Blue Lake: Prelude

katabasis

Here is Justin. Justin is here. 

Up through the spruce, each needle tree wearing Summer, Summer gold from the sun filtering down from the tips, a lacery of shadow and of different greens and different golds, oh, just, summer and shadow, gold and black but it's all really invoked by green, by those tall and stately trunks and the path that winds between. Up over the streams, the rilling of rivers gone white with flood because clouds and rain have hung over Denver so since Spring's sudden fires, mist and shadow and skies pearled and marbled like an old bookmaker's most coveted trick with ink and silk just marble that paper with colors and that paper is the sky and it is summer.

Summer up here is forever, because summer up here is the sky. Summer up here has no boundaries except those etched by air that almost scrapes the breathing out've your lungs, higher you go, closer to the sky and to summer and to forever.

Here is Justin. Justin is here, and the sky is waiting to break itself on him, and there is not another soul around (no men and no women) for miles. He'd passed a woman earlier on the trail, weathered look in her eyes, weathered look around the mouth where fine lines were showing like paint peeling, on a horse like soot and flour got into a battle over which would get to be this horse's coat, and they'd nodded, and she'd gone on her way.

But that was earlier; it's getting late, now.

Later and later.

Summer is never really forever.

Justin

[Per+aware]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )

Justin

[Per+Alert -2 from acute senses]

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

Justin

It was summer in the rocky mountains, and the elevation made it feel like you were closer to the sun than in other places.  All day Justin had trekked along wooded trails and across sun-drenched earth, crossing between painted splashes of light and shadow until the sky began to grey and darken with threatening rain.  It was quiet here, out in this wild place, but he was not alone.  Perhaps that's what one might think - that he came out here to be alone.  But there was nothing solitary about walking amid so much life: the tall pines and their old memories, the darting minnows beneath the churn of pregnant rivers, the familiar call of a hawk as it swooped overhead.

And more.  And more.  A thousand lives.  A thousand threads woven together.  That anyone could walk through this place and not feel more alive and more connected for being here... such was a person that Justin would just as soon not know.

He was a different person here.  Different in his joy and his reverence.  Different in the way that he trusted.  He knew the earth and the sky better than he knew the city.

Hours, it had been.  Since morning, when he'd left his car in the parking lot at the head of the trail and lost himself in the mountains: climbed rocks and stared at the clouds, dug his hands into the earth and opened his senses up to the patterns around him - brilliant and beautiful and beating together like a tapestry.

And then he reached the place where the trail emptied out into a basin, and ahead of him lay Blue Lake, still and quiet beneath the evening sky.  Justin adjusted the pack on his shoulders and made his way toward the water, taking in the sight and the smell and sound of the place.  Breathing it in and marking it to memory.

katabasis

He notices something on the far side of Blue Lake. He notices a cairn built by hand. He notices paper, caught within the heart of that cairn, moving in the sharp (cold [austere]) breeze the picks up from that side of Blue Lake from those peaks and hushes across the water making it ripple like silk or like something under silk or the edges of a feather and then it is at him, too, that sharp breeze, like it'll pluck his eyelashes out and make wishes on them all.

He notices something else, too. A mingling of resonances, the remnant of some working, some of the threads of which he can pick out. They sound like strings, plucked, to him -- or linger in the air like the notes of a song, calling (summoning [invoking]), valorous, premeditated and weaker, like a pulse threading beneath skin, not the body itself or the heart but connected to it and a reaction to it (another will-worker), reverent, fluid. Prime and Life and Else that he doesn't really know, just an Othering. He can tell that the Working isn't finished yet; that this is just the ritual, drumming up to some rite. He can tell also that it happened a day ago; this is just the lingering.

The wind is sharp, that tries to pluck his eyelashes.

But he sees something else, too.

A lick, above the water.

A place where the sky looks unusual, just a small little tick of a place, like a cut in the skin of a thumb so the skin's gone a little translucent and otherwise you'd never see the cut or do anything but feel it.

Justin

[Watch the Weaving, diff 4 -1 (practiced)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Justin

[Also life scan to see if anyone is still around, diff 4 -1 (also practiced)]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (10, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Justin

[that... was supposed to be 2]

Justin

A cairn.  The workings of a ritual.  Familiar in some ways, though different in others.  Justin paused at the edge of the lake to gaze across at it, to take in the details and the flickers of interwoven resonance that still lingered in the air.  When his eyes lit upon that lick in the sky, he went still; a frown of concentration painting itself on his features.  He reached into his pocket then, pulling out a small leather pouch that contained pieces of herbs that he'd picked that morning.  It was the mint that he was after now, and when he bit down on the leaf the familiar subtle chill helped to focus and open his senses.  Bringing the world into sharper clarity.

He moved slowly as he rounded the lake toward the ritual site, eyeing the strange flicker in the air above the water as though he half expected something to burst out of it and attack him.  (This was a possibility that Justin always considered.)  There was a confident purpose to his movement though.  Wary, but interested.

katabasis

Even as his senses expand -- or no. They don't expand. He just uses them. They're his, and he can use them if he wants to use them. And he wants to use them now. They're his, and there's a certain way of looking. But even with that certain way of looking, the intention of the Working partially eludes him. It's a complicated, knotty one, and just a fragment of the greater whole.

The resonance was a summoning one, an invocation, a calling, and that seems to be in part what the willworkers Working here want to do: to call, to invoke, but also to imbue that which is called (Life), also to protect that which is imbued (Prime), to Shield. And he can see how the summoning interacts with that strange cut in the sky, how the one is responsible for the other, chicken and the egg.

Nothing seems to be about to come out of it. 

As he circles the lake, as the breeze dies down and the water goes flat, when he looks close, maybe he'll see something in the water under that little cut, like a reflection of it that isn't quite a reflection, a shadow of an otherwhere.

At first there doesn't seem to be anybody else around, even scanning as he does, looking for other People, for Anyone Still Around. The rite was a day ago; then again, that's an at first. And up there near the tundra proper where the air is even thinner, on the very, very outter edges of his perception, he can feel the steady slumbering beating of a heart somebody dreaming somebody warm who is asleep whose bones are solid but who once had a bullet pass through their ribs who once was hit in the back of a skull so hard there's a denseness to the bone someone whose knees are bruised someone who is female and ovulating and whose lungs still bare the signs of a casual smoker.

Justin

Justin investigated the ritual site, but he did not disturb it.  He moved near enough to see the patterns etched into the dirt on the ground (footprints, wind) but he didn't make a move to touch anything.  And all the while he looked and listened and felt.  And his eyes saw shimmering patterns of day-old willworking, but his mind couldn't make sense of the threads - couldn't piece together what they meant.

And then, at the edges of his awareness - a heart beat.  Human.  Justin turned and looked at the rising mountain behind him.  Then back at the lake.  At the odd sky and the odd not-right reflection.

Then again at the mountain.

And he started walking.

His steps took him up the dusty rock trail, winding up, up.  Toward the place where he could feel that heart beat, its sleeping rhythm pulsing like a beacon.

Justin

[Stamina (tireless) + Athletics]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Justin

[er, re-rolling that 10 cause I apparently can't check a box]

Dice: 1 d10 TN5 (8) ( success x 1 )

katabasis

Up he goes. The air gets thinner, but not by much; it is wax, against his skin; it is clarity and it is cold, and the evening comes. The way is steep, past the cairn of stones, around Blue Lake, until he sees the blue (of course it's blue [this is a blue place]) of a sleeping bag, a fur throw (real fur, if that matters, coyote fur, but he is still alert enough to see the blue peeking out beneath) tossed over for added warmth, no visible head because whoever is in the sleeping bag is in the sleeping bag, sleeping. But he can tell it's one of the Willworkers (reverent, fluid, sleeping in her heart like a stone).

Justin

By the time Justin reached the sleeping woman, the effects of the long day were beginning to settle into his bones.  He wasn't so much tired as he was... settled.  Still and calm and rooted to the earth.  It was a good feeling, usually.  Absent that wild urge to run and climb and move.  It was a meditative thing.  An ending to the day.

But the day itself was likely far from over.  And there were untapped reserves yet ready to run, if running should be necessary.  If this woman should wake up and decide that she wasn't terribly pleased to see him there, watching her sleep.  There was a sense of the invasiveness of his actions.  That she was vulnerable and that he had not been invited.

He didn't try to muffle his movement, so surely she would have heard him coming if she'd had a mind to listen.  But for all that he could tell, she didn't.  Instead she went on sleeping like a stone.

"Hello?" he said, questioning.  And if there was no answer he crouched down at her side.  The wind up here was cold and biting.  It left the skin on his arms reddened and the sweat through his t-shirt chilling uncomfortably.  In a moment he might do something about that, if he needed to.

katabasis

There was no immediate answer. The answer comes as he crouches. The lump [Leviathon] stirreth, and an elbow pokes out [the sleeping bag exhales warmth, a furnace] and then an arm, and then a head, coarse dark hair matted together with sleep, but also with remains of sap and oils, of a day's worth of grime, three swan's feathers and an owl's feather knotted (and somewhat bedraggled) into the dredding mess.

"Who?"

[NPC Awareness.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Justin

Who? she asked, and Justin crept back a few feet to give the woman space, pressing one hand into the cold dirt.  

"Sorry, I didn't mean to sneak up on you.  I was just... I'm Justin."  He watched her with a curious gaze, the pools of his eyes murky-dark in the low light.  The line of his posture was non-threatening, but alert (ready.)

"Is that your cairn I passed on the way up?"

katabasis

Her voice is still thick with sleep, but she pulls herself further out of the sleeping bag, the coyote fur skimming back. She is wearing long sleeves, but Justin can see paint on her skin, can see where it has been dyed, where it has been stained, and what he can see of the pattern recalls to him what he saw when he watched the weaving. 

"Mine and my teacher's. What manner of sorcerer are you? Are you," and now she is sitting completely up, and he can see that she's still in boots, boots that are more moccassins than boots and lined in fur even though it's summer, but well, it gets cold up here at night, and her gaze is direct and the kind of dark outside the circle of firelight. "Are you friendly?"  

Then, as if a thought just occurred to her, she leans forward. "What did you dream last night?" She sounds excited and tense, asking that. And look, there's that reverence humming beneath the surface like bees in a hive.

Justin

[... and then I was reminded that I haven't made his Nightmares roll]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Justin

What did you dream last night?

The truth was, Justin didn't remember.  It was a good day when he couldn't remember what he'd dreamed the night before.  But he didn't need to remember the dream to know how it had made him feel.  Those things - the racing pulse, the gnawing panic, the bone-deep sense-memories of a pain he could still recall with such clarity that thinking of it would send phantom sensations (lacerations) running through his body - they stuck with him long after he'd woken.  Long after the dream itself had faded into the shadows of his subconscious.  Sometimes he did remember the dreams, and those were often the bad days.  And the dreams were different, but the same.  Variations on themes.  Sometimes horrifying, sometimes heartbreaking.

This morning when he'd woken up, his hand hurt.  Probably, he'd dreamed of it being crushed.  Of bones popping and pulverizing beneath the blow of a hammer.  Or maybe it'd been something else this time.  A rock, a boot-heel.

Justin shook his head.  "I don't remember."  (And if he had, he wouldn't have told her.)

"But I'm friendly, yes.  I'm with the Verbena.  You?"

katabasis

The hum of reverence dies down; is sublimated by wariness he can see stealing into her eyes, coupled with suspicion. She is sitting on her calves, and she leans back again, hands on her thighs.

"Tcha. The 'Dreamspeakers.'" But she says it like she and her master have their own name for what they do, like Dreamspeakers is just a label that other Traditions use. Which is true.

She just sits back and regards him for a long moment. And then she says, "Describe how you came to be here."

Blinks once. "I'm Thea."

Justin

The answer didn't surprise him (all things considered,) and he nodded lightly in acceptance.  But when the woman (Thea) asked how he'd come to be there, Justin tilted his head and raised an eyebrow.

"I climbed the trail.  I was visiting the lake and I felt you, so I came to see."

His position didn't change.  He didn't attempt to relax or sit properly, but nor did he stand.  Instead he remained crouched in that half-casual-half-ready-to-jump pose, reacting warily to the other mage's suspicion.

"Where is your teacher?"

katabasis

"No. That can't be it. You're here now, so..." Justin probably gets the feeling that Thea is almost talking more to herself, although she starts out strong and confident. Her voice trails away, and she looks away from Justin, searching the sky instead, like she's looking for a sign. And she is, and he can feel her looking, that reverence fountaining, flowering, eyelashes tangling as the wind sweeps by again ... Everything is a sign. The shaman doesn't conjure up signs. The shaman just reads them.

"Or I guess it can be that simple. My teacher is in another part of the mountains. We're supposed to spend the night alone, well, except for Visitations. You're not what I expected."

Justin

Justin was quiet for a moment, watching the shaman look for signs in the sky.

"What were you expecting?" he asked in a quiet voice.  And then, almost tentatively, "There's something in the sky over the lake."

katabasis

"You should come back," Thea says, leaning forward again. "Come back and meet my teacher." Then, as if aware of how what seems imperative to her may not seem so to the wary-eyed boy who came up the mountain, she cracks a grin and says, "You're in it somehow but I can't tell. I'm not good enough yet."

Justin

[Per+Subterfuge - is this a trap?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Justin

You should come back.

Justin seemed to contemplate this for a long time.  A beat of prolonged silence stretched between them as his eyes searched the sky (though it would no more offer up clues to him than it had to Thea,) then the woman's face.  Justin wasn't someone who made decisions impulsively.  He also wasn't typically inclined to trust the word of a stranger who might have been attempting to draw him into a trap.

But there were things that a witch and a shaman had in common.  Thea spoke of signs, and of connections.  And that resonated with Justin.  Enough that he finally tipped his head in a light nod.

"Alright."

Then he stood up, brushing the dirt from his hand.  He didn't say anything else when he turned to go.  There wasn't anything else that needed to be said.  But if she didn't stop him, he'd begin to make his way back down the mountain toward the lake.  And from there, he pulled on his coat and continued the long hike back to his car.

katabasis

Thea does stop him. He stands up and she does too, coming more easily to her feet than he might have expected, after seeing the way she crawled out of the sleeping bag, knowing how stiff sleeping on the ground has to make you. She smells like an animal's den, but dry, dry as a bone in said animal's den, and she fisted something on the ground as she stood. "Take this," as he turns to go.

Thea puts a stone in his hand. It's not particularly smooth, nor is it particularly sharp. It's just what came to hand when she swept the ground.

"When you come back, bring it so we'll know you. Dawn. [Time that is convenient for players actually playing the next part out.]"

Then she watches him go, and he doesn't hear her crawl back into her sleeping bag. 

Blue Lake lies before him, but it's darker now, Evening coming down and a slim moon sickle in the sky.

Beauty up here.