[Ereban]

Season of Fall, Day 73, 513 AV, near the market Adrift among a thousand people. That was Bread Street. Just a few turns off of the market and the vicious alleys emptied into a long walk curving around the backs of several buildings like an adobe secret, a long hidden room with stalls crowded against its walls and the hot sky for a ceiling. But everyone knew the secret and the long walk buzzed with a jumble of beings, Eypharians draped in rich robes, beaded chains in their hair. Humans and Dhani moved from stall to stall pointing, haggling collecting items and passing them back and forth. But Bread Street wasn’t about the stalls. It was about meeting people, or waiting to meet them. It was about business; business that went on behind the backs of buildings. That was Bread Street. Eereban hunched on the stone bench. The shadow of the rough wall behind him long since moved on taking the cool morning with it. The curious sun blazed down on his pale hair and his ivory tunic did nothing to shed midday heat creeping up into his thin face. His pack, filled with aromatic herbs, weighed on his lap. He tried to remind himself that it was really money in the pack; certainly the undertakers would buy some of his herbs. They were cheaper than perfumes. He leaned to his right to peek down the alley, thin as a knife blade and shaded. A brilliant slash of sunlight carved across the windows higher up and in the alley a knot of silhouettes mingled around the undertakers door. What was this cut-through? White Feather Alley? Lost Alley? Ereban couldn’t remember and sat back against the wall again. He and it were the same temperature now. An ocean of figures drifted and wove past him and every so often he could see clear across the space to the stalls on the other side. The odors of sweet incense and sour beer did battle with the savory gray-bud and pungent waxy leaves in his lap. Between the swinging arms and ambling bodies, the flowing robes and wire-wrapped dagger hilts he spotted a woman squatting down between vendors, her bare knees up to her chin, dusty sandals the color of dirt wrapped in crosses up her thin calves, squatting to rest, squatting to be below the eyes of everyone for a time. Ereban squinted trying to burn through the glare from the street. Her skirt was a short affair with strips of leather and feathers, hawk and gull not peacock. Her top was mostly hidden in her posture but he could see some beaded cords and imagined it to be some sort of rough woven blouse sloping up to a smoothed collar gripping at her swan’s neck. She was not unattractive for all that she seemed fearfully made-up. Her face was a wash of silvery white and sparkling green. Perhaps hours ago it might have been an elaborate pattern but now it was a dropped cake of smudges revealing her features. Human, weary, brown eyes unfocused against the glare, lines at the corners of her mouth, the sort of aging mirage brings or just cheek-weed. She didn’t have the husked-out look of a dusker. Her round chin sat on knuckled fingers wrapped in copper wires like rings. But of course, not rings. Alone on a stone raft in a sea of bodies it was hard to stay in one place and Ereban’s mind drifted back to Ven’vahlen, his bearded human face, golden wheat field of whiskers frosted at their tips. “Eren, if you want to really see something you have to focus, pay attention. Nothing you can see at a run is just one thing. You have to slow down to a walk and look just how I showed you.” Ven’Vahlen’s voice in Ereban’s head, calm and even, just a note short of jolly, so out of place in the wary tide of Bread Street. He missed the old magus like a familiar star lost now somewhere below the horizon, trekked out into the desert letting the winds inherit his trail. Slow down and walk was Ven-speak, Magus speak. But now seemed like as good a time as any and it wasn’t like he was going anywhere soon. He sat up straighter and then relaxed. He relaxed his face and then his shoulders in a barely visible cascade down his form, willing his muscles to soften and lengthen, to relax. He breathed down into his abdomen slowly letting the breath spread like an ink drop through the water of his bones. Often Ereban would feel for the moon like this, sensing its silver presence like the last fading moments of a bell held aloft beyond the dune line, beyond the mountains. But this time he reached inward for that hidden place, the pool of his center. Ven called it that and the name helped. Ereban could see it as a dark pool in a dark place, his thoughts rippling the surface like breezes from a door left open. He sat still and quiet in the syrupy chaos of Bread Street on a stone bench with a satchel in his lap and did the hard work of waiting. He waited for the breezes to fall away, to quiet as if embarrassed to disturb this holy place in his mind. And after a few moments the pool quieted into a glassy flatness so smooth it seemed to dissolve entirely. Looking into it was looking out of it. In his mind he stepped through the dark pool of his Djed and emerged on the other side seated on a stone bench in the heat of the day, a pack full of herbs in his lap. But now that he had slowed down to a walk, the world was awash in color and activity. Auras swam over everything, they mixed and parted like flames, wound around each other and knotted in elaborate patterns, filigree auroras. In whole it was all far too much to take it, too much to even allow and he had to quickly focus or let the Djed go and splash back to the common world. Ereban quickly held a hand out with the effort of narrowing his vision to just the woman across the street, a reflexive gesture. Slowly he drew his pale hand back as the focus shifted like lenses dropping into place. A few passers by gave him the look one might give a beggar in lieu of coins, but no one seemed to have much time for a dirt grubbing human and just as well for him. The woman’s aura was a complicated flow of streams around her form, braided forms and crystal patterns interlocking and reforming as she moved, as she breathed. There was supposed to be information here, secrets hidden in the folds of color and patterns but it was like deciphering the language of sunsets. But then nothing is just one thing. Nothing is just one thing. The words echoed in his mind swimming up from the Djed. He looked closer. Her main pattern, a flowing blue series of stars whirling into each other, showed random knotted patterns, small and clustered, rusty brown and gray. What was that? Hand prints? Finger impressions? The pattern drained downward into a yellowing cluster of bands that wobbled into and out of each other. Where was that? Low behind her bent knees? In her lap? Is that briny yellow dance there for sex? For desire? That can’t be. Ereban felt further, reached out with his Djed. It was like standing against a strong wind. Nothing is ever just one thing. That squeezing set of yellow bands… was her stomach. Hunger. Like a thing with its own life it hung on to her. In a moment Ereban could see it clearly. The pale yellow bands pressing into her light, they would not go away. No amount of food would feed those talons. They sank in too deep and reached into the core of her. Everywhere he looked there were bits of that same yellow light seeping into and out of her complicated patterns. It was a sickness, a hunger that could never truly be fed; transcending food and love, tipping into a spiritual place no one else could reach. Not even her. Perhaps half a hundred other patterns swam through her being. Dreams? Worries? Any one of them as complex as the cancerous hunger that clung to her. Even at her mouth, just past her dusted lips the patterns twisted into beautiful green and coral shapes with a frequency, a lilting tempo. Was she humming? Singing quietly? To comprehend all her patterns, he didn’t think it was even possible and the flow of Djed was already becoming sticky, thick with his thoughts, harder to press through. Ripples in his still center tossed his perception like waves and with the instinctual understanding that enough was enough he stepped back through the mirror. The rest of the world rushed in to meet him, admiring moments from all directions full of sound and scent and hot sweaty air popped inward, pouncing. Ereban jumped slightly and blinked his pale blue eyes unable to forget the hunger he saw on the woman. It was like watching someone constantly die while living. The crowd was thick now, all arms and robes, sandals and boots. She was somewhere behind them all if she was even still there. He made to stand when a light touch landed on his shoulder. The bald Dhani servant from the alley leaned a little too close making Ereban desperately want to scoot back. “The undertakers will see you now.” The yellow eyed gentleman hissed folding his hands back into his sleeves and remained close a moment too long before turning and swishing back into the shade of the alley. Gathering his bag to his chest, Ereban rose slowly. He felt more fatigue than he had expected. A quick glance across the road showed only an empty space between the stalls. And Ven’s voice came to him again from the halcyon past. “Be warned Eren, my dear boy, no one can forget the things they see. There are some that say they can, but they cannot. No one can. What you see is yours forever.” That last part always sounded so sad, like an admission of some unimaginable guilt. But now just as then, Ereban had only questions and no answers with only patience to put in its place. He ducked into the warm shadows of the alley, pack in his hands and a new memory to cherish and deplore. . .

[Timshel]

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Ereban:

• Withheld. Your CS is good, but you haven't been active for over two months. If you come back, PM me and I'll add your grade here.