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[Victor Lark]

He took Ifran’s cue happily, lifting his drink and taking a harsh gulp of the liquid that had since grown lukewarm. Inspired by the thought of intoxication, he stared at a bar for a moment too long before turning his chin up again. His mug stumbled noisily as he set it down, singing an unvoiced groan of disappointment as the eypharian reiterated and expounded without giving any real disclosure. However difficult it was to expose, everyone had a passion; everyone could be excited, or angered, or moved. Almost everyone. Victor did not consider that he had met his emotional match, only that he faced a peculiar challenge.

He had taken him for vain, and seen an intellectual instead of a braggart; he had indulged the discussion, and had been tricked into playing the fool. Creativity was getting him nowhere. Maybe he should give honesty, if he wanted it returned to him. Or not.

“I live for you, Ifran of the North Winds.” He sighed, almost sadly, and the imperfect imitation turned it into something sarcastic. “And your stories and your wandering ramblings. I am only a bartender, after all. It is what I do.”

Truths expertly woven.

A suddenly sloppy hand reached to Ifran’s knee, leaning briefly as if to excuse the gesture for clumsiness. Chuckling an apology, Victor gave an embarrassed touch to the man’s golden shoulder before his fingers retreated to wipe his uncolored brow of invisible sweat. A coy smile stretched his lips sideward as he mentioned, “But I asked you first!”

[Ifran]

"Ah, flattery!" He chuckled. "How you do remind me of home, Victor Lark. I have not wandered so very far. There were the desert days where I learned songs from the slaves, traveling from oasis to oasis. Then there was the long journey north by way of Riverfall to come here where imagination trumps reality. "Nobody in Alvadas is who they seem," he added, reaching out to touch Victor on the nose as one might a child. "You least of all, tender of bar, weaver of words. Bartenders listen to people whose guards drop with the heaviness of drink, whether depressed or elated. How do you manage to pin people down here, to know what is true? "Reality here is not fixed. What is truth? What is anything? I live for transcendence, but the god, its patron, is dead. Each time my foot steps out onto a stage, I converse with the gods. I create, which is more than can be said for many of them. I wear masks to reveal my insides. I live to be all things and all people. "And what," he concluded, "do you live for, Master Lark?"

[Victor Lark]

Honesty. He did not want to give it. He could count on one finger the souls with whom he had shared his honesty, and yet he was beginning to think that more had known it than he realized, if what Ifran said was true. There was no other option, with the question posed again, the half-lie seen through.

For the sake of his own wits, he pulled a sloppy rendition of sadness on his pouting lips and dipping eyes, another mask for another moment. Contrary to his usual agenda, Victor hoped to distance himself from the emotion he portrayed. If he could make a parody of it, then the words would not come so close to his empty heart, and neither would this exotic stranger. He itched his nose where the golden finger had touched it. “I live…” For you, he could not think to insist; for your face, for your passion, whoever you are. But there were no words for what he felt, how little he felt. “I live to be someone other than myself. Not necessarily all things, but something.”

His eyes rose only as far as the drink in his mug as he admitted, “I want to be an actor, Ifran. Maybe even one who acts on a stage.”

[Ifran]

"Ah," he intoned, considering. Victor may very well have been lying, but all improvisational games required affirmation to keep things moving rather than negation which stopped the forward motion, the development. Whether Victor lied did not matter; it was a game. "And so you own a bar, you collect stories. That is one way to begin, to collect the stories of others, weave bits and pieces together until you have a story to call your own, a story to live. But if you wish to be another person on the stage, I would suggest that you speak to Master Fabel at the Crooked Playhouse. He is the purported expert in Alvad theater." Ifran learned what he could from the self-proclaimed Master, but what he really wanted was to perform with Ionu's Inverted, if only for a night, and then to weave true Illusion upon the stage, upon the minds of his audience, and then expand his audience into the entire population of Ahnatep. "Do you?" he asked after a moment. "Do you really?"

[Victor Lark]

“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied with a laugh, sagging forward like dejection. “It’s been a recurring thought, a passing fancy.” He quaffed the last of his drink, unable to recall how many he had finished before. Maybe he was drunk, or maybe he was falling for his own charade. It was a game, he remembered quickly enough, and a lie, even when there were threads of honesty in it. Victor did not realize how he appreciated Ifran’s philosophical distance then. He took the opportunity to drop an intimate subject, exchanged it for something easier and far less personal.

Victor’s hand snaked across the short stretch of bar between them and dared to touch the gilded fingers he met there. With a drooping smile, he stole a look into the eypharian’s eyes, those blue oases that told lie-truths and truth-lies with intangible whispers. If there was a glimmer of passion or compassion in them, Victor could not see it. And what he could not see seemed to turn the man’s face to stone, and yet his hand was warm, soft flesh. Ifran was taller, stronger, and perhaps cleverer than he... but Victor knew every man knew one passion, no matter how many others he masked with stone and conversation. Maybe he could leave the night with that much.

He wove his pale olive fingers between pretty bronze and pushed the heels of their hands together, as if to consider the way they moved. He traced to outline of Ifran’s thumb with the tip of his own. “Thank you. One day I’ll find the ‘Playhouse and this Master Fabel of yours, and maybe I’ll have what it takes to converse with the gods.” His chuckle was like a shrug; it admitted how little he still knew of the Art. “Tell me about a time you did, or when you thought you did. In Ahnatep, or Riverfall, or wherever. Give me a story, for my collection.”

[Ifran]

If Victor spoke truly, he could indeed seek out Master Fabel. If it was all part of the game, well, so be it. Ifran watched that paler hand toy with his own, knowing an attempted seduction when he saw it, though Victor's game was more subtle than most, perhaps hidden under the cover of a supposed seduction. Intrigues within intrigues. "The first time I played Royet, namesake of our theater, I prepared with an obsessive passion. To play the river god that begat my people, to distill our culture in one person, ... We are known as an irreligious people or, rather, religious on the surface. I felt it necessary to achieve a true ecstasy, and so I cultivated zeal within myself. Royet has died. The river, that is; the god abides in the Ukalas with his mate, the mother of our people. "By opening night, our director was worried that I was over-prepared. In an art form that does not shy away from theatricality, nor an awareness of its own falsehood, she worried that it would be all artifice and no soul, the which has been seen on our stages and lauded, but not what she wanted. But when I stepped on the stage... I did not lose sight of the audience, nor the exigencies of my art, but I did feel as though there were eyes upon me of a different sort. Eyes from the Ukalas perhaps, and when I sang to Ephya..." He paused, and then sang a few stanzas of an aria to Victor, right there in the bar in full voice. The song was in the Semhu fashion, which was beautiful in a strange, often inaccessible way. The Eypharian arts were not for everyone, it was true. But his voice was disciplined to a point that few achieved, and he was still young. It would develop as he aged into his prime. The timbre of it, the control, they were great. These things were often wasted on the style of the Alvad theatrical tradition practiced in the Crooked Playhouse. Here was Ifran at his best, singing a love song to a man in a bar, but speaking to a woman long since assumed into the Ukalas to be with her immortal beloved.

[Victor Lark]

The tale itself was plain enough, and more personal than Victor had expected. He was glad for that much as he considered its meaning, thumbing the hand in his. He would hold onto it for as long as Ifran would let him, taking some relief in the feel of it and wondering idly if it felt any different because there were so many of them.

The song sang, and Ned briefly interrupted with a surprised snort. Victor laughed, but then he listened. He could not tell the difference between the qualities and timbres of the music, and so he was stunned by its superficial beauty. Only when it was over did he realize that his mask had fallen, his carefully crafted expression disintegrated into the slack, absent stare that was his hollowcore. Ifran had seen that face once before on this night, and Victor was beginning to suspect there was some magic in the coincidence. It was as if he had stolen what little passion was left in the room, and used it to produce a performance of which he would not have been otherwise capable.

Victor wondered if looking at him was like looking in a mirror, then thought that he much preferred his skin looking less like metal. The energy of wanting, the djed in the desire, loosed and flaked invisibly from him. His throat felt tight with it, so he coughed.

“The gods gave you your soul, then,” he said, not really understanding what his own words implied. “If only for the night... or maybe all nights after. If you felt eyes in Ahnatep, then surely Ionu has seen you once or twice. She’s probably here now, giving soul to your voice, watching the two of us!”

Turning to his drink, Victor noticed a peculiar discoloration on the thumb and forefinger that remained entwined in Ifran’s, like the golden paint that was not paint had rubbed off on his hand. He loosed himself hastily and folded the morphed appendage in the nook of his elbow, tipping his drink in a short sip. “Or maybe He’s taken it away from you, now that you’ve unleashed that beauty on this city. Maybe I’ll see it on tomorrow’s walk.”

[Ifran]

It felt good to sing for an appreciative audience; it was hit or miss with the crowds at the Playhouse, though many of the frequent theatergoers had grown more accustomed to his exotic sound. But this was truly theater, communicating a love long dead and elevated to the Ukalas to one person who might keep that knowing locked in his heart forever. His smile was neither humble nor proud, and he did not comment at the leavetaking between their hands. He merely made a pious gesture, strange, perhaps, for an Eypharian. He had so many hands, but the gesture was simple. He touched two fingers to his brow, to his lips, and to his chest before offering that hand and his gaze up. Perhaps it was childish to envision the Ukalas as being up, but he was no scholar, no high-minded wizard, to know the secret mechanics of creation. It was a theatrical gesture, but no less true for that. "We tell lies to show the truth," he said, apropos somehow, or perhaps only in his own internal monologue. "From your lips to the Trickster's ears." He wanted Ionu's eyes upon him; in fact, that was the only thing keeping him here through the horrid weather and unappreciative audiences. With those eyes on him, he could turn all other eyes away, and cloak his rise to power in other seemings. O Ionu, he prayed quietly, make me an instrument of Thy reality. "If djed is soul and soul is djed, then perhaps we give and take our soul with every breath and every glance." He reached out with one of those hands, slowly, empty palm visible so as not to cause alarm, and brushed Victor's face. "There, a little bit of my soul for removing your mask that moment." There was no hint of malice in his voice, no promise that some secret would be used against Victor at some point in the future. Ifran was the man who hid in plain sight, distracted attention for himself with fanfares, but there was a part of him that remained in shadows deep as Akajia's bosom, and he did not share his secrets.

[Victor Lark]

Victor dabbled in a reflexive smile as the last of Ifran’s touch faded from the startled pores of his face. It was not often that the men he teased bothered to reciprocate; he was secretly glad to have flinched, if only for the sake of his mask. He wondered briefly whether his face had changed like his hand had, in the distraction. But his guest seemed not to notice anything strange, so he dismissed the passing concern. The soul they shared was as subtle, or perhaps as fictitious, as Ifran had intended. He stared at the other man’s mask for as long as was polite, trying and failing to silently argue nothing had been removed.

While the intricacies of the soul and djed still escaped his earth-bound mind, Victor took those words to heart. It frustrated him to wonder if there was any soul in him; he preferred to believe that it was imparted, earned, even stolen. With that logic, there was some semblance of hope that he could gain whatever it was he lacked. “Thanks,” he muttered, and his lips turned up with his voice, the lilt of wary sarcasm.

Victor shrugged, stood. The intimacy of it all, and not the good kind, was gnawing at him. A brisk jump poured him to the other side of the bar again, where he found a forgotten gold piece and a few cards strewn on the floor. He disappeared a moment to retrieve them, and was shoving them in his pockets as he rose again. “I pray every day,” he mentioned as if it were an accomplishment, head bowed in half-true exhaustion. “Those ears are everywhere, somehow; what’s heard is a different matter. Gotta be careful what you wish for, in Mischief’s city.”

He made to take Ifran’s mug with his untainted hand. “Want another?”

[Ifran]

"I think not," he said after some consideration. "Not tonight, in any event." He stood, paid for his drinks. There was much to think on, and this man could be dangerous indeed. Or not; sometimes what loomed in the shadows was not so terrifying as one might imagine. "But another night, surely. This place is fast becoming my favorite in Alvadas." Of course, he did not truly enjoy Alvadas, so that was not as flattering an admission as one might think. But it was polite, and Ifran was always that, except when he was not. "Do come to the Playhouse," he urged in all sincerity. "I believe you will find it illuminating and, perhaps, entertaining." His smile was full of lazy grace, winsome and inviting. "In any case, I will be there."