Shenanigans [Victor]

[Seven Xu]

36th day of Fall, 511 AV
Noon

Fall was upon the City of Illusion in its fullest force; trees burst with color and the crisp air wafted lazily beneath a high sun on a clean canvas of blue. Victor Lark rocked on his heels, assessing an opaque wall of green that stood teen feet above the ground beneath the visor of his hand, while his halfblood chewed a pale bottom lip and gathered lint in the deepest reaches of his coat’s pockets.

“Can you climb a hedge?”

The question had been flippantly shot down with a shake of raven hair and a forceful pull on his sleeve. Seven could only lurch further into the Garden of No Return—an apt description, and much easier to pronounce than its proper moniker—at the surrender of a laughing face and shuffling feet.

The duo had spent no more than a fortnight in Alvadas; explored no more than a fraction of the twists, turns, and shifts in the cobblestone streets when the imposing shadow of the hedge maze loomed into view. Seven’s fire clashed on Victor’s steel grey when they wordlessly exchanged glances for a fraction of a second before bolting in a stumbling race to the maze’s entrance.

A pale hand wriggled free of Victor’s arresting grasp to test one green wall. Thin barbed branches snapped in protest beneath the pressure and he huffed; the hedge was too dense to climb through, though not nearly strong enough to sustain his paltry weight. “I’d be naïve to think he’d give us a map,” he grinned, dropping to a crouch to investigate a gathering of peonies at his feet. “But he could have at least given us some kind of clue.” The Alvad they found lingering at the maze’s entrance had appraised them beneath a heavy black brow and a beak for a nose, but allowed them to pass without the exchange of a single word.

Seven rocked forward and then hoisted himself to his feet, bending to sweep dry dust from his knees. When he straightened and turned, the entrance was already obscured by a barrier that had not previously been there. The hedge wall scarcely made a sound when it materialized in a rustle of leaves and the displacement of mud and they found themselves very much in the middle of a crossroads. A set of pale fingers grabbed and tangled in warm olive. “We could be in here for days, you know.” Seven’s brows knitted together and the pale line of his mouth twisted in concern; he gave the familiar hand a light squeeze while he drifted between the countenance of his partner and the open sky above.

“Which way do you want to go?”

[Victor Lark]

The stretch of Victor’s brow and the limp of his lips, as he glanced carefully in each available direction, almost looked like happiness. Really, it was only the hanging remnant of one of many smiles; really, he was examining, considering, weighing. He drummed his fingers against the sharp knuckles beneath them, then eased them tightly into the soft valleys between. There they bent down in a hard squeeze as he turned from his options to Seven. The smooth metal around his pupils was obscured by a laughing squint as he peered at the candid crimson opposite, inspecting whether there was a suggestion in the question.

When he found none, he shrugged. “It’s not about what I want, is it?”

He threw his attention at the path most directly to his right. He might have leaned in that direction for half a second, but then he was darting towards the leftward path and yanking behind him the skinny arm attached to his.

But just as he might have crossed from their little fork, the great green walls rustled and closed in his face. Without a beat, another threshold opened beside it, revealing a long path with an autumn-wilting oak at its end. Its height only barely surpassed that of the hedge beside it, just enough to persuade a man that he might see over the wall if he climbed it. Victor did not hesitate to follow the maze’s proposition. As quickly as he had settled, he reeled down the new route as if it were the first. He released his grasp on Seven only when they reached the tree and its corner.

Victor offered the maze a glance at the other side of the turn, but he saw nothing that interested him more than the red and orange leaves that hung just above his reach. Only a running start could toss him far enough to reach the lowermost branch. Once he had swung his leg onto the perch and hoisted himself to a secure crouch, he gripped the rough wood with one hand and reached down to Seven with the other.

“Here: if we get up high enough, we won’t need a map. You can make it in your head!” Victor had heard something about the nature of this garden, and the recent caprice of the leafy bastions around them affirmed that. It was more than a suspicion that what he suggested was a fool’s exertion, and yet he very much wanted to see the top.

[Seven Xu]

At the base of the gnarled oak, Seven rocked forward and flexed his toes against hard ground. He’d once again taken to chewing his lip with a dry protruding fang, as if in deep concentration. He thought to open his mouth in protest—his skill in climbing trees was dismal at best, incomparable to the surprising grace of his companion—but even if Victor’s logic was paper thin, a waiting hand and a buoyant grin made for an easy persuasion.

He dipped beneath the branch to the opposite side and offered his right hand, finding more dexterity and strength in his left. That was reserved for the rough bark of the eye-level bough; a haphazard foothold and a bodily tug on Victor’s end later; Seven was straddling the thick branch with a wan smile on his face. He lifted a hand to pluck rough scraps of bark from the opposite palm, scrutinizing the pockmarks they left behind in the plushy white flesh. Finally, he wiped them clean against his thighs and straightened to consider their new vantage point.

They weren’t very high.

Several more thick branches reached out above them like vibrant red-and-orange fingers trying to pluck the sun from the heavens. Seven’s calm smile bent into the semblance of a toothy grin when, for once, he was the first to make the next bold leap into the unknown. He wobbled when he rose to his feet, keeping one hand planted firmly against the trunk of the tree while he stepped once to a bough that perilously cracked beneath his meager weight on his way to another, larger limb. Lowering himself into a balanced squat, Seven peered down at Victor, face flushed, heart thumping.

“What if this shifts, too?” He laughed breathily, scanning the clearing the hedge maze had afforded them. Seven was still too low to successfully see any sort of way out; another shuffling of leaves to his distant left pricked his senses and drew his claret stare. “What if it gets sucked into the ground or grows so tall we’re never able to get out?” The incredulous questions were based in rational concern; he had no doubt the city was capable of that, and stranger.

When Seven rocked backward to glimpse the high sun through the patchwork canopy of leaves, heedlessness and gravity’s influence drew him from his perch, only managing a startled gasp before the tree bequeathed him to the hard embrace of dirt-packed ground. A shock of pain ran across his shoulders, having taken the brunt of his fall; hot defeated tears welled up in his eyes and he inhaled a sharp, indignant breath, before attempting to collect his bewildered, aching frame from the ground.

[Victor Lark]

His jaw hung; the wide black of his pupils made a skinny ring out of his eyes’ dim iron. As they followed Seven’s upward progress, Victor wished he knew what pride looked like when it was felt for another. He would have shown it to the pools of nervous vermillion above him, if they had glanced down sooner. Unfortunately, he would not be left to wait and watch for long. By the time Seven began to vocalize his worries, his dark-haired shadow was already climbing up behind him. His ascent hugged the trunk of the tree, leading him towards branches that could be reached with a leap instead of a climb. That path led him seconds out of Seven’s sight as he rounded the wide tree and bounded to his other side.

“Maybe it—” His witty riposte stopped before it had started. As he emerged again from behind the thick trunk, he discovered that there was no one left to taunt, no one to startle or assist. Seven was gone. Victor’s throat felt tight.

He looked up first, figuring Seven had assumed a competition and fled even higher. There was no rustle of dead leaves to confirm his suspicions, so he jumped downward onto the limb that had one held his friend and leaned around the tree in a frantic search. He called out his name, a pair of stern syllables that might have almost seemed angry. Before his tone could stray into worry, the corner of his eyes glimpsed familiar white from below.

Relief slackened his throat with an irritated sigh and he scrambled downward. The branch which Seven had loosed snapped beneath the second trial of Victor’s foot, but he managed to orient and slide down the base of the tree to the hard ground. His haste earned him a hole in the elbow of his old black shirt and a few scrapes on the side of his hand, but he did not seem to notice as he crouched beside the thin young man and tipped his chin up. There were tears in his eyes and, for a moment, Victor forgot the obvious explanation. Anger lingered at the back of his mind; it was a dangerous thing, when combined with curiosity. His heart thumped wildly with the remains of adrenaline as he said breathily, “You can’t do that, Seven. Don’t you have climbing blood in you? I thought your mother might have given you that much.” Without a beat he laughed, standing and offering a hand to the pained half-blood. The whole ordeal instantly became a distant memory. “Come on; let’s go. We don’t need a map, mental or no. You can choose the way next, and we’ll figure it out together!”

In reality, Victor was averse to choosing at all. He meant to embrace the maze like he did the streets of the city beyond it, to let it lead him instead of trying to find any particular thing. But he did like to see how Seven chose. He pulled him by the fingers down the long corridor and stopped at the next fork. One path turned abruptly while the other stretched on, but neither contained any landmark of consequence. He considered both options before his attention returned to his fool, eyes having long since exchanged concern and insult for blithe enthusiasm.

[Seven Xu]

Something red-hot flared behind the whites of Seven’s eyes as Victor lashed out with a retort that stung far more than his graceless exit from the tree. His lips tightened around clenched teeth and he frowned, ignoring his screaming shoulder in the name of wobbling to his feet again. “What did your mother give you, Victor Lark?” The rebuke fell short of clever, though it was laced newfound curiosity. Victor had never spoken a word about his mother, or any other family for that matter. Furthermore, what Seven knew of Ravok was left on a wall in Syliras. “Some bird’s name and a nice smile is hardly a legacy. Besides, I wasn’t climbing when I fell.”

Fire lanced through Seven’s back again and he grunted as his fingers were seized by an unsympathetic hand. Their tour of the garden resumed. Truthfully, Seven had no urge to find an immediate route out of the maze. After all, they’d just arrived, and the expanse of hedge and flora were enough to occupy the pair for bells—he just wasn’t keen on bells turning to days. Leadership was relinquished to him, and he managed to twist his aching body to the left, tenaciously cutting Victor off to knock a free set of knuckles against his chest. The frown had been replaced by an amiable smirk; there a promise of venom on an exposed line of white.

“Come on, this is just as likely to get us out as any other way.”

They blindly negotiated the path for several paces, adapting when a new verdant obstacle denied them their next turn. The ground had gone from dried packed dirt to a veined span of roots they had to navigate by tiptoe. At least, that was the approach Seven had taken. Once, he’d caught his boot on a particularly large root that jutted out of the ground and he caught himself before he could take a second tumble.

Despite the prickling burn that heated his every movement, he trudged on. It was growing dull now, though he wasn’t sure if he was just getting used to the way he was ultimately tugged around like a rag doll. “Look!” This time, he was the one who won their tug of war.

Another tree crested the nearest wall, though only barely. It was squatter and thinner than the first; when the pair turned the corner, they could see several low boughs that swept towards the ground, its fingertips ripe and heavy with mottled green-and-red apples. Seven’s caught a bubble of laughter in his throat and dipped beneath the shadows of branches that kept the sparse green grass beneath sheltered from a high noon sun. A hand rose to grip one smooth elastic branch, testing its strength with a sharp tug. Several apples loosed and thumped against the hard-packed ground.

“It wouldn’t be so bad, to get lost in a place like this.”

[Victor Lark]

“You mean it isn’t so bad.” Victor corrected with a wink, nodding the mostly red apple in his hand at the pair of matching eyes beside him. He took a bite of it and, as he chewed, added, “We’re already lost!”

A chuckle rocked his shoulders as he slipped beneath the new tree’s shadow and slumped against its trunk. He glanced at Seven, narrow-eyed indecision poring through and beyond him, and a second later he seemed to have decided on silence. His his attention dropped to the snack in his hands. He had not bothered to check it for defects before he plucked it from the knotted roots at his feet, so he took a distracted moment to dust it off with one hand as he turned it in the other. Just beyond his eyes’ reach, something seemed different on the ground... but he could not decipher what. For once, curiosity did not stir him from his contemplation.

“My family’s legacy is a formidable one. Where it matters, at least.” He dragged an irritated tongue over his gums, but then a smile erupted over his lips and he raised his mercurial gaze to Seven’s height. “What did the Xus do, in Lhavit?” There was a bite in the word even though it had been said through happily exposed teeth. Victor knew plenty about Seven’s sisters and father, but he had not known their name until recently. He might have known the answer to the question, at some point; he had only asked it in an attempt to steal the last word. He pushed away from the tree and looked towards the path around them, dismissing the subject with far more ease.

He took one step forward, and then he realized the difference. The roots around them were growing, crawling over each other, approaching at a snail’s pace and somehow with alarming speed. Victor stepped back against the trunk’s slope again. “Seven!” He commanded, docking his apple between his teeth and reaching for the hurt man’s fragile wrist. He pulled him towards the tree, grabbed him by the hips, and hoisted him up at the lowest branch. Only when he was certain that Seven was safely above the ground did he grasp the branch for himself, wincing at the loose bark which dug into the fresh sores on his hands.

Clutching the thin and swaying limb beneath him, Victor regarded the ground from his new distance. He was not sure if it had moved again, or whether it had moved at all. He extracted the apple from his mouth and chewed a piece of it through a frown. “They were...” He looked up from the roots to Seven. “Are they—?” And then the wall opened on the other side of the tree, and Victor turned to see what waited beyond it.

[Seven Xu]

The black roots loosed from the ground and crept along the base of the tree, lapping at the trunk with an unearthly strength. Timber creaked beneath their influential fingers and bark was effortlessly pried away. Whatever witty response Seven was brewing in the front of his mind regarding Victor’s deliberate jape was quashed, escaping through a flutter of pale lips and a wrinkled brow.

Beneath a screen of alabaster, Seven exchanged his befuddled glance for the respite of storm grey. “I see it,” he confirmed in a short exhale. Long white digits knotted the scraped hand at his side and his feet frayed the bark on the flimsy bough in an attempt to creep further from the ground. Seven’s free hand crossed his lap to snatch the bitten fruit before marking a venomous dent of his own. He offered his companion a sideward glance; a forgotten mask made his face impossible to read and left a lump in the back of Seven’s throat. Uneasy laughter rumbled beneath words of comfort. “They’re roots, how dangerous can they be?”

Crack.

A response came in an alarming shudder, so violent it nearly knocked them off of their low-hanging branch. The tree listed, groaned, and overripe apples thumped to the ground by the dozens. Seven swallowed a gasp, reaching for a torn and faded black shirt as he lurched forward. The stolen apple was shoved back against Victor’s chest, already bruised and browning from a diluted bite. “We need to go.” Despite the crawling dread that poured tingling black tendrils hot through his limbs, Seven didn’t yell the words; though if he had to repeat himself, he may have.

Seven’s descent from the tree earned him a lengthy scrape across his back where a shirt failed to protect against rough bark when he slid off the bough. When his feet met hard packed dirt, his footing was weak and he nearly stumbled; a surge of lightning coursed through his legs and reminded him of previous injuries. Teeth grit, Seven began to navigate the tangle of slow moving roots step by step, arms extended to either side and fingers splayed in an attempt to steady his already compromised balance. The staggering dance carried him towards the new opening in their little coppice, away from the phenomenon that was slowly but surely devouring the squat apple tree in their wake.

[Victor Lark]

Callousing fingers grappled for that precious fruit as it tried in vain to fall out of Victor’s grasp—instead of heeding Seven’s advice. Only when he was certain he had it, did he look up from the peculiar stain that had formed around the bite of a venomed fang. He lifted the slop of tenderized sugar to his mouth as his he met the anxious red glare that insisted their departure, but was only granted a glimpse of that dread before Seven escaped onto the treacherous ground beneath. He followed quickly after, landing on the gnarled wood just as a mighty chorus of snapping and cracking wrenched the apple tree sideward.

He scrambled after Seven, stepping lightly between the roots where he could find space. The half-eaten apple was still clutched in one hand, more for prideful persistence than any real hunger. He was watching those stumbling leather shoes flee to clearer terrain when he felt a tug on his pant leg. Reflex stopped Victor from tripping himself entirely, but he still emitted a short groan of frustrated surprise as he turned his attention to the obstacle. By the time he had reached down to free the cotton around his ankle, a root was crawling over the toes of his shoe; he pulled himself out from beneath it before it could grab hold, but even as he stepped back, he felt a pressure around his other foot.

The yell that followed was more annoyed than afraid. A few stumbling strides later, Victor had fallen on his ass and the roots were relieving his feet to grasp at his arms and hands. He managed to tug one arm out of the chaos to roll onto his stomach and crawl towards this friend. “Seven!” He repeated, reaching out to him. The hand that did not offer itself to bony white aid still held that wretched apple. The tapered ends of snaking wood drilled through its thin red skin and ripped it apart between Victor’s fingers, smashing and obliterating it as it fell to the earth.

With that piece of the tree devoured, his assailants became suddenly less reluctant to allow his retreat. He clambered to his feet and sprinted towards terra firma; as soon as they were beyond the peculiar monster’s wriggling command, Victor took Seven by both arms and pulled him against the prickly green wall. If the taste of venom had remained on his hastily swallowed bite, he could not remember it. He only needed a little, to bide its nagging omission on his lip and tongue. Concern splayed sloppily across his face as he asked through heavy breaths, “Are you alright?”

Then he brought his face forward in a pair of short, hard kisses: one, which held them in the brief passion of their survival, and another, which pressed his bottom lip against a set of fangs. When he tore away, mouth hanging and throbbing with the dull pleasure of a noxious burn, his hands dropped to his sides and withdrew to the center of the green aisle. Victor glanced towards the shrinking tree on one side, then advanced a few paces in the other direction. “We need to keep moving. The maze does not want us to linger, at least not so close to the entrance.”

[Seven Xu]

Blinding panic had left Seven’s chest tight and his reflexes slow; the sky twisted above him before it dove into the gravel. Everything beyond a few strides was invisible to a set of panicked reds. An obliging hand had snapped out to grab Victor by the wrist and he threw himself backward in a bodily tug, wrenching the human free from disinterested tendrils in time for the wrath of the garden to rain down on every scrap of the tree’s existence.

Are you alright? Steely pride flashed with something that mimicked distress. Seven’s response was a stifled noise in his throat.

The hedge maze did its part in blocking the leftovers of the unsettling event, starving their eyes of the swarming mass of roots and ponderously closing them into verdant tranquility; it seemed like a garbled dream. As he pushed off of the prickling barrier that he’d been forced against, the inexorable thumping of his heart and the dull throb of injuries disallowed respite were the only evidence anything had happened at all. His companion’s ability to shake off even the strangest of situations was contagious; Seven’s tremors subsided, his chest calmed, and familiar pink warmth washed a pale face. “Right, keep moving.” he echoed.

Seven’s exaggerated forward stride brought him into step behind Victor, fingertips drumming at the depths of his loose jacket pockets. His lips were pressed stiffly together in an attempt to rid tender flesh of a diluted sting. Victor had long since discovered a reflex that offered that blazing libation and freely coaxed it; whether or not Seven deliberately obliged that addiction, he would never say. He surrendered a hand to his mouth to sweep the tingling sensation away on the backs of bony knuckles, and sucked in a breath.

“Tell me about Ravok.” The lofty request was half an accusation; the city could very well have been sprawled in the lush forest just beyond Syliras or on an island in an unknown ocean; all he knew was that Victor turned into a self-important patriot when he mentioned Rhysol’s Ravok. There was a lake, and rooftops—decidedly less crude than a wall of painted black triangles. They crested a bend, and Seven stumbled forward to close the gap between them and continue side by side. Ivy had long since crept along the ground where the pair walked. Seven skirted it nervously. Despite their similar height, Victor’s straight-spined gait often left their eyes uneven. Seven squared his shoulders and donned a lopsided smile, though his vigilant stare remained fixed on the ground ahead.

“Where it matters.”

[Victor Lark]

The maze was merciful for a short time, the turns arbitrary in the name of mistaken intuition. Despite the ease of the moment, Victor’s pace was quick. It was not limitless energy that drove him—the small man was less inexhaustible and more tolerant to the discomforts of exhaustion—but a consuming enthusiasm for seeing. Every turn was a promise for a sight or even an adventure, unlike the cage of stone that lurked beyond the sea and in his recent memory. He wanted to be attacked and tricked and shocked, so that he could conquer the encounter and come out the better. That end did not require conversation.

Victor sighed through his nose, dipping his gaze when he saw that their latest turn yielded nothing but another benign pair of walls and another long, narrow lane. After offering a sardonic smile to eyes that did not rise to meet it, he looked idly ahead. “It’s a city that thinks sitting on a lake can defend its people from the world,” he replied sourly, glancing upward so that he seemed to care less. Though wrought in riddles, Victor’s explanaion was as genuine as it was bitter. “And that the God of Chaos would protect them from His own evil.”

Everything matters, he had said once, but he tried not to think his old life ever did. Only the present mattered, and yet so did Seven’s opinion. There was no harm in sharing that common knowledge with this man, who so craved to learn the details of the world. That notion delayed the onset of boredom, and so Victor continued, “But it is also a city of businessmen. People will tell you it’s full of dark mages, but the folks who have it right are the ones who make money from it. That’s the business of the Larks, and that’s where it matters.” Thick puffs of clouds had formed quickly over the white wisps of hours previous. In the next second, they stepped into a cool shadow. Victor’s sharp steel turned to tug at the blood-red gaze beside him, and a half-lifted finger met the sleeve of an arm whose hand was tucked away beyond his grasp. “But Ravok is my city as much as Rhysol is my god. We’re at the center of the world here, Ionu’s playground! Alvadas is where it matters, and that’s where we are!”