Closed The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Kavala becomes reacquainted with a long lost presence in her life.

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Built into the cliffs overlooking the Suvan Sea, Riverfall resides on the edge of grasslands of Cyphrus where the Bluevein River plunges off the plain and cascades down to the inland sea below. Home of the Akalak, Riverfall is a self-supporting city populated by devoted warriors. [Riverfall Codex]

The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Kavala on June 30th, 2015, 5:32 am

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Early Summer, 515 AV

She'd taken the morning off. The business of spring at The Sanctuary had left everyone breathless and in need of a well earned break. The Konti was no exception. So she'd decided to take the morning and ride into town to the Antiquity Society's sale and look around. The trip had been a short one, the morning cool, and the day promising to be warm but not overly so. It was a good time for the Dreamwalker to take a break and set aside her Healer's mantle and just exist.

Cadra had taken the children for the day, knowing Kavala had wanted to go to the sale. Tasi was just getting old enough he'd be trouble running amok through beautiful and fragile things. The other two were just toddling, and far more than one woman could deal with while in a crowd and still managing a five year old as well. So the Konti had been grateful and knew she'd get Cadra a gift while she was at the sale, hopefully something that the kelvic house cat would appreciate.

The sale was not yet crowded when Kavala arrived. There were people about, but it was far too early in the morning for the hall's courtyard to be shoulder to shoulder. Kavala was relieved. It gave the Konti a chance to pass through the gates, check in to the sale, and then browse the long tables set up with hovering Antiquity Society Members in careful attendance.

There were bowls and cups and even jewelry. There were amazingly graceful pots, some having fragments carefully glued back into place, on display both for sale and not. It seemed each 'dig' or 'project' had a table. Some were more informational than actual sales. Kavala didn't mind. She carefully browsed the displays, sometimes touching when allowed, letting the mark on the back of her hand guide her way. The place was fascinating, distracting, and just what she needed in that moment to get away from the realities of her life and the hectic nature of The Sanctuary.

Voices whispered to her from the past as her Eyris gift touched items that were made or used to belong to long dead people. She caught flashes of insight here or glimpses of history there. Sometimes she stood, fingers delicately touching a glass vase, and gazed off into time reliving the moment the glassblower pulled it out of the fire.

It was like she was a voyeur to history and she loved every moment of it.

Konti were deferred to in Riverfall, so no one begrudged her the delicate touches she gave certain things. The Kuvan mark of citizenship gave her even more rights. But her reputation as a formidable healer and geomancer sealed the silence of people who witnessed her gaze upon their tables with eyes so pale of a blue they made her look blind.

Kavala was a kind one, well used to Riverfall's nature and her citizen's needs. She never left without a compliment to a displays owner if one was hovering, nor did she offer to talk them down when prices on antiques were clearly displayed.

She picked up a bracelet for Cadra and a set of horn ornaments for Caelum. Her nephew, Cadra's twin, got an old wooden compass she knew he wold love. A tiara was purchased for Caelum's daughter which matched a ring that Kavala was able to acquire for Elise. There was something picked up for everyone, be they family or just close employees. And even Aweston, the head groom, was thought of as she paid for and arranged for a large Drykas style desk - the type that could be broken down and reassembled easily enough - to be delivered to his care.

They worked hard for her, one and all, and she made sure they knew how much she thought of them and appreciated them.

But for herself, something else was selected. She would not have given it a thought save for the fact her fingers brushed the hanging pendulum, and her white brows furrowed in confusion. The pendulum swung and she caught a whisper of a voice so familiar, so comforting, that it gave her pause.

"What ... what is this thing with the pendulum?" She asked the man who was hovering over the booth. He chuckled slightly and shook his head. "No... its not a pendulum. That's called a bob. Together they are a plumb and bob. Architects used them. That one is Eypharian. I picked it up in a dig down in Eyktol. It was part of an old private estate, pre-valterrian." The man said.

Kavala gave it a second glance. The thing was.... oddly familiar. She would have called it garish, but for some reason the style was comforting. It was made of some sort of incredibly well preserved wood inlaid with golden glyphs. She ran her finger across them and found the spark of magic and nodded, recognizing them for simple preservation glyphs common on many ancient tools.

"What was it used for?" She asked, curious now, studying the triangular stand - the plumb - with its golden chain holding the 'bob'. She peered right, then left, and nudged the bob gently so it swung slightly before settling in the middle hanging straight up and down. Her sharp eyes noted the markings on the wood in gold while her fingers traced the lines in the grain.

The seller answered her quietly. "It's simple. The plumb bob establishes a line that is exactly vertical or true..." The man said, gesturing to the device. "It's basic math, Lady. Any string suspended with the weight at a bottom will be both vertical and perpendicular to any level plan through which it passes." He said as if he quoted it from heart. "The Eypharians used them to establish verticals in constructing their great cities." The man went on to elaborate their uses, how exactly they were used in different professions, and why that one was special.

"It was owned by a noble. See how well it was constructed and designed? Probably a second or third son, not an heir, who was required to pursue some sort of noble profession." He said with a smile.

Kavala nodded and then they carefully began to dicker. They traded values back and forth until finally they settled on a price. Rather than have it wrapped and delivered, Kavala took the item with her, cradling it in her arms like a child would a beloved doll. The voice whispered through her Lykata as she did so. She finished walking the sale in a pensive mood, puzzled as to why the voice in her mind was so familiar.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*


Presents delivered, the children asleep, Kavala settled into her Drykas style bed. She leaned back against the headboard, closed her eyes, and stroked the plumb and bob that was gripped in her hand. She fell asleep quietly, as easily as stepping sideway, and embraced Nysel's realm with a smile. Latching onto the chavi that linked to the item and thus to hers the moment she purchased it, Kavala traveled backwards and quietly stepped into the memories of a scene that might have been straight out of her memory.


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She was no longer Konti. Instead, six arms graced her torso, one set resting on her hips, one folded, and the other carrying a tray of food. She slipped into the elegantly appointed office and walked up to the elaborate sprawling desk made of dark imported wood. She took no pains to be quiet. The man bent over the desk would not hear her anyhow. He was focused on his task, his work, obsessively. That's how he was, lost in the wonder of his work.

The woman set the tray down and folded her now empty hands with her second set of arms. She spoke gently... as to not startle him.

"Cousin. The cook says you haven't eaten. I brought you something." She said softly, repeating herself after a moment sure he hadn't heard. "There's wine and fresh bread, olives, and sliced meat. Please eat something." Shanru said softly.

Her name was Shanru. Kavala blinked and turned slowly in her dreamwalk, until she caught a glimpse of the woman she was inhabiting in a mirror across the room. Her face looked back at her... not Konti... not human... Eypharian. Long golden hair was caught up at her neck and the clothing gracing her body was elegant and cut with an eye for outlining the social status of her family. Gold adorned her arms and throat. She wore the man's torc who sat at the desk.

Her cousin... her protector. She was under his guardianship since both sets of their parents had been killed in an accident traveling together outside of their estate. The man behind the desk had went from second son to heir to head of household all in one day. And Shanru had lost her parents and her younger beloved sister. He? He'd lost his parents and older brother.

They never talked about it. Not the accident, nor the way she tried to stay out of his way except in these rare times when she worried that she would loose him too.

And now she lived here, with him, fighting the fact that women had no power and there was nothing she could do about the decisions that landed her there. Instead, she ran his household because he refused to do it himself. And she worried about his books and his gardens and how they were going to pay the servants and manage the estates while he leaned over his papers, using his tools, and designing buildings that no one believed could ever come to pass.

Shanru loved him. The old ones that matched bloodlines for marriage had even suggested they unite. Their blood was acceptable for it even though they were cousins. It was an acceptable practice especially since Shanru had six arms. Her blood was as royal as his... but he did not want her. He wanted his tools and his dreams and his towering buildings that were slowly birthed into being on the broken backs of his slaves.

And so she quietly plotted her escape, her flight to freedom, and her way straight out of the desert and north to where the mages lived. Eyktol was never more than a bastard stepchild of The Alahean Empire. But Shanru was convinced they'd let her learn magic, give her the power she craved to make her own decisions in life, and live as she wanted too... not in her cousin's shadow, defending him to their peers, and wondering what was so wrong with her that he wouldn't even ever look her in the eye.

Still he hadn't taken notice.

Shanru reached out and slammed her fist into the table. The tray bounced and so too did his tools. Ink splattered on the image of the building he was adding careful angles too with a protractor.

The woman took a step back, her lip curled up in an ugly sneer. "Or not. Starve for all I care." She said, whirling and fully intending to march out of the room and never ever bring him another tray the rest of her existence.

Leave. She had to leave tonight. It was simply intolerable to live within the belly of this monster they called an estate, growing fat on the free flowing food and water, while others starved around them.

Shanru intended to never look back.
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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
Reverie Isle Wolf Creek Training Course
Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Branimir on June 30th, 2015, 3:13 pm

Startled, the man looked up, ripped from meditating over the aesthetic minutiae of his current project. A project that now was no more, snuffed out in a flood of ink, the precious wadj marred by rivers that had no business running across the stately facade Hasuthep was in the process of dreaming up. The long-suffering sigh he let out was the first sign of him taking any notice of anything at all, and even then not so much of Shanru's presence but of the ripples it caused in her location.

"I have to quite apologetically inform you that I have no intention of starving. In fact, I think I could do with less food as I am growing as soft and pliable as old sandstone." Theatralically patting his belly which barely extended across the broad belt around his waist, the architect turned. There was some truth to his words, in as far as he spoke of becoming soft. Despite his parents' wishes, Hasuthep had insisted on learning the mason's low trade along with his higher studies of architecture. He had insisted that the only way he could understand the process of building was to learn every aspect from the ground up. It had left the Eypharian quite stout, with a barrel chest and six well-toned arms.

Little was left of that now. A truth only made more infuriating by the fact that he likened himself to the building materials that too were part of his trade. Unfortunately, with the tray scattered across his worktable, Shanru had nothing left to throw at his head in frustration at the comment itself. Neither could she immediately punish him for the tone he took. That calmly patronizing, overly formal manner of speech he took when he was annoyed. The architect was not in the habit of wearing his feelings on the outside, certainly. But were he ever to be found strangled, it would most certainly have been this way of speaking that caused his death.

"But," Hasuthep continued, "You may rest assured of my gratitude for your care and worry, dear cousin. I shall endeavor to at least see to a little... libation. In due time. Now..." Turning away from Shanru once more, he began to straighten up his workspace. Every pot of ink, every stylus, every little bit of charcoal and every tool, they all had their place. Then there was the spilled ink to be removed with a cloth and the wadj to be taken stock of. How many sheets did Shanru's anger destroy this time?

The wine, he set aside, the food, he brushed away, just so out of his workspace, no more, no less. The slaves would find a use for it, certainly. The Gods knew they needed their strength with Shanru about. Hasuthep wanted to smile, but he forbade himself from doing so. Just as he'd forbidden himself from showing more than the bare minimum of emotion since...

He was the one responsible now. By his deeds or misdeeds, by his behavior and stature did their household stand or fall. It was more weight than a single one of the columns on his drawing could. Yet he'd decided to do so anyway because, well, because there was nobody else who could. He considered it humble dignity, and didn't give much concern to what most everyone else said, except, maybe...

"Come here." he bade. It was a request, not an order, but being who he was he of course expected it to be followed. "Come here and marvel at the destruction you have wrought. No sandstorm, no earthquake could do worse. Though I am sure there is a lesson in it to be learned. If this column here broke... but, please, see for yourself." Hasuthep's voice remained calm and measured. No wrinkle blemished the square brow of his cleanly shaven head, nor did the Kohl-lined eyes narrow at her.

Maybe that was the most maddening thing of them all.
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Kavala on July 1st, 2015, 3:34 am

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Finely groomed nails dug into the palms of six sets of hands as Shanru froze in her steps as his words washed over her. Oh, sure, she’d heard the other things he’d said. He was soft. Hasuthep was not his brother who was forceful and outspoken and stood up and spoke up. He was debase, liking his hands in stone and the stacking of blocks like children did. So instead of being streamlined like the rest of the nobles of his rank, he was built like a draft horse with wide shoulders and unseemly muscles acquired through hard labor not through hours in the training facility with weapons that gleamed dangerously.

She didn’t like it when he talked down to her. He was doing it again… and indeed had been since he’d started responding. He was going to get drunk. DRUNK. The woman clenched her jaw in frustration. Would it kill him to be civil? Would it kill him to sit down at the table with what remained of his family and eat like they all used too? Would it harm one bit if he at least tried to pretend life moved on? She wanted to leave him there, to slam the door and get the satisfaction of hearing something come crashing off the wall. Acting out was her way of dealing with things. She hadn’t been like this before the accident. Shanru was a driven woman, and knowledge was always power to her. She’d spent hours reading and exploring science and genetics. In fact, she was of sufficient birth to specialize in reproduction and the strengthening of Eypharian traits. She could have even been a matchmaker if she had gotten father to pay the right bribes and get her apprenticed. It would be a fitting duty for one of her station.

Hasuthep would never understand such things and smooth the way for her. She knew that as she stood there, back to him still. So magic was her only course. Her longing for the north and for dreams that could be fulfilled there was tangible. It was a beacon of light in this darkness. She wanted free of this death, of the unspoken weights in the room. She wanted to leave Hasuthep to his buildings and drawings and plannings that she could never compete with.

And then his words came through her bitter inner dialog. He requested something of her. It was a foreign act to her. His words were an icy velvet caress to her ears. Slowly, hating herself as she did so, the girl turned. Her fourteen years weighed heavily on her then as she retraced her steps and came to stand at his side. She studied the link across the hash lines, flowing in a natural way that reminded her of waterways crossing parched land.

Her gilded skin, shining golden in her cousins well let workspace, reached out and traced words through the ink. Her writing was impeccable. Shanru wrote what she was thinking because she couldn’t bring herself to say it. The Arumenic wouldn’t flow from her lips.

“I hate you.” It was beautifully poisoned, adding structure to the chaos of the ruined diagram. It stained her fingertip black and she lifted the digit from the page and studied it, wondering if it didn’t indeed reflect the blackness in her heart where there used to be only sheltered pampered joy. It was her small revenge, her way of showing no remorse nor regret. She didn’t bother looking at him. Hasuthep wouldn’t meet her gaze anyhow. He wouldn’t show anger. He wouldn’t punish her. He would do nothing but clean up the mess and start over again, this time not sleeping or eating until it was back to where it had been pre-cousin imposed disaster. Her actions changed nothing. They made no difference in his life or the horrible lumbering stone monster they dwelled within.

A year ago it would have made her cry. Now, deep in the back of her mind, she was sorting her possessions and choosing what to take with her. Tonight. She’d leave tonight. And maybe this was how he’d remember her, if he’d remember her at all. The girls’ lips twisted and she dragged in a deep breath. The urge to cut off her finger was tremendous. It suddenly became a symbol to her of the deep nothingness inside of her that she wanted gone... that she thought a flight north would cure. She resisted the urge, dragging in a deep breath and steadying herself. She looked up then, directly at him, and wondered if he was done with her yet.
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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
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Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
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Kavala
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Posts: 3025
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Joined roleplay: October 25th, 2009, 1:46 am
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Branimir on July 1st, 2015, 6:14 am

Hasuthep looked at the script as it emerged from the flood of ink snaking across the wadj like that great life-giving river yet only wreaking havoc. The lower two sets of arms each crossed below his chest, one leftover hand cradling his own chin as if to hold his jaw shut as she spelled out that she hated him. It would have been a lie to claim it didn't touch him. But what was he to do? He wasn't trained in these matters, he didn't know how to raise the child that he still saw Shanru as.

He could spare her his wrath, at least. He would, he knew, even as the thoughtful seeming hand on his jaw muffled the grinding of his teeth and masked the play of those muscles meant for biting. He couldn't bring back the loved ones they lost, he couldn't heal their family. No bridge he conceived of could span that bleeding gash in their midst. But what he could do was to build new things, and incorporate pieces of the dead in them. The design of the guardpost she'd destroyed had been laid out in those classical proportions his father had always spoken of as the foundation of Eypharian might, and the columns grew tall with that running wine motif that Shanru's mother had always so adored.

And if he ever were to gain the chance to design something with statues, they'd all be there, their shared grandmother as Dira. Hasuthep couldn't raise the dead, but he could make them immortal, enshrine them across the entire realm. But he couldn't show her if she wouldn't see. Instead she scrawled on his drawing like the child he was convinced she was. No matter how immaculate the script, couldn't she at least use a stylus as was proper? Shanru was no building. He couldn't tear her down and rebuild her better and stronger and from finer materials. He wasn't trained for this, what was he to do? What could he do?

He found out when her gaze met his. Hers was stony, set like a spearman expecting an enemy charge. She hated him, she said. But she was but a girl. He was not. Maybe it was time he applied the wisdom that should have been his but so often escaped him. "You do not hate me, dear Shanru. You hate something, but it is not me." The hand had left his chin and sought out her shoulder. He couldn't show weakness, he thought, but maybe if he showed himself just understanding enough, managed to get her to speak in more than stares and outbursts, maybe he could quiet her enough so he could return to his designs.

With a last look at the wadj, the river of ink and the finger-painted words of hate, he raised his other arms into a timid, superficial gesture of affection. "So let us speak of what ails you. I understand you need... guidance and I am woefully unequipped to provide such. But I also understand -even my paper understands- that you are a forceful young woman who will make her way and, in time, find her way with someone suited to her... passions." Once again, his voice was the epitome of calm, tinged with a supple strength born of conviction. It was doubtless that he meant the words he said, speaking as frankly as he probably hadn't in a year.

Softly pressing his palms to Shanru's side, her cousin indicated his intent to lead her over to the little seating arrangement where he tended to receive visitors. With all the warmth of a schoolmaster, but also the same long-suffering method to his seeming madness, he clearly did intend for them to speak. On his terms, however, rather than hers. Even if Shanru had somehow tickled the admission out of him with her latest fit, this didn't feel like a victory rather than an unnecessary extension of her torment.
Last edited by Branimir on July 9th, 2015, 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Kavala on July 5th, 2015, 1:30 am

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It was more words than he’d said to her in ten days. They were so calm, so certain, that it added fuel to the rage within her like a warm wind blowing over an already ignited landscape. What she wouldn’t give to have a reaction out of him. She wouldn’t have cared if it was anger, sorrow, or even helplessness. Just a reaction. Not this…

It was her right to decide who she hated. And in that moment, she wanted it to be him, fervently, though in truth it was not. She hated herself and she knew it. Shanru hated that she was still alive and that they were all dead.

His touch startled her even more. That he laid a hand on her at all left her stunned momentarily. Hasuthep loved his tools, touched them, and the paper he birthed his dreams upon. She was flesh and blood and nothing he ever wanted or would understand. Pale eyes glanced towards the door as if plotting a flight path though she never moved. Nor did her skin betray her surprise by twitching under his light grip.

She watched his gesture, then raise her eyes to his lips to watch him speak further. She was speechless for a time, letting what he was saying about her sink in. He pushed her then, gently, towards the settee and its elegant cluster of tables. He wanted to …. to… talk? The young Eypharian was struck so startled that she quietly let him lead her, let him settle her, and all the while watched him in silence. Here was her chance, an opportunity and opening to tell him what she wanted, what she needed, and the words balled up in her mouth, drying it out.

She took a steadying breath. Then she quietly organized her thoughts before she began to speak.

“I’m stifled here. There’s no one to talk to, nothing to do, and we haven’t been out socially all season. Father promised me he would arrange it so that I could intern with the geneticists and be a match maker so I could have status without worrying about income or property. Now, with our new arrangement, you haven’t even asked me what I want to do or need to do. You work all the time, Cousin. You have that. It’s never changed for you. You throw yourself into your work and you leave your household day to day affairs to me. I’m ill-suited for such work and you know it. You know how it looks too, us living here, and you without a wife. People expect us to marry, and you’ve made it clear that is not going to happen. You act like I bother you, like I interrupt your work. I’m sorry if I do, but you are literally the only one here of my same rank that I can talk to. And you won’t talk to me. What am I supposed to do? Make friends of the servants?” She said, laying one set of arms on her knees, the other set crossing over her chest, and the other set she gestured with. She held still for only movements though before her hands were all waving slightly, moving to emphasize her words.

It was as if she watched herself speak, unable to stop herself as she continued. “I want to leave. Tonight. I have it all planned. I want to go north and learn from the Alahean Masters and pick up magic. You don’t want me here. I want to go somewhere I am wanted.” She emphasized, then finally looked at him again, uncertain of what he’d say.

Shanru was startled that she’d told him everything. She hadn’t meant too. But the words came tumbling out.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*


Kavala paused then, in witnessing the scene, and marked where it was on the chavi. She was watching it outside of either of their awareness’s, which was unusual for her. She liked to be fully emerged, viewing from one set of emotions and drives to another. But there was something heartbreaking about this, something sad… like even after the pair had lived through the accident, it was still killing them even though they were the only survivors.

She wondered then if Hasuthep was alive or dead, in a place she could touch and greet, and bring back here to witness this. She didn’t want to be alone suddenly, a voyeur in the tragedy the pair were still living. And so she quested forward, through time, back to the future where her chavi was still laying down memories. Only she wasn’t following her own chavi, she was following his. She passed swiftly through his lives, jumping over the pauses of his deaths, and spinning into the future to where he was in that moment.

She found him alive and to her joy asleep, deep asleep, where she could touch him and drag him into the Chavena with her. And she did so, forcefully, yanking him from his rest and from the annoyed cadence of a mind reliving a day that had been less than satisfying for him. She reformed them on the Chavi, having stepped sideways to retrieve his essence and unite it with her own.

“I’m Kavala Denusk, of the Denusk Pavilion, Sapphire Clan…. And you and I are related.” She said, half forming herself from the light she’d been only a moment before. Translucent and wearing her Konti form, the healer turned Dreamwalker gestured around her. “This is the Chavena and that….” She said, pointing to a glowing strand among countless glowing strands….is your life.” With that she reached out, took his ethereal hand, and dragged him backwards…. Into the past.

She traveled, letting him do what he wanted – speak or not – so long as he came with her. When they were back at point Kavala had been watching, she took him further, backed him up, and let him see the whole whole of it, his life before, and then the accident. Then she let him see the pain afterwards, where no one had healed, until that moment on the settee when both of them were talking. And it was there she stopped controlling the scene and let it run forward, no longer alone… no longer afraid to see what was going to happen in the conversation and thus to the future of the pair.
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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
Reverie Isle Wolf Creek Training Course
Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
User avatar
Kavala
I am more than the sum of my parts.
 
Posts: 3025
Words: 3295757
Joined roleplay: October 25th, 2009, 1:46 am
Location: Riverfall
Race: Konti
Character sheet
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Scrapbook
Plotnotes
Medals: 17
Featured Thread (1) Mizahar Grader (1)
Trailblazer (2) Overlored (1)
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Branimir on July 6th, 2015, 6:15 am

He'd claim to be a lucid dreamer if asked, though nobody asked him, ever. Moreover, this was far from the actual truth, but the young man wouldn't know. The truth of the matter was simply that he tended to be aware that he was dreaming, and occasionally he'd managed to force himself awake from a dream he didn't enjoy. As such, Branimir Saker found himself rather bewildered at the turn his sleeping introspection had taken. One moment he'd been as a bird, hovering above an unknown port city and marvelling at its labyrinthine layout and wondering how anyone ever got anywhere on time.

The next he found himself dragged to the ground and confronted with a pale figure. An effigy of light he thought, his sleeping mind a touch more lyrical than the practical brain he employed in waking bells but far from a poet. Feeling the things she spoke into his dream more than hearing them, gaining concepts more than words from them, his mind contracted and spiralled around itself in utter confusion. Branimir had no Konti in his bloodline that he was aware of, and he communicated as much through the dream, resorting to being himself for lack of another approach.

Which in this case meant buying time so his sleep-brain could assess the situation and find an explanation for the weirdness happening around him. However, there was no time for sale in this instant. Whether he wished it or not, the dream-self of Branimir Saker was whisked away through the regions of the world and into its past, slipping and sliding and stumbling along behind the intruder in his reverie. Powerless to act, words -protests- were all that was allowed to him, but a means he intended to make ample use of.

"I am Branimir Saker, of Zeltiva." he yelled after the woman, "And share no blood with Konti, deplorable as that may be." Some small measure of wisdom suggested that formal approach. If the white witch was truly dragging him from his dream to whatever space forsaken by the Gods she wished then it might be wise not to offend her. And if this was all his mind trying to tell him something else, well, it wouldn't serve him to be rude to himself. "Now would you kindly take a moment and explain this matter to me?" But it was to no avail. The Konti formed of light flew on through the ages and the green of the world submerged into the devastation of the Valterrian, or at least Branimir's imagination of it, then rose back into civilization but quickly shifted back from green to the color of sand.

One thing made sense in all of this, his reeling mind fought on. One thing, one word he could cling to: Chavena. Theoretically, he had the smallest understanding of what that was; knowledge gleaned from annotations in books he'd studied, mention of it in common prayers to Nyself or Eyris, but nobody had ever stopped to explain to him what it was, exactly. Now was his time to ask, presumably, though his abductor didn't seem inclined to speak. So instead, for the rest of the journey, he observed. Whether this was but a moment in dreamtime or a year, its nature precluded Branimir from judging its passage. But he could still use that supposedly brilliant mind of his. Apply himself how he could because it was the only thing he could do.

All it did bring him was the realization that his senses were far too limited to perceive this world of dreams around him for what it was. Shadows of the past, reflections of things whose time had come and gone and left an imprint on... this, the Chavena. But, he became painfully aware, he didn't see the real truth of it. He saw concepts. His dream-brain translated the things he saw into images his mind could comprehend. When he thought he beheld a Suvan fries as it was freed from the stone, he realized he just re-imagined a historical lecture about a particular ornament found on a pre-Valterrian pillar and the stories it in turn told. When he thought he saw the foundations of a desert tomb being laid, the layout matched one he'd seen in a book before. Was this all in his head?

If so, then his imagination was more fanciful than usual. Branimir didn't usually dream of people. Not of Konti (at least not in the way of them abducting him in his dreams) and neither of Eypharians. But here they came to a stop, in a room of Eypharian design, with two of the six-armed, golden-hued creatures sat together and speaking. The man, massive by the standards of his people, calm, quiet and -to Branimir- seeming quite timid. The woman showing a restrained agitation like something coiled tightly and as like to break as to lash out.

And then there was the chambers they were in. For the first moment, they commanded all of Branimir's attention. Was this his mind as well, he wondered, just laying out how he imagined a stately Eypharian space? The high ceilings, without artful vaults yet stable and airy? The walls of a tan approaching the golden hue of their inhabitants, painted with colorful scenes of rivers in blues and greens nature couldn't seem to match? What was the layout of rooms like beyond the curtained door? On and on he wondered for a dreamtime eternity, but the touch of his abductor forced Branimir's dream-mind to focus on the pair in front of them.

"I know." the Eypharian male -Hasuthep, his sleeping mind named him- said in a voice like a whipped child. Fearful, almost whimpering. Spineless. "I know I have not done you any favors, but, my dear dear cousin..." Branimir observed the sweat form on Hasuthep's heavy brow. It occurred to him that he was aware of the warmth in this place, but it didn't quite touch him; he was here but not here. Well, it was a dream and somehow the Konti chose for him to dream of this creature who seemingly couldn't speak his mind, or did so with great unease. "You could always have come to me with... this. You are a strong woman and I fully expect you to make those needs you really have known with a force that I recognize as conviction. If there is one thing I have learned in the way I have done things in my life it is this:"

"You can never trust in others to make your fate for you."

Branimir's dream-self paused in its observation. A curious turn of phrase, it considered. Especially given his current predicament.
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Kavala on July 7th, 2015, 1:04 am

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“You share no blood with a Konti? No, maybe not in your flesh of the now, but in the past, of course we have.” She said matter-of-factly. Kavala was interested enough in her new companion’s reactions to what was happening to him that she really wasn’t inclined to debate something as silly as fleshly ties. She assumed, perhaps to her folly, that he’d understand sooner or later that the world was made up of more than flesh and blood. What she was about to show him was of the spirit and belonged in the past but could well play on the future.

“You don’t have to yell. I can hear you perfectly fine.” But as to his question, she for sure gave it credence and addressed what he wanted to know. Just not now… not yet. Let him see first because in her experience, people didn’t understand what she told them UNTIL they’d seen it. And that usually required a second explanation to reinforce the first. If she waited, let him see, let him experience firsthand, then her words would have more weight and not be wasted.

Kavala knew that timing was everything. It was something she’d learned in her years among the Akalaks and even before having been raised a Drykas. She waited until they’d passed through time, backwards, passed even through the Valterrian, and paused drifting above the scene before them. She let him relive what she’d just witnessed herself, then pulled him out of the memory for a moment to explain. The act involved them traveling along a spiraling twisting cord of light, plunging into it to become the figures they witnessed, and then pulling back out to hover above it. They were themselves, then the others, then themselves again just like that. It was like taking a dunk in a cool clear river on a scorching hot day after walking long it the whole while. Only, it wasn’t just a single river. Here, two rivers entwined like two lives interconnecting. One was a brilliant silvery thing, shimmering with iridescent colors. The other was a deep burnished gold, shot through with violet and purple and deep blue sparking with reds. He knew, looking at the burnished gold river, that it was his in a way he possibly couldn’t explain. The shimmering form of the Konti, translucent where they floated above the cords in a field of similar cords, all but owned the second one…. It’s multidimensional light show all her own.

“Each of us has a Chavi, Branimir. I have one…” She gestured to where they hovered at the silvery and highly complex cord. “You have one….” She nodded to the other. “I stumbled across yours touching mine, and it made me curious. Here, in this time and place… a few hundred years before the Valterrian… we were cousins. Our Chavi have touched after this, many times, almost in every life. Chavi do that. They hover around those that are familiar and link and intertwine. You are watching us play out something that happened in the past… something painful and beautiful. It seems there was an accident. My parents were killed as were yours. You were never supposed to be anything but an architect, and suddenly you were in charge of our family’s wealth and integrity. Don’t you want to see what happened? Don’t you want to know? We are Dreamwalking. It’s Nysel’s gift. Since I got to know you through this chavi in this time and place… I wanted to meet you in the present too. I am in Riverfall now, living my life there. But there are big parts of it missing. I often quest to find out why. Dreamwalking accesses the past like you were actually there, time traveling, though we can’t physically do so. In this way we can bear witness to our own history, first hand, though we cannot alter it in any way.” She said, not afraid to tell him all this, somehow thinking if he was entwined with her life so many times, he’d understand… he’d known… he’d be exposed. He was no stranger, whether he understood that or not. And he filled, at least in part, one of those empty spaces in her heart where family belonged, whether they liked it or not.

She gave him a chance to speak then, listening to anything he might have to say. And I he asked questions Kavala would patiently answer them. And when there was a pause, a hesitation in the two ethereal forms locking gazes with each other, she’d take advantage and plug them right back into the scene, diving into the clear warm waters of his golden chavi.

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The girl laughed at him, outright, though it was more a hurt incredulous sound than mirth designed to degrade. “Come to you? With this? How can you not know it was an issue? The servants talk of it. My friends are non-existent now because you’ve sent them all scattering a time or two with an ill-placed scowl during a visit or a refusal to answer a perfectly decent invite that was then taken as an insult. My social life is ruined because of you. I am too young to go anywhere unescorted and you know it. So you sit me at home and refuse me an escort because you don’t like outings. I doubt you could get me a placement with a goat herder at this point, let alone an internship with the genetics department at the palace. I did lay this all out to you, when I first came under your charge. You were working on a big project then, that dam that was supposed to stop the flooding… and though you were just a junior on the project, you thought it would lead to bigger things.” She said, taking a breath and then launching forward again.

“It lead exactly nowhere because your inept at bribes. You’d be working on big projects now, shoulder to shoulder with the palace architects, if you’d only knew what wheels to grease. But you mutter that you want it on the merit of your work, not on the merit of our money, but life here doesn’t work that way! I stood there and told you how it worked and you muttered and nodded and kept sketching and told me it would be fine and that you’d see to all of it later when your deadlines had come due and your submissions were in. I respected that! I waited. I’ve ran your books, minded the servants and slaves, kept the food and wine flowing which you don’t eat or drink … your deadlines have come and gone and they’ve given you more and more projects with more and more deadlines… they are working you to death and you are not moving forward as far as I can see. Your father, even my father, would have known how to handle this.” She said more quietly now, forcefully, with a frustration that was almost tangible.

“You have too much integrity for the world you live in.” She said in a voice that held a ring of condemnation in it.

“So by saying that I can never trust in others to make my fate for me….. you’re saying to go ahead and leave?” She said, rising then, nodding, knowing even then he was most likely distracted and just talking to her so that she’d leave mollified and give him time to restart his project.
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Please Note:
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  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Branimir on July 7th, 2015, 7:18 pm

"I am not in the habit of asking questions of the living." He heard -dreamed- himself say it before he even thought it and then paused to wonder at his own turn of phrase. If nothing else it was all the confirmation anyone needed to see the connection between Hasuthep and Branimir. Maybe some things did never change. Or they spiralled around the ever until they came full circle, again and again and again.

There was that to the dream. His mind was unimpeded, and so was his dream-voice. No external constraints here, no decisions to make. Just the past, if he took the woman at her word, immutable as it stood written. And them, with him having no power over her, but her thrusting him into this... unwieldly past at her leisure. There was little for the young man to decide here, and so he was free to witness and comprehend and, ultimately speak. In that sense, his words had been an apology more than anything else.

As he immersed himself into the scene and the things he saw and by the grace of a mind forever hungry took as they were, he did indeed find his curiosity only mounting and never subsiding. Accepting without understanding was but a small leap of faith when understanding could yet be gained. All he needed to do was speak. "Now..." he stalled for words in the same measured speech as the Eypharian before them, though without some of the many-armed one's luster to them. "The Chavena as you called it... it contains the entirety of our history? Delineated along each person's... Chavi? Which is in turn the entirety of their being across many lives?"

More of a summation of what he'd heard than a first timid question, but just trying to grab this truth showed up the vastness of its simplicity. Everyone, everything that had ever existed in the world, its entire past, all its faded glories and lost secrets... all that knowledge carried away by the rivers of Tanroa. Vast in its simplicity because it was infinite. But, more importantly, not gone. That line of thinking also rather elegantly sidestepped the personal tragedy of the two Eypharians -- them, as the white witch insisted. An insistence he found hard to ignore as he looked at them, perceived them, witnessed and, being human after all, judged.

For now, though, his focus was on the sheer conceptual understanding of... all of this, this thing he lacked words or even vague concept of. His summary as banal as it was superficial hardly did justice to what it tried to describe, or so Branimir felt. "Is that about correct then? Do bear with me, I was just dreaming along mere moments ago. You will forgive me being somewhat overwhelmed by... well, everything."

Awaiting the Konti's response, his left hand unwittingly did as it tended to do, wandering, roaming around, seeking the deeper connection to things, the knowledge and the understanding that it could bring. But he was not truly here, was he? Could not touch, or be touched, could not change what already happened... could not dig deeper than the dream took him. And maybe Eyris was too far away, here in Nysel's domain. This one was a foolish thought, and he chided himself for it. In the world of the flesh, he might have tied the chain bound to his other hand in response, but here all he could do was grit his dreaming mind.

Then again, maybe he didn't need to touch this world to be a part of it. Kavala had shown him the chords. The connection was already there. Maybe if only he let it happen, maybe if he simply accepted. Faith, to Branimir's naive mind, was knowledge without proof. Could he? Should he? Would he? He looked at Hasuthep and Shanru, listened, allowed himself to become part of the scene even as he heard the Konti reply to the words directed at her.


"I." the Eypharian architect -an architect, what a coincidence, and one Branimir would have to follow up on- stressed. "I may not have achieved the heights I dreamed of when I set out on this path. But all I have earned, all I have reached was paid in heart's blood and is tenfold as dear to me as anything that could be bought with coin. Why..." Why can you not see that? Why can you not be more like me? Branimir knew the words before the man spoke them. His language was, again, more refined, but the intent was clear.

Kavala had been right. Something stood between them. A wound that festered and drove them further apart instead of healing them back together. But how? How did these things function? Why would people not simply speak of their desires and why would they be so meek as to be brushed off, then. His family was small, but its bonds all the stronger for it. He might not love his mother as heartily as she wished, but he did so in his own way. He might not be the son his father had wanted, but he still strove to make the old man proud, and his father in turn strove to respect his son for his decisions. It was so simple.

Apparently not for those two. Branimir knew, he knew somehow that Hasuthep didn't want to lose his cousin. Yet, he also suspected that he was trying to drive her away as gently as he could, cutting through a veil of brooding silence. "If such is your wish, Shanru, you shall have all the things you need for your journey. If, if this will make you content and complete, then please go with my blessings. But first, indulge me please. Why magic? What has magic wrought that is not all the greater a miracle if shaped by hands alone?"

Branimir's dream-self filled up with an unusual emotion. Then again, many emotions were quite alien to the young man who had all but exiled himself from society. A happy, content life. But now that was interrupted as he felt something akin to anger well up in his chest like an explosive pressure from within. "What is wrong with that man? The both of them for that matter? They speak without connecting even though they already are connected. As lovely as six arms might be, maybe they would need six eyes."

Bemused, the dreamer sought to calm himself. Looking questioningly out to Kavala, he suddenly recalled a thing she'd said before.
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Kavala on July 12th, 2015, 12:46 am

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Kavala listened to the man drifting in the Chavena before her. She held ties to him firmly, wanting to know him with the longing of someone who missed having family around. Sure, he was not exactly family in this time and this place, but to a Dreamwalker, once related by blood was always related in one way or another. And though she wasn’t this girl and he wasn’t this man they looked in upon, there were echos of each of them in who they were now. Kavala was reverent of the past. Thankful. Thoughtful. She knew how important what had come before was.

“Yes. Exactly that.” Kavala answered him as he attempted to sum up what she’d said. “But its so much more than that too. It’s recorded everything they’ve thought, felt, seen, and done. The whole of the world’s knowledge is here, Branimir. All of it. You just have to know where to look to find specific pieces or be very very lucky. More often, unless you travel someone’s specific Chavi like we are here, it is a gamble which one you touch and what you see. I was able to find you because I picked up an item in a sale in Riverfall. It was a plumb and bob. Hasuthep used to own it… thus you used to own it. Sometimes items become keys that allow dreamwalkers to connect. It’s how I found you. It’s how we came to be here, watching them. I was watching before I went to find you.” Kavala said, forthright and wanting him to understand the events that lead up to where they were.

She wanted him to understand, more so than anything, that it wasn’t just a dream. Where they were, what they were doing, was as real as if they were walking through a market in the material plain, shopping for weapons.

Kavala watched Branimir’s form turn and study the scene again. He could almost plug himself into the scene as thoroughly as she could for all that he was not one of Nysel’s children. She was curious about him in the way of someone being curious at discovering a long lost sibling or cousin as it were. Human though. The form was so frail. She wondered yet again if they picked their forms or if they were indeed assigned to them somehow in the space between death and life again. That part, for all that she wondered, was not recorded on the Chavi. Death happened, then birth was the next record. What happened in between was a mystery… one that frustrated her greatly.

She turned her attention back to the scene.

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“I’ve taken care of it all already, Hasuthep. Thank you for the offer though. I have my things packed an enough coin to get me where I am going.” Her tone indicated she needed nor wanted nothing from him. Everything about her body language, at least to Kavala, read that she’d rather lay open her own throat than take any offered help from him further than what she’d already gotten.

“Cousin, I don’t think you are capable of understanding, if you had to ask that question in the first place. Djed runs through all things. I sense it everywhere. I’ve always been sensitive to it. I picked up Auristics before I could walk and took glyphing with my first mathematics and writing courses. But true magic has been withheld from me. I want to be a reimancer. You want to take stone from the earth and cut it and shape it and build fortresses from it. I want to bring it forth from djed, have it burst into being, and have it obey my will without complex drawings and figures and plans that employ the back breaking labor of slaves.” She said thoughtfully, her eyes glowing with the conviction of her passion.

“You think you’re the only one in the family that has stone in their blood? You aren’t you know. I hear it too. It sings to me. It calls my name. I always have gems and little bobbles in my pockets.” She turned one of the pockets of her wrapped dress out and slid a small rough cut emerald, a larger murky ruby, a peacock stone, and one cube of iron pyrite out into her palm. “For luck, happiness, clarity of mind, and false security.” She recited, gently fingering the stones. She glanced up at him then, really looking at him, and shook her head.

“Once I was told I would be your charge, I thought things would be alright, Hasuthep. I thought that because in so many ways we are the same. But then I realized how you dismissed magic, especially reimancy and most especially geomancy and I understood then that you’d never do anything but dismiss me either. To you something has no validity if it happens because you will it. To me that’s the same as you locating your source stone, starting a quarry, cutting blocks, transporting, assembling, and finally completing a project. I just want to do it cleaner, without the deaths and toiling of the Humans and Dhani we enslave. I thought, foolishly now I know, that you and I would see eye to eye and make a formidable team. But you dismiss me as a child. All my friends are now married. Some even have children. But here, like I’ve already said, I have no social life, no marriage, no prospects and no career. I don’t want to waste away running your household. You can hire someone to do that for you or marry someone you deem old enough and placid enough for the work. I want more than that. I always have. And while I don’t have the money to bribe the geneticists to take me on, I can be a mage. I will be one.” She said, shaking her head and meeting his gaze.

The funny thing was, at least to Kavala, Shanru didn’t look angry anymore. She just looked resigned and determined.

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“I don’t know what’s wrong with either of them. Sometimes situations happen and the gap that grows between people becomes too vast to make a connection with. He’s shut down. She’s angry and on the run. Odds are if she walks out that door they will never cross paths again. I know they lost their families, but they can’t see the family they still have right in front of them. Many people are like that.” Kavala said, pausing in the scene and not knowing what the man would do from here.

“Something changed that day though. I’ve still got the stonesong in my blood. And since I’ve been little I’ve acted upon it. Reimancy is second nature to me and so too is the manipulation of stone… of all the elements for that matter, but earth is my true calling. What about you? Do you still build? Still design? I wouldn’t be surprised if you did.” Kavala said gently, her curiosity about the man overwhelming. She knew the scene would play on around them, but that didn’t mean it had to fully consume them.

"I do not, however, have an overwhelming desire to marry cousins.” She said with a true laugh and pulled back a little. She wove her dreamwalking mantle more closely around her and plugged them deeper into the scene. She wanted to feel what the man was feeling so she set herself in his psyche and left Branimir to feel all that the girl was feeling. Kavala didn’t need those sensations. She already understood her. Kavala’s desire, instead, was to understand him.
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Last edited by Kavala on July 12th, 2015, 6:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
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Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
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The Tides Of Time Always Wash Over Us (Branimir)

Postby Branimir on July 12th, 2015, 6:27 pm

Branimir nodded while Kavala spoke. While he hadn't truly experienced it himself yet, he understood that the gift of Eyris he bore could be used to draw what she called the Chavi from objects. An imprint of the person it had belonged to, or who'd created it. Maybe even both if it had been dear to creator and user alike. Thoughtfully, he raised his dream-self's left hand and beheld the pale afterimage of the Gnosis Mark on its back.

"All of it..." he quietly echoed Kavala's words as he listened and imagined the eyes of his manifestation in the dream lighting up like embers in a breeze. Whether that truly happened or not, he couldn't even conceive of. Nor of the vastness of her implications. But as with all things that transcended human understanding, his mind limited the entirety of all knowledge ever to have been in existence to the image of a gigantic library. One anyone with a love of knowledge could spend an eternity in.

It was the most splendid thing he could imagine.

Existing in a dream as they did, thinking it all happened in a haze seemed redundant. It was all a haze to Branimir either way. Now moreso as his mind raced this way and that, makebelieve ears still listening, certainly, but his thoughts still, or again, lost in the implications and applications of the Konti's words. He thought of the liquid stone the Alchemists of old had used to cast building blocks and ornaments to their needs, which then became as chiselled granite but so much finer. He imagined the legendary vaulted domes of Suvan architecture, of a width no modern art could recreate. He thought of Alahean towers daring to cut the clouds.

In Branimir's mind, these things were real. When the Goddess had touched him, when he understood the significance of the Gnosis mark, it was these things he dreamed he'd find and bring back to the world. And build them. He hadn't known how but he knew he would. Now the Konti had all but shown him the way, if not the exact path. The Eypharian would not know these secrets of Empire, though he might hold his own mysteries.

Unaware of Kavala's worries, Branimir had no issues accepting what he saw, simply because he needed to believe that as much as this was dream, it was real. Because he wouldn't accept the things he wanted not being available to him. Because he needed this as much as Kavala needed her family back together.


It had to hurt her to watch the Eypharian Cousins not just drifting apart but tearing each other from one another. Of course, this was the past. These things had happened. They couldn't be altered anymore. But here, now...

Once more, Branimir's gaze shifted from their past selves to the Konti witch, and back again, and forth. He didn't feel these things as she did. In many ways, he was simply a voyeur of the scene. Worse, he was a critic. While he observed and analyzed, he also judged, impassively. He saw their faults and foibles without seeing how Hasuthep mirrored him in so many ways above and beyond the ones he agreed with. Still, Branimir presumed that he could see the Konti's plight in all of this. Whether it was the subtlest of feelings or thoughts at the edge of his awareness, or more calculated logic, he understood a simple truth.

These two people, the Eypharians, Shanru and Hasuthep, they were them. They were one and the same. Certainly, they must have evolved through their lives. Branimir wasn't blind to other people, he simply chose to segregate himself from them because he could not bear being misunderstood. Kavala was not a stupid girl, or at least she did not strike him as one, not acting on impulse and half thought-out ideas of what would give her freedom. Some part of Branimir wanted to help, but he couldn't even say which part, he didn't understand the why or how of it all. Maybe it was simply that connection she spoke of. Maybe it was the opportunity for himself he saw in cultivating this connection. Somehow, he wanted to help. He just had no idea how.


Lacking that knowledge, his attention returned to the scene at hand, and Kavala's own commentary. "He cannot make her stay, he does not know how I think. He could beg, but then she would probably resent him." Branimir spoke and shrugged. Again, this was the past. In theory, speculating on it was wasteful. It would unfold as it had, in due time. He needed but to wait. And yet, the wistfully impassive observer felt the need to analyze and speculate and, despite his better demons, wonder which strategy would yield victory here. A dream of past glories, this was not. Past pain however, there was to be had.

As the white witch spoke of the stonesong and magic, Branimir's reply was silence. He knew nothing of magic. In many ways, he'd always been a simple man. Magic was the stuff of legend, a dangerous, unpredictable thing at best in the hands of mortals. He understood Hasuthep, without holding the man's strength of conviction in the matter. Magic, quite simply, had never figured into Branimir's design even as he knew that the legendary buildings of old had not been possible without it. With the vast number of other interests he'd held, it simply had never truly been part of his plans.

Another thing he would need to revisit. And then she asked about him building and his immediate response was that bittersweet feeling. "Only on paper, and in my head." he replied without much consideration. "For now. But I will in time." Branimir then amended that statement. What else was there to say? His studies lay fallow as he chafed under the reactionary structures of the university. If he stuck with their curriculum, he'd only be fit to build wooden outhouses. So he fled to the library, hid himself in the past and copied books for a living in the meantime. No glories past, nor present for Branimir.


The dreamweaver interrupted his thoughts as she dragged him deeper into the scene once more, though to his surprise Branimir found himself in the girl, Shanru's body. The first thing he felt was her slender hand, one of six no less, gently clutching no less than four stones in her hand. His own dream mind registered the different textures born of both material and cut, the varying speeds at which they took on body temperature in her hand, each of them different, each of them like a living thing waking up. Was that the stonesong they spoke of?

The young architect had regarded stone differently so far. Theoretical. As a list of advantages and disadvantages to be weighed against one another. Or individually as the impressions his Lykata Gnosis could draw from them. But to Shanru they felt alive. And even as he heard his -her- voice speak he marvelled at that connection. "Is silence your only answer, Cousin?" Shanru poked the lumbering Eypharian with her voice, and Branimir felt her unhappiness course through her. It hurt her to leave him, but she was drowning and needed to save herself before she could save anybody else. He could not fault her.

She had made her decision and nothing in the world could sway her opinion anymore. The only way they would not be separated would be if he came with her, and he would not. He sat on firm foundations, like the buildings he conjured up on his sheets of wadj. He had his life, but she had none. If she was to survive and find herself able to breathe, she needed to swim for the shore, and the shore was far away. Branimir could understand. She chafed under her conservative life as he chafed under his. Her way out was to be magic. What, Branimir wondered, was his?

What of this stonesong then? Would she learn to sing it and return to Hasuthep and between them they would achieve greatness? For even if she was a strong woman, one thing Branimir did understand and know by heart was that the ability to create or shape stone was one thing, but even then... to build something that would last one would need the theoretical knowledge of how to make such an edifice stable. Magic might draw a beautiful dome from seamless stone, but without proper distribution of its load, that dome would crumble under the stress from its own weight in due time.

Together, and that much Branimir understood, they could be greater than the sum of their parts.

And he wondered what that meant for their present selves.
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Branimir
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