[The Road to Syliras] Hands (Flashback)

[Lillis]

Author's NoteThis is an introductory thread, PM me if you'd like to play off this. Or if you want to make a new thread with me! I'm always looking for new RP opportunities. If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. "How much?" The gentleman who stood before her, travel-worn and weary, was allowing his eyes to wander over the canvas of her body a little too freely. With arms crossed tightly in front of her, Lillis eyed him back, appraisingly, and said, "Depends." "On?" The traveler dropped his pack, and rubbed a hand over his face, grimy from weeks in the woods. He heaved a sigh as though to indicate that he was in no mood for extended negotiations, and she was all too willing to oblige him. "On what kind of reading you desire. An aura reading is 5 gold, palm reading is 2." "That's quite a price." "I'm marked by Avalis," she said, not without a little edge of defensiveness to her voice. "So obviously..." "Do you do cards?" he interrupted, satisfied with her credentials, as they were. Pursing her lips and canting her head gently to the side, Lillis gave a sharp nod. "Yes, but you don't want a card reading." Certainly not cards, no, not since a thief had recently deprived her of her deck. "Oh, don't I?" The grin on the traveler's face was roughish, almost charming, if not for the myriad of black caverns where some of his teeth once were. "No. You want a palm reading." A corner of her full, cerise lips curled up in a smile and she peered at him from behind a forest of dark lashes. "I'm very good with hands." Ducking into her tent, the traveler furrowed a brow and stayed near the exit. It shielded them from an icy autumn wind, but that was about all it did. Sparse and barren, she had few possession to speak of, and this space reflected as much. "So this is a gypsy tent?" "Not exactly. Will you sit?" "Where?" Lillis took a seat on one end of a woolen blanket, spread out over the dirt floor of her tent, and gestured that he should do the same. He hesitated, but ultimately joined her, sitting cross-legged opposite. Tucking a flaxen curl behind her ear, she studied his face in the dim candlelight. "I --" she hesitated, her breath catching in her throat for just a moment, "I was robbed two days ago." "I see." "I'm trying to replenish my store. I had these... beautiful tapestries, pillows, silks, crystals. A proper setup for a fortune teller, but..." a slender shoulder arched in a shrug. "They're just things, ultimately, and anyway -- enough about me. Show me your hand." He reached out, fingers splayed and she leaned forward, not touching him, and nodded slowly. "Mm. All right, that'll be 2 gold." "I don't think so -- give me the reading, then you'll see your gold." He withdrew his hand, then, and sat back. But she simply pursed her lips and stood her ground. "I know better than to give things away. Put the gold in the center of the blanket." He did not hesitate the way she expected. In fact, his purse revealed a great deal more money than she would have thought from someone in his condition. Storm-sky eyes grew narrow as she regarded him, but ultimately she tucked her feet underneath her and leaned forward. "Show me your hand." And she looked, but did not touch. She studied his palm silently for a time, endeavoring to concoct something that would sound passable for two gold mizas, for in fact she had no talent for palm reading. To her, his hand looked dirty, and she was able to divine that he had not washed in some time. But that was it. "Well?" He urged, brows raised. "What do you see?" A little pink tongue darted out across her lips as she lifted her gaze to meet his. "You have an... exceptionally short marriage line," she lied. "You're... not married?" "No," he confirmed, unimpressed. "Right, well, it doesn't look like you ever will be." She returned her attention to his hand. "However, ah, it seems you have a remarkably long life line -- yes, see?" She gestured vaguely to one of the many creases of his palm. "So that means --" "I know what that means. Anything else?" He was frowning at her in a most pronounced manner, but she did not falter under the weight of his gaze. "Well, perhaps if I knew what you were looking for -- answers to a question, perhaps." "No," he said evenly, "nothing like that." "All right," she stammered through a few more things, generic and safe, with a few inspired details that she drew out of the air. And when she was quite finished, she reached out for the two coins in front of her. But before she could pluck them up, he grabbed her arm which fit easily in his thick fist. As soon as they touched, the vision began. She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to control it, but it pulled her in like gravity. A flash of him and a well of blood seeping from his gut; a flash of him, tangled in something yellow; a flash of ivory. "Now just a second," he said in low tones, "do I look like someone who can actually afford to waste money on a sub-par palm reading?" "How you choose to waste your money is hardly my concern," she said on the wings of a sharp exhalation. The images were coming faster now, and she saw him die in the shadows of her mind. She watched him die in this future. "So what other... services might you render then, hm?" he asked, but she was not hearing him. She was watching him die. She saw the ivory of her suvai, she saw the curve of her own hand as she plunged the blade into his gut. She heard the life seep out of him, she saw the blood. And then she opened her eyes. "Well, that's interesting," she muttered, and wrenched her arm free. "I said, what other services --" "I heard what you said." She rose to her feet then, backing toward the flap of the tent that served as an entrance and exit. "I think you'd better go." "I'm not going anywhere. Services rendered --" "Take your money, and go." She said evenly, crouching down toward her pack where she kept her blade. "I don't need the money badly enough to warrant that kind of hassle, so please... do us both a favor -- take your money, and go." She turned her back to him, then, crouching over her pack to rifle quickly through it. He approached her slowly, with a lumbering gait, and reached out to brush his dirt-smeared fingers over a lock of pale yellow hair. "I'll give you all the gold in my purse," he said quietly. "You haven't got enough for what you're asking," came her sharp reply, as she curled her hand around the grip of her suvai. "Who says I'm asking?" He tugged her hair fiercely then, forcing her to rise to her full height, her suvai gripped tightly in front of her. The hand she'd been studying slid around to the front of her and pulled her close so that she could feel the shifting of his muscles all along the back of her. The hand she'd been studying groped and landed in place on her breast, kneading her flesh with an urgency that she did not recognize as sexual need. The hand she'd been studying began to travel slowly downward until it felt the cold ivory of her weapon. It paused, lingering there for a moment, before she heard him take in air to question her. But in that moment between breath and speech, she turned and plunged the blade into his gut. The traveler dropped, then, amber-colored eyes raised to her face in shock. He did not die immediately, and she watched him go, comparing this death to the memory of the vision she'd had when he touched her. "I'm sorry," she said quietly, "I'd have preferred that you die more quickly. But we work with what we're given, I suppose." She locked stoic gray eyes on him until he'd passed, giving him the respect of her full attention. But when he'd gone, she stooped and picked up the two coins that rested on the woolen blanket and dropped them into her own purse. She cast a glance over her shoulder at him, then: "For services rendered," she said, and stepped through the flap of the tent.

[Lillis]

At the center of the world there is a statue of a girl; she is standing near a well with a bucket bare and dry. I went and looked her in the eye and she turned me into sand. This clumsy form that I despise, it scattered easy in her hand. In the archive of her memory, she would not recall the act of collapsing her tent, packing her things, nor even the pang of regret that washed over her at the momentary recollection that she had not, in fact, deprived the man of his purse upon her departure. In fact, the time between the killing and her arrival at the hot springs would be a gap, a small stretch of lost time, that she would never get back. She would remember the pooling of his blood and then, as though it were an instant later, she would remember bending over a shallow pool and scrubbing her hands with soap and silt until they were raw and bleeding. She would remember the vacant look in his eyes and then the feel of freshwater on her windburned face, as though the stinging brought her back into herself. She had ceased her trembling by the time she slipped out of her gown, out of the linen pants that helped her keep the secrets of her past, out of her undergarments and into the warm water of the springs. She set about washing her clothing first, delicately soaping the gown, then rigorously scrubbing everything else before laying it out to dry, flat, on a nearby rock. Then she dipped those honey-colored curls into the water, scrubbing them as thoroughly as she had her clothes; she rubbed silt, then soap, all down the length of her, as though to purge her person of any remnant of her most recent foray into the world of malice. But was it malice? There had been a grim moment of satisfaction when she recognized that the man no longer posed a threat to her. She had relished the sense of power, but she took no real pleasure in doing what she did. "It was not malice," she whispered to herself, and shivered, despite the warmth of the water. The crunching of dried leaves set her to attention, but she did not immediately turn. Instead she dipped lower in the water, and turned slowly around, finding herself a few meters away from a Syliran Knight on his rounds. He was eying her dubiously, as though he were unsure as to whether or not he had just seen a water nymph. Lillis locked storm-sky eyes on him, and framed her lovely smile with two dimples. "Hello," she said lightly, and he gave a sharp nod of acknowledgment to her in response, but did not move on. "You out here alone, miss?" He asked. "No," she lied quickly, easily, "my husband --" she made a vague gesture toward the woods from which she had recently emerged -- "just went to check the traps he laid. Said we'd have some good sized rabbits this time of year, most like." "A little late for supper, isn't it?" "Mm, Rowan -- that's my husband -- said we'd be fine on apples and some crusts of bread but I said, No, sir. No, this lady needs some meat in her system." She grinned, and sank lower in the water, focusing intently on the man in front of her. She began to read him before she realized she was doing it -- the colors of his aura glowed faintly around him as she cultivated what weak power she'd learned and focused it to a sharp pinpoint. She may have been squinting her eyes at him. But she saw the clear, sharp reds of desire subside into an optimistic yellow and further still to a healing, or care-giving, green. She saw no guarded grays or concealing browns, nothing to indicate a heated nature that would put her in any danger. And so -- feeling relatively safe -- she collapsed, exhausted, into the water. And when she lifted herself out again, the Knight was gone, but he had seen through her as clearly as she had seen through him: he left her a piece of warm bread, some salt beef and a pear wrapped in a handkerchief, resting beside her drying gown on the flat rock nearby. Lillis could have wept at the sight of it. And came to rest upon a beach, with a million others there. We sat and waited for the sea to stretch out so that we could disappear into the endlessness of blue, into the horror of the truth. You see, we are far less than we knew. Yeah, we are far less than we knew.

[Lillis]

She was steaming against the night air when she rose out of the hot springs. Sitting with her knees drawn up under her chin, she eagerly consumed the bread and salt beef that the knight had left for her, saving the pear for breakfast, and curled herself up in her cloak between her drying clothes and her hobbled Gildling. Even on a bed of stone, it did not take her long to fall asleep. And the dreams came quickly, and brought with them a fever that set her to sweating and trembling in turns. They always begin the same way, with the three smiling faces of her sisters peering up at her one by one, and then bending once more over the tomes that were the subject of their studies. This was the Opal Temple on Mura; these are the images of home and family that come to her only in her dreams. Eventually, the shadow of nightmare crosses these happy memories and she sees the vacant look in the eyes of her slain mother, she sees the blood of her sisters, a pile of their flesh flayed from their lifeless bodies. And finally she twists herself awake, wrenching herself violently from these images. And though it is not quite light, she remains awake. For breakfast, Lillis ate the pear the Knight left her; she rinsed her face and hands in the hot spring, combed her hair, dabbed her neck and wrists with lavender oil and pulled the slip on over her head. She fed Quix an apple; she folded her dried clothing and pulled her suvai from her saddlebag. Initially, she was shocked to see that it had blood on it -- she scrambled to the edge of spring and cleaned it carefully and thoroughly, until she could contentedly go back to repressing the memory of the previous day. She stood on a large expanse of flat rock and held her weapon out in front of her, practicing her suvai positioning with the utmost care, slowly at first, and then faster -- She began in a neutral position, her feet shoulder-width apart, the truncheon in one hand and the longest blade resting against the forearm of the freehand, palm up and fingers pointing down. A slow, graceful movement brought the blade to shield her face so that she was peering outward through the three blades, her free arm coming up to block, fingers curled into a fist. The next movement propelled her into a gentle spin, coming around so that she landed on one knee, the blade pointing directly outward. Then she was back up on her feet, parrying out with her free hand up, palm flat and facing her. A flick of her wrist brought the blade inward so that she was clasping it with both hands, the blades pointing downward, in an ending position. She repeated this series a dozen times or so, doing it faster and faster with each rotation, until she was breathing heavily on her final conclusion. She bowed to her invisible opponent and shuffled toward her saddlebags where she pulled out a second suvai and began the rotation again. She was able to do it slowly, handling both blades with the utmost care, but she kept dropping the blade on her left side each time she tried to speed it up. Frustrated, she returned both blades to her bag without finishing the rotation. But that was what she did every morning -- instead of praying, she practiced.

[Lillis]

if time were a second oh, if life were a moment that once stood still, i'd leave it untattered, untouched, until... She must have painted him a hundred times, etching out in charcoal the strong lines of his jaw, the gentle slope of his nose, the tight curve where his neck met his shoulders. She could create his likeness with her eyes closed tight: the memory of him lived in the muscles of her hands, lived in every nerve in her body. She preferred to use a large canvas that allowed her to throw the full weight of herself into the work of it, rendering his face, his body, with the vigorous force of both hands to fill in color. That was almost like having him back, that act, creating him out of thin air, conjuring him with a fervor that always tended to border on frantic desperation. And when she was finished, she would step back, panting and stained with bursts of color, and she would feel the way she felt after making love. But then the artists eye would set in, and she would lose the feel of him in her bones and set about correcting the mistakes her love-lost body would make in the creation of the piece. Ultimately, it was never quite right. She was less than half-a-day's ride outside of Syliras when she stopped to rest, wanting to catch a few hours of sunlight before she slept. She had little paint to speak of, so she resorted to hand-made papyrus and charcoal, sketching him in pieces -- a hand here, his mouth and chin, a shoulder, the line of him looking away. She sketched fiercely, smearing her hands with black as she worked over the paper. She didn't stop until the sun had disappeared beyond the horizon and she could no longer see what she was drawing, his image lost to her again with the coming of the night. Rolling the sketches up into a tube, she tied them with a ribbon and tucked them into the hollow of a fallen log, hoping he would travel this way, find them and know she was all right, know that she was looking for him and that he should continue to look for her. "Ridiculous," she muttered, dipping her hands into a puddle of rainwater to wash them clean of the charcoal. Ridiculous, perhaps, yes. But there were little bundles of drawings and paintings littered all long her path to Syliras.

[Dusk]

XP Award! Nel XP Award Bargaining: 1 XP Fortune-Telling: 1 XP Suvai Combat: 1 XP Auristics: 1 XP Deception: 1 XP Drawing: 1 XP Lore: Repressing Memories Unrequited Love Additional Note Well, that lets us know right off the bat what kind of girl Lillis is! Great intro, look forward to reading more!