[flashback] ancestry of the sun.

[Caelum]

The bold regard that absorbed the image Sama'el made, acknowledging the tragedy of it along with the hope, had begun to grow dim in direct proportion to the lowering skies as the ethaefal drew to a halt within the clearing. Sunlight striped dusty patterns through the trees behind him, glittering off the curve of horns and burning the copper in his hair to embers as he dropped the trunk portion of dead fall on the spot prepared for their fire. "Blueberries," he smiled and it made him fresh, new again. "Wonderful. There's some jerky in my bags. We'll have a regular feast tonight." Aingeru. Aingeru. Aingeru. He blinked against the tormenting circle of names and glanced over his shoulder, into the west. - - - The heavy, steel bound chest spilled open and released the cloying scents of cinnamon and moss to unravel through the pavillion. Fragile reams of raw silk ivoried by age and ornate copper and teak bracelets, salt-beaten cloths and glowing amber beads poured over the tossed carpet. The light film of dust coating the trunk puffed and plumed into the bars of cutting the room like silt from the oldest riverbanks, finer and softer than any liner of nests known since the dawn of the world. The amniotic sands of such water banks, the cupping hands of civilization's cradle, had whispered the truths of addiction long before alchemists had revealed that the ratio of salt in seawater was the exact same ratio of salt in the bloodstream of man. Only he was far from the waters, the Sea of Grass that had welcomed him to this world yawning around him waited beyond the tightly woven walls where the wind whipped and shuddered. Long fingers sorted through the trunk's contents, searching with a quick air of desperation. Black ink trickled and speckled over his knuckles, vanishing into the untied sleeves of his jewel-bright shirt. He realized his hands were shaking and that it was not the wind screaming outside. He woke between one thundering heartbeat and the next. It was the moon rise that woke him. Twilight had descended upon Black Rock, diffusing the light from the windows into lavender shadows that twisted and grew mottled, cast as they were by the endless ribbons of water tunneling the city. Liquid light spilled over his hand as it rose, fingers curving as if to catch it, hold it even as the cold sweat that jagged, flash of dream had left him in faded. Syna's gold dappled his hand as he struggled up to an elbow, air still feeling heavy in his chest, but the idea of a smile began to flicker along the line of his mouth. His goddess was most glorious at dusk and dawn. The golden light began to dwindle, puddling ink into the room and onto his hand. His smile too dwindled a moment later because it was not just shadows on his knuckles, but the darkness was part of his skin. Windmark, the word came to him, floating up through his mind as though buoyed by terror. WIndmark like the man in that wrenching flash of dreams. His hand began to shake when he lifted it, closing about the elegant curve of a horn that was vanished even as he gripped, leaving him with nothing but empty. Black Rock. City of the Dead. Thunder had talked to the depths of the sea while he fell, sky-spat, into heaving waters. It flooded back to him, through him, memory of falling. Dark swirls of what he hardly knew as windmarks crawled over his skin, the embers in his hair guttering to ashes. The divinity that had shaped his limbs, coating him in the borrowed beauty of Syna, was fading fast. He was being erased. The sun was swallowed by the horizon and he began to scream. - - - "I'll need to check that fungus against my book," he was saying back in the Wildlands of Sylira, mouth having kept moving despite the trajectory of his deeper thoughts. "Let's leave that for the light, maybe have it for breakfast if it checks out.." He trailed off as the halo the sun lent him waned, the shadows crawling farther out of the trees to stalk the day back down. The colors of him began to bleed away, stolen not just by absence of illumination but of grace. He inhaled and turned towards the dead fall, sinking down to build the fire that would last. - - - When the wail died, he found himself the captive of a pair of impossibly blue eyes. The same eyes that, when he searched his cobbled memories, had been there when he found himself thrashing against the sea. Into their depths, she pulled him, unwittingly. A draw -- a line tossed, hooked, gently strung -- a wealth of calm and understanding in those eyes that had no right to be there. The world, for him, narrowed down to nothing but the blue of her eyes, nothing but the soothing shift of pale azure towards cerulean as the light of the sun faded completely away. Mesmerizing, because her eyes echoed back at him exactly what he was feeling, somehow. "I'm sorry," she said. Words crowded his mouth, shoving up against each other with knuckles and knees, stringing themselves into knotted streams of sentences injected full of sorrow and horror and lacks of understanding. They jabbed and garbled about his goddess, about cosmic stretches of wisdom hard won through the course of numerous lives. The words hunkered in on themselves with misery for not understanding, with wished for absolutions and unsung orisons for the cycle of days. Not a single one of those words ever made it out of his mouth. They began to pop and vanish like fireflies in the murk Leth's reign had left of his memory. They fell on their own tongues with swords because the language by which they were formed was incapable of forcing itself out between his teeth and the lesser language he was left with still felt foreign and, thus, somehow at fault. Maybe it would have been different if in that hour he could had spilled out his soul to this girl with eyes as blue as summer skies and equally as aching. Maybe the confessions would have begun to heal a piece of his broken soul and acted as a torchbearer, a shining example of what the rest of his battered and embittered self ought strive for. Maybe. He gulped in air. He struggled up to his elbows. There were shadows in previously molten eyes, unmoving as he blinked. Everything hurt. Everything hungered. I'm sorry, she said. He hated this language. - - - "I've a spare shirt, you want it," Caelum said, still building the fire, patient and slow while wearing the skin now of the man Sama'el had given a name back to. Sunsinger. Kasb'el Sunsinger. His head was bowed, dark spills of half braided hair loosely knotted at the base of his neck. The transformation had left his clothes a little loose in the shoulders, a little long in the arms and legs. Leth abbreviated him. Always.

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

Numb nods and mumbled assents answered all Caelum's statements, attempts at being polite, at being a person again. Not chattel, but a man. Still, no matter what the glyph on his wrist said, he was no longer a full-fledged member of the horseclans. One would think a soul would rise quickly back from such oppression, buoyed by its immortal worth, but he remained submerged, moved only by submarine currents when danger didn't whip up a froth on the surface. "I'm sorry," he said finally, echoing a woman he had never met, about whom he knew nothing yet. When he looked up and really looked, Kasb'el had relieved Caelum of his vigil. Sam had to wonder if this were really a gift from the gods and, if it was, why it had taken eight years for an answer to his prayers. Surely they had been more strident when a Strider's lifeblood was soaking the Syliran countryside. It was more comforting to have Kasb'el, the fabled ancestor, rather than Caelum, the golden scion of the sun. Kasb'el had his story inked upon his skin, was a human being. Caelum shone with the radiance of the solar goddess, and that light unearthed shameful secrets. He knelt wearily closer to the fire to help with the preparations of their feast. It went against his nature to sit back while someone else saw to things, and shirking had been severely punished of late in his world. "With a full belly, I'll probably pass out, so I'll bathe in the stream in the morning and see about that shirt. Thank you, ah, Grandfather."

[Caelum]

The apology brought his head up and around, frowning with the unforgiving light of the fledging fire behind him. It spat his shadow out long. "You've done nothing to apologize to me for," he said shortly and nudged a final branch into the fire. It seemed for a moment when he rose that he was off balance, adjusting to the differences in his physical form. He always felt as if his skeleton was trying to crawl its way out of his skin for a little while after first black and first light. "Here," and this was gentler as he retrieved the jerky from his bags, a few instruments dangling from the hook of his fingers: a tin cup, a sifter, the rolled catch of his medicine stash. "You eat first while I brew your tea. It'll help your sleep be more healing. Sam," he paused before moving onto his stated intentions, studying the beleaguered Drykas with burnt eyes. "What clan are you from?"

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

The younger man was so tired he didn't even know what he was saying, but he accepted Kasb'el's authority much the same way as he had accepted his father's, or that of the Ankal, his grandfather, or even his Master in Sunberth after the fight had been ground out of him with pain and degradation. He began to eat some of his bounty and mumbled thanks behind his hand before taking the jerky and adding that to the various and sundry things he was eating. "I'm sorry," he said again when he had paused to swallow and breathe a moment. "I don't even know why I said that. Um, what's in the tea? Lousewort, gentian, rose hips, goldenseal...?" He had, after all, been paying attention. "Oh, we were of the Sapphire Clan," he said, but would not say the name of his pavilion. It was dead. It had no name, just as Sama'el was dead, leaving only Sam the slave. Even if Sam had stolen back his freedom, that didn't make him Sama'el again, whole, complete, untouched.

[Caelum]

stars, hide your fires. these here are my desires and I won't give them up to you this time around. and so I'll be found with my stake stuck in this ground marking the territory of this newly impassioned soul. - mumford & sons; roll away your stone Tin clinked as the moon-made Drykas settled cross legged near the fire, eager for the light it offered. The beaten kettle was set on the edge of the flames to heat the water within it before he turned to the loot of herbs and unlocked the old kid hiding his stores. Shoving up shirtsleeves in revelation of continued windmarks, he set about preparing and portioning out first what had been gathered of the lousewort and the orangeroot. "Yes, exactly those things. The orangeroot here," and he opened his hand to display the shreds of carefully peeled root, fresh and green bleeding against a scar-slashed palm. "Is to purify. If I could have found sandalwood, I'd want it for the fire." A frown for that, dark eyes dropping back down to his careful work. The illustrated herbal book laid open on the ground beside him and was glanced at every so often as the last of what he wanted to accidentally poison his companion. "I was of the Opal clan," he said at length while tamping the herbs into the bottom of the cup. Steam had begun to waft from the kettle, the boil of the water within creating a strange sort of music in the night. "It must be true then, what he said, that I married a woman from the Sapphire clan. Do they still sing to their gods in the Sea of Grass, Sama'el?" A cant of his chin, a curve of his mouth into something that might have been amusement. The boiling water was poured into the cup, instantly releasing the scents of the herbs there to unravel in the air between them.

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

out on the wall sounds of banging is constant coming from your head and desperate the calls came and ringing from those wanna wring your neck your neck open your mouth sounds of breathing found it spilling from your face best to be dim to the humble of traffic stepping on your name count on us all falling our own swords tonight. - band of horses; our swords While Kasb'el went about his business, Sam sat in frustrated weariness. He didn't know how to help with the preparation of such concoctions, really. Nana had said he had no feeling for herbs. Sometimes Nana could be a judgmental bitch, but it shamed him to think other than the golden best of his deceased relatives. What seven year old had a feeling for herbs, after all? "Sandalwood's from Eyktol... no?" He thought he recalled that being imported from Benshira traders who skirted the edge of the Sea of Grass in Winter to trade with the tent city. See, Nana? Little Sama'el was not worthless after all. He nodded to the recounting of family legend, of Kasb'el Sunsinger, favored of Syna and Rak'keli, bringing honor to his name. But the question made his eyes sting and his throat close up and he shook his head quietly. "They did," he said, somewhere between a whisper and a croak. "They still do, I think. We followed old traditions... We did. We sang, we burned offerings... I've drunk your blood," he said, glancing at Kasb'el for a moment. "Diluted down generations, I mean. Holy Viratas never marked me out, but there are the old rituals..." There was a pause as he wondered if that would be a disappointment to this, his ultimate ancestor, that he had not been picked out by a god, though perhaps the only goddess who might have paid him any attention these past eight years was Nikali.

[Caelum]

"Yes," he responded to the question of the sandalwood. "It has peace-offering qualities," he explained with a bow of his head. A heavy braid came loose to sag against the curve of a shoulder, clever hands working slowly at closing back up his kit and counting the remains of herbs there. "Best when burned." Dark eyes lifted, motes of gold mostly lost in their depths, and regarded Sama'el steadily throughout his answer. "Here," he said finally and leaned forward, the steaming cup of fresh brewed tea an offering between them. The corners of his mouth twitched towards something resembling a smile. "Nobody's ever told me they've drunk my blood before and be glad Viratas had not yet begun paying you attention then. He is overly familiar with the nuances of betrayal, n'yeh?"

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

Sam nodded, accepting the incense lore from an elder with all due respect. He hoped that he would soak up knowledge from his ancestor the way a sea sponge did the bathwater. At the same time, he wondered at this providence out of nowhere, after all those years of suffering and unanswered prayers, or prayers answered in the negative. He was afraid to imagine that this would become a pavilion of two that spanned centuries. Blood diluted over time. One might say that their relation was too thin, tenuous to be counted for aught. All the same... "Thank you," he said, taking the cup in his hands and blowing on it even though he seemed to remember being told that was bad manners. Manners in Sunberth counted less than his horse's droppings to him now. "Viratas... he knows all betrayals, I think, yes. My grandfather, the Ankal was marked. There were ceremonies of blood drinking. He said it kept him healthy, but that was not why we did it. The word is in the blood. If only I had been marked when I was young, I could have been the grail... But all I have of the accumulated knowledge of my pavilion is whatever's in my own blood..." He glanced thoughtfully at Kasb'el, wondering what he might glean from his blood were he marked by the Blood Catcher. But he wasn't about to let blood for no purpose.

[Caelum]

"Seek the favor of Viratas, gain it, and I'll willingly share with you what memories are bound in my blood beneath Leth's reign, Sama'el." The offer, made so calmly, was not as generous as it might have seemed. The memories of Kasb'el Sunsinger and all of the other lives that had come before his were distant, shapeless things to the ethaefal. While at once he avoided the Sea of Grass as if it promised him certain doom, he had never been able to shake the idea that if he was capable of remembering his hours on this earth prior to his ascension with greater clarity, he might find in them the answers of divine healing he sought so passionately. He hooked an arm about an up-drawn knee, continuing to watch his companion in the play of moon and firelight while sipping at his own mug of tea. It was of a less potent concoction than that he had brewed for Sama'el. "If you are the last of me," he muttered, a frown riddling his brow before he gave a faint shake of his head. "Will you endeavor to restore our pavilion and ensure the continuance of the line? Or have you other plans with your freedom?" In his mind's eye, he pictured a path twisting and spreading. In its tangents waited glyphs and star signs all braided together like blades of grass. Later he would attempt to sketch it, to lay it over his maps and charts that seemed only like so much madness to anyone else. Later he would wonder what it meant of Webbing.

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

Sam was quiet then, trying to put life into a proper perspective where it was not ludicrous to think that he might be blessed by a deity, that he might raise a pavilion on his own when it took a greater man than he merely to maintain one. That one of his most famous forebears would want him to. Taking another thoughtful sip of his healthful tea, he shook his head, not to decline the honor, but to dismiss the question. "I don't know," he said truthfully. "I haven't thought that far ahead. Do you think I could?" Another sip of tea dragged at his eyelids. Kasb'el had said it would energize him or something. Or had Caelum said that... "I can't take the first watch," he admitted, slumber weight him down despite the shame. A Drykas warrior should be able to ride all day and all night without the need of sleep, but here he was just trying to finish his baby medicine and answer simple questions.