PM to join [Tlazotinya] A House That Tries to be Haunted

[Philomena]

Minnie felt the slender hand wrap her up tight against the sides. The Eypharian, yes, was curved, still, thick with strong, and well-knit flesh. She met against a series of mad angles from the old professor, bones that jutted crazy-cornered from her fever-devoured flesh, joints grown thick an swollen hard beneath the paper-dry skin. her eyes peered up, strangely, at the woman, something like pleaing in them, and fear. But she did not refuse the aid, only nodded. And then spoke softly in her wet-growling throat.

"Yes... Yes, I hope. Oh, I hope so... come, child. Come."

She takes the Eypharian children's tale and slips it in her satchel now, carefully, still with gentle reverence of the white gloved hand.

The book cared for as it should be, then, she searches for her balance in her new place, rests light on her feet, and finds the only just embarrassed comfort of leaning on someone tlaler and stronger than herself - taller is not ever a challenge in adults, it seems, and stronger... she is strange bird-light in a strong and able arm now, as light as a long-sick child. She reaches the arm with the dead black hand around the Eypharian's back.

//The time, Minnie-Wren, for mistrust is past. You have done enough, for now, perhaps, dear? Go. Rest. Let someone be gentle and kind for a moment.//

//And what if she isn't?//

//Then it will be alright. The end is now so close, no humiliating memory will persist too long. But the memory of kindness, oh my Minnie-Wren. That lasts forever, doesn't it?//

She sighs soft, and murmurs, very, very soft, the words almost swlalowed in her throat, "Yes. Yes, perhaps, Alanza-mae. Perhaps."

She sets the walking stick against the shelf, then lifts the middle finger of the glove to her teeth again, to pull it back off, gripping it between her two ghost-sallow pale incisors, and ttugging weakly, blushing.

//Trust.//

She looks up to the Eypharian then, her face crumpling softly into somethign at once very old and very childlike, a sort compressed vulnerability.

"My... hand... you will... will you help me?"

And with a certain timidity, still the pale reserve of the oft-kicked dog, she lifts the gloved hand slightly bowing her head.

"I'm sorry, to be a nuisance."x

[Tlazotinya re Jahrid]

Tlazotinya's face softened as the other woman asked for help. She could do little but smile. "Miss, you are no such thing as a nuisance, the least I can do is help..." With that said, long dark skinned fingers peeled away the white glove, revealing the hand beneath, she then held the hand against her heart, and smiled. "As long as my hear beats, in my chest, I will be glad to assist you. Although I hate humans, you are so different from others, so pure, you aren't tainted, and you carry a beauty about you, the same beauty Mama had. So please, don't ever say you are a nuisance....." The Eypharian smiled, then lifted the hand to her lips, she pressed the dark full lips against the knuckles of her hand, She held them for a moment before lifting her head. "Yes, it will be nice again to find someone so appreciative of Semhu, the beautiful dance, taught to me by Mama...'' Her dark eyes were warm and full of elation, a contradiction from their earlier look of coldness.

[Philomena]

Minnie's hand was not beautiful, not in the traditional sense. The infection in her blood had spread and swollen the joints of her knuckes to round, red hazelnuts, and the skin was papery and dry, and humid-clammy. IT shook with the slightest palsy in the other girl's hand. She stood close enough that the wet rattling of her throat was audible with each slow breath to the other girl. But in the center, embedded in the skeletal face, in the poorly set hair, the hollow waste of her bust, her eyes peered out soft, and young, and quiet.

She smiled, softly, the smile has the creaking quality of disuse, her muscles so used to being set in fear and loneliness. She stares at the girl, no words in her voice, for a moment. Just the slow rattle of her breath, and the fierce defiant tenseness of a body that lives, simply out of sheer will not yet to die. A tired, but thick and strong will.

Finally, she speaks, and her voice, thick and napped, but soft, murmurs, "Come, come with me, child. Come child... I can do, perhaps, not very much, but... but I can show you a beautiful place. And read you a story, yes. I have not read a story... not since... Shearsy? So many years ago..."

She awkwardly takes up her stick, and moves to totter forward, but stops herself, and tuckes the stick under her damaged arm. She then looks up at the woman with the same quiet readiness to be rejected, the same dog's face. But perhaps... a little more open, a little more trusting. And she reaches quietly her good hand to take the lowest of the woman's left hands, to lean on, to walk together.

"You... you will not mind? I hope?"x

[Tlazotinya re Jahrid]

When Tlazotinya felt the other's hand wrap around one of her left ones, she smiled.; And instead of saying anything, she simply wrapped two more arms securely around the frail figure, one around her shoulders, careful not to touch her neck, and the other around the small of her back. Tlazotinya was easily a few inches taller than the woman, making it easy to support her weight. "You know, ever since I was a little girl Mama had said that I loved that story, in truth I do, even today, I am glad I have found it, I had been hoping that the University had it. If not, I would have been very disappointed, It is a story about how we came to be as we are now, our race, yet it was glorified into a children s tale, it was the first book Mama ever read to me, and the last....." Tlazotinya was smiling, her dark eyes burning like coals, yet they were happy, filled with elation and joy rather than the cold void they had been prior, when the two had first met. In truth, Tlazotinya was beginning to feel at ease with this frail and respectable woman.

[Philomena]

Minnie smiled softly back, her dim eyes not focusing well, and spoke again, "Glorified into a children's tale. I like that. People do not understand that, perhaps, sometimes - the glory of a children's tale."

She began to limp forward then, and out the library. Her steps are frail and while at first she tries to hold her own weight up. The strain of this is obvious on her face, and she blushes in her ashen cheek, but lets more and more of her weight melt into the other woman's arms around her back. The weight was not heavy - there was so little of her sickness-riddled flesh left by now, the fat devoured by raging fevers, the muscles dried into their sinewy cores now.

They walked out of the library, and into the street. Her bad arm grew tired and her walking stick began to slip, she tucked it back up, awkwardly under her arm, and murmured words that, if properly pronounced, were probably an apology. The street down the hill from the university, though, robbed more and more of her breath from her as she walked, and she panted in long, harsh rattles with the strain of the trip, more and more relying on her companion's arms to carry her, the sweat beading on her forehead, her jaw set hard against her exhaustion. But she kept moving, kept walking, her breast rising and falling with wet rattles of breath.

The people of the city looked darkly at the two. Some, recognizing the old professors, sneered, other blushed and turned away. Noone likes to see death. Noone wants to see the failing woman. And the other woman with her arms around her was a foreigner, proud and strange.

Minnie paid them no heed. She walked on, the last slick traces of winter soaking into her shoes. her joints burned, and her uscles shook, but she breathed, long slow breaths, and focused her mind into the center of the pain. As they turned off toward the side of the city, her voice began to murmur softly as she walked, snatches of thoughts slipping out of her exhausted subconscious.

"Not so far... not so far, Minnie-Wren... not so far. We shall show her this, hmm? Not so far away now... Who sent her? Who sent her?" her voice caught in a sort of rattle of almost laughter, thorugh her panting breath, her voice rattling, singsongy through the recitation of an old poem

"A soft hand comes of its own accord
Like the tip of the wave upon the shore,
When the sand is parched and begs for more.

A soft heart comes when the Gods decide,
Though the sea between be thick and wild,
It comes in a leap, and a bound and a stride."

Her voice gets hoarser as she says this, and she coughs, stopping a moment, but only a pause, swallowing hard against the productive embranes of her throat. Then, she rounds a corner, to a fence and wall, around a wide garden, and in the center, a grand and beautiful house. She hesitates then, a moment, but says nothing, and walks along the fence then stops.

"Here... here we are... here..."

She is out of breath, but gently pulls away from the woman's arm and leans, a touch feverish, on the cold metal fenceposts, and reaches her good hand up to take one of the woman's hands again, and squeeze it with her own, a shaking, weak squeeze, but with the warmth of both her fever and affection imbued in it. Her eyes, dogged and tired, but soft look up to the woman.

"You cannot be mortal? You cannot. You must be... if your eyes were blue, I would think the gods had, in the end, sent me some kind heart. I do not even know if I am dead. Perhasp you are Dira come for me? But yes, I will show you, whoever you, beautiful creature..." her rambling clatters weakly out of her mouth, without any real pauses, "... look down the road, and you will see the sea."

Indeed, where they now stood, the road was at a crest before it fell away, and over the tops of the wild salt-stained trees, the sea was the leaden grey of early spring, vast and endless falling out towards the tip of the bay.

"That is what some people wait for in the early spring. A lover maybe, among the sailors it brings. Or a merchant ship with their fortune. Or their own voyage out. Then, then, turn..."

She pointed through the fence rails, and behind them was a ring of fruit trees, skeletal and bare, but for just the swollen pink nibs of the flowers, so soon to bloom.

"Some people wait for this, the beginning fo growth, of the season, of the promise of coming harvest, hmm? The blooms, to them, they are only the promise of the apples that will come later."

She wanders for an instant, her eyes scanning the earth, dimly. Then she smiles, and her eyes leak a few tears. IT is a beautiful garden, even now, in the hard grey of a spring not yet fully formed, the earth well turned and rich with the smell of life, the frist hints of green in the dull grass. A stone path leads away, but at the foot, beside the two women, is a brown bed, lined in sea-stone, with just the peeping green swords of early flowers.

"This is what I wait for. The Sea-tulips. Every year they come, every year. And they swell, and bloom, and when their beauty is spent, they seed and die. They do nothing, even their seeds do nothing, for it is the invisible heart of them, the bulbs beneath the earth that the gardeners take to spread the plant. And yet... so useless, so meaningless, these are what I wait for. Some work for the pureness of attraction, or ambition, or simply for their needs, for the pleasure of the earth. I? I come and wait for beauty. I think it is the sweetest, the purest of all. I used to... my... used to have my son come, arrive, return, when the..." her voice grows more scattered and confused, exhausted, now, "He came when the tulips bloomed, he came, when the tulips bloomed, every year, every year, every year the tulips bloom, they bloom. Now noone comes. Noone comes anymore. Or... perhaps the tulips have been waiting, hmm? Perhaps. Perhaps this year, they bring me you, strange one. Do you know Lanie... you know her? You must... must know her..." her voice is dissipated now, rambling, and it wanders into a hollow of her throat to die.

Her eyes swirl with exhaustion, with the distance and intimacy of delirium, and still with that queer, childlike trust. And her tiny hand releases the woman's now, and reaches up with a quiet palsy to touch her cheekbone, in the way, a child touches a painting, to feel if it can really be real.x

[Tlazotinya re Jahrid]

Tlazotinya noticed how hard it was for the delicate human beside her to walk the distance of the streets. This worried the Eypharian to no end, she visibly pulled to woman closer as they passed people in the streets. She met each set of eyes with a murderous glare, she was dangerous, and she was clearly ready to take down any who dared come closer. This caused many to wince and look away, or give the pair a wide berth. Philomena seemed oblivious to such behavior of the citizens, for the older woman was rambling to herself, this caused Tlazotinya to give pause to her wandering thoughts as to where they were going. Worry, an emotion not felt in months welled up inside her. She knew what madness looked like, she had seen it plenty of times in her lifetime, and she was still young, the frail human beside her was expressing the same traits as of one who is slowly loosing their conscious mind, yet Tlazotinya said nothing simply staying close to her, and supporting her with three strong dark skinned arms. As they came upon their destination Tlazotinya's dark chocolate eyes widened, she reluctantly released Philomena, yet stayed behind her in case she was to topple over. "Yes, this place is grand, and it is beautiful..." She spoke softly, almost guarding her voice as if frightened to say the wrong things. She followed each of Philomena's instructions, listening to the rambling voice, trying to not allow tears to leak from her eyes, her new friend was loosing her lovely mind, would she even remember her in the morning? "My sweet and lovely human friend, I was not sent by any god, I am here to find those that killed my parents, I am not a deity, or a demigod, I am a simple Eypharian from a once Gilded family...." She smiled softly, unable to hold back the tears, she leaned down as Philomena reached up to touch her dark skinned cheek, the skin was soft, yet soon became wet with salty tears. She wrapped a set of arms around Philomena, then buried her face in the woman's neck, and allowed the tears to run, her taller form shook with the grief that had built up, the frustration that she felt, and the helplessness that she still hadn't found the killers.

[Philomena]

Minnie turned to listen to the girl's words. She heard them. At some level, perhaps, she even comprehended them. It would perhaps be most accurate to say she did not fully comprehend what the the implications of the words are - the direct meaning is clear, the indirect - that is, that Tlazotinya is a dangerous woman - completely mysterious. Perhaps it is is the consequence of circumstance: what fear, after all, does a dying woman need have of a murderer?

And so as the woman spoke, Minnie smiled, a soft smile, and her hand, though it shook, touched the Eypharian's cheek as softly as it could manage, the fingers traced the lines of salt-tear on the woman's cheeks. Like little rivers, she thought, like the great branched rivers in the Semhu plays she had read. The world reflects inwards, smaller, and smaller into us - we are our own landscapes.

"And outwards, too..." she murmured, "And outwards too... tears like a river, a hand like a river, lips like a river, a body like a river. Rivers of air, rivers of breath, rivers of stars in the sky. Hmm? Rivers of starts in the sky, and inwards again, to rivers of light pouring into the eye. The pours backward into the hard, the heart into the soul, and pumping rivers of blood... strange little child. Does a leaf in the river think the mountain has sent her? She thinks she simply struggles on a river. But the river flows because it runs down from a mountain, the old force..."

She finds the voice on her lips, now, only now, realizing she has spoken, and blinks, her face contracting into confusion, perhaps a little fear.

"I am... summat is wrong... summat is wrong." Her voice shifts very suddenly into the brogueish burr of her childhood, "I canny stay. I muss' go home... I muss go home... I need to... I need to lay down..."

She reaches a frightened hand then around her, half-blind and frightened, does not find her stick, and starts instead to clumsily pull herself down the street by grasping the fence rails, lurching along slowly, two or three stumbled steps, unable to find the stick where it is still jammed under her left armpit. She does not forget the Eypharian woman: she looks back at her frequently, her eyes now desperate, apologetic, ashamed.
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