their game begins.

[Caelum]

A bottle so dark it was almost black Caelum selected from the glittering array behind the bar. He turned it over in his hand, thumbs smoothing across the label before he collected a pair of standard cut wine glasses from the overhead rack and meandered back around the bar. His offerings were set on the marble beside Wrenmae and he slumped once again, comfortable and indolent. “No,” he answered, amber eyes delivering a sideways glance. “I don’t take offense with sacrifice. I take offense with someone selfishly wreaking destruction on what societies this world has managed to unbury since the Valterrian and calling it sacrifice.” He removed the wine key from the pocket of the same leather riding pants he had been wearing earlier. Nothing in his attire had changed, nothing but their surroundings mutating in the least; but then the ethaefal would never change, would he? The colors of him would shift every season and his skin would slough aside and replace itself at every dusk and dawn, but in the end he was immortal. He would never age. He would never grow sick. He could be wounded, of course, and die, but that was so small a concession to death when compared to the rest of the world. He could be here for a thousand years. He might already have been for five hundred more, a rare survivor of the tidal wave of ethaefal suicides post cataclysm. Had he ever made such a fool hardy attempt to return home? There were thirteen Riverfall wines, as a matter of fact. Caelum failed to point this out and simply fetched the dark bottle he was prying the cork out of now. “Godspirit,” he explained. “I understand it was altered in the Djed Storm and is both rare, expensive, and utter ambrosia.” He poured while he spoke and then squinted one eye down at the bottle, smirking. This was a dream, so why not? Setting it aside, he nudged a glass toward his companion and slouched elegantly backwards against the bar, sliding one elbow behind him as prop and angling himself absently toward Wrenmae. “Caelum,” he introduced himself, easy as anything in reply to the goad. His eyebrows cropped up and his smirk softened back into a smile. “That’s what I’m called. And I’ve seen Alvadas, actually. That city spun me around until I couldn’t remember which way my own feet were. You grew up there then?” He paused, brain keeping pace, sifting furiously through all the little facts delivered him since this dream began. “What was that like?”

[Wrenmae]

Offering only a shrug to the ethaeful's disdain, Wren took the glass of wine and stared into a purple red so dark, it might have been tar. He could only tell the difference at the edges, where the light caught a shimmer of color across the surface. Beneath, it was all shadow and uncertainty, much of who he used to be.

Tipping the glass between cracked lips he tasted the wine, let it marinate his tongue in flavor before retreating down his throat. The hypnotist sighed, slouching forward over the bar and smiled, placing the glass down. "It is at that," he complimented the bartender with a raised glass, "Good to see something positive came of the djed storm. I was hunkered down in an abandoned temple in Sunberth when it came through...a lot of people died. Confusion, terror, destruction. Not that Sunberth was ever much to look at, but it was even less so after the passage."

Taking another sip, he placed his palm down on the bar with a smack. When he lifted it again, a small handful of gold rimmed mizas remained. He was guessing at the price, and really, in a dream it hardly mattered...but there was a certain principle of the place that demanded respect. "My name..." he trailed off, looking into the depths of his cup and shrugging, "Pick one. I've gone by a few. If you're looking for my true name, it's Egyptus, but I suppose I go most often by Wrenmae now." He reached onto the stool behind him, out of the sight of Caelum and resurfaced with a worn book that he placed on the bar. "The woman who watched me Springs when my father traveled wrote this and sent it with me. Her name was Philomena but..." he sighed, draining the glass, "She's gone now...with my father, and both my step-brother and sister."

He offered the ethaeful a thin smile and tipped his glass slightly toward the bottle, raising an eyebrow.

"Alvadas is a place like none I've seen before or since. The laws of reality seem to change within its walls, so growing up there was confusing...one had to be used to never knowing the way home or sleeping on roofs. When people didn't want to hear me tell stories, I made my living as a thief." He shrugged, "Not much to say about my childhood. Those close to me were always sick or...stayed away for their own good, Alvadas is an easy place to get lost in if you want to...but I've always had a certain curse about me with those I get close to."

Catching Caelum's eyes, the hypnotist smiled without the trace of any real mirth. It was a bitter, sardonic thing. "People around me tend to die," he continued grimly, "Sick, injured, killed. No one is strong enough to keep my company for too long."

Stifling a hiccup, he held out his other hand and turned it, as if prompting Caelum to speak. "How about you, Ethaeful? How has the fall from your lofty home treated you? Any adventures of pasts worth sharing?"

[Caelum]

“Spectacularly shitty,” he drawled blandly. A smile curled into one corner of his mouth, humor rising in sun-blasted eyes. “But I seem to have landed on my feet. For now.” The wine bottle was lifted, Wrenmae’s glass refilled and his own topped off. Returning the bottle to the bar, he exchanged it for the book his companion had conjured out of his yesterdays and dragged it carefully across the marble toward him. He continued to slump, head ducking down now and a spark of daylight shimmering against the curve of his horns. He thumbed through the book, reverent fingers prying the pages apart, deeply curious as to the contents. “Vayt?” He named the god of blight with a blistered tongue, framing the power delicately and shooting Wrenmae a look. A noble nose wrinkled without thought, as if he smelled something septic in the limbs enveloping this dream. “Not to fear,” he added after a moment. “I’ll keep you company. I can’t get sick. Not in dreaming. Not on Mizahar. You’re in luck.” A grin flashed like heat lightening before he huddled cozily back over the book, flipping through pages. He listened to these losses, this long string of spilled prayer beads bouncing across the floor of Wrenmae’s life and rolling out of reach beneath furniture monuments to Dira. “The towers of the Ukalas aren’t topless,” he offered at length, responding to Wrenmae’s beckoning hand and his voice thoughtful. It was also a little beaten, holding itself with the same careful tension of a man badly wounded and still not quite recovered. “But the fall from them is rather long all the same. You don’t remember anything of importance, everything you are, everything you were little more than memory you can only pray will take shape in the next doorway.” He blinked long and slow, surfacing a little, and seeing Wrenmae again. He felt the divinity in him not gutter, but flicker. It was merry. Nikali could be a nosy bitch. “I have a lot of names myself,” he admitted. “But I can’t tell you my true one. I can’t speak it. No one can.”

[Wrenmae]

"Just as well," Wrenmae said, his eyes lingering on Caelum's face, "But I can't say I have much respect for your previous patron. You'd think in all their power, the gods could just step in and solve something like that."

He held up his glass, angled it to clang amicably against Caelum's, and drank. "So, what body of water did you fall into? All your kind fall into the water, naked, wet, afraid, forgetful...all the kind I've seen anyways. I imagine if you took a tumble onto the ground, you wouldn't be getting up."

Grimly he took another sip, enjoying the rich taste on his tongue...so rather than swallow he swirled it in his mouth, bathed his tongue. "As for Vayt, I think the god gets a bad reputation for no particular reason." He followed Caelum's eyes, as if the ethaeful were looking for answers in that. Wren shook his head and smiled, "Not that I would know, first hand...but if Vayt has any presence in my life, I can't say I'd hate him for it."

Setting the glass of wine aside, he crossed his arms and leaned off the bar, "People need to be tested. I stand by that. Healers may be bound to help anyone who deigns to ask them, but the strong take care of themselves and fight past whatever sickness Vayt grants. Those that prove their right to be here deserve to stay."

He looked down into the wine glass, his face falling for a moment before he pushed the glass farther away, "It's just the way it is. Everyone only sees the disease and the poison, the pain...but they refuse to think about the good there. Natural selection, cutting the wheat from the chaff, it's just..." He moved his hands as if trying to force a value and then just let them fall. "Never mind it," he said at last, "Most don't understand."

Wren was quiet for a few moments, finally looking up at Caelum grimly, all warmth draining from his expression. He didn't look angry, not really, just tired.

"You're a real person, aren't you?" He asked at last, quietly, "I don't always know, but you get this feeling after talking a little...stuff you couldn't make up, or couldn't know. It doesn't always happen. Sometimes I dream of the people I've killed, or those who I left behind. Sometimes I dream of myself...but you're a person somewhere, aren't you? You're going to wake up and remember this. Stop me if you can, convince me to stop if it'll work."

Clearing his throat and thumping a closed fist against his chest, Wren offered the ethaeful a ghostly grin, "No sense in lying. We have our faces now, our names. Something or someone brought us together. Interfering gods or chance. I don't mind the change of scenes and honestly it's...comforting...to know you won't wither and die, but if you are going to stand in my way I can't..." He broke off, his voice almost cracking at the end.

He reached down to the empty stool and pulled up a long dagger, laying it on the bar bleakly. "I can't get close to you, or anyone. Not until I've made the deaths matter...not until I make this life matter."

[Caelum]

"If that is your definition of strength then you are a fool, Egyptus," Caelum pointed out. It was with a breath drawn in thick through his nostrils. Though his words were hard, his tone was not. It was tired and fond, as if he had expected to hear as much and he did not think less of Wrenmae for it. He did not condescend. He comprehended, and then he disagreed. Aged eyes slid over to settled firmly on him, peering across the lip of his wine glass. "No man is bound. I no more have to try my hand at your wounds than I must lick my own. My goddess asks it of me, but the choice is mine. I wanted it. She granted it. I can deny it still. To do so would be to fall out of her favor, but the power of choice yet belongs to me." He paused, and tilted his glass as if to concede a point. "But Rak'keli is only one of my gods, and they do not at all ask, or ask sweetly." He knocked back the remains of the ambrosia wine. He had never tasted Godspirit wine, but this was not a man without imagination. Untold time had been spent in the Ukalas. He lowered the glass to the marble topped bar and caught Wrenmae's eyes in the reflection of mirror glass lining the wall behind it. "Black Rock. I fell into the sea off the coast of Black Rock." Some element of stoicism in his eyes warned Wrenmae not to laugh and the hundred thousand ironies littering that solitary little fact. "I'm a healer, Egyptus." His tone softened, wearied. "I understand natural selection. I am familiar with concepts of breeding." Indeed he had looked over the detailed records of Denval's breeding program that spanned the course of centuries. "The strong prevail. The weak die. But here you are, envisioning a new empire for human kind and forgetting what it is that makes humans unique to begin with. They adapt." He watched the value fall from Wrenmae's fists, understanding it, but still failing to agree with the expansive borders of his opponent's opinion on it. The line of his mouth shifted as the knife came out, as truth laid itself bare between them. His eyes moved from the knife on his bar to the despair ripening in Wrenmae's eyes. "What deaths?" He asked quietly. He did not deny that he was real. He had been attempting to convince half the world that he was for ten years now, and he wasn't going to take a step back in that tonight. He paused, then added, "If you're going to carve out my heart with that knife, you should know that it'll still be beating when I wake up. I mean, let's not make this a nightmare. Is it? A nightmare?"