Why is it always crowded? (Dhalvasha)

[Asara Willow]

"I am just as inexperienced as you. Usually, though, I'll buy my fruit and go out to where Zafkil has my tent in the forest and eat there, where I won't be glared at." A small smile of complete amusement brightened her face though. She didn't understand why she found eating alone with a horse was worth a smile, but there she had it. "I am perfectly fine with this alley. After all, if a Human wanders in and sees us, they'll wander right out in a hurry."

Her stomach positively snarled with glee at the sight of the peach, and she reached for it willingly. Surprisingly, she didn't feel the usual bubble of mistrust when she took it, and she supposed it was because the person giving her food was a member of her race and not a Human vendor.

Slowly she pierced the fruit with her teeth, finding it somewhat soft from age, and her venom flowed into it, breaking down the already soft flesh into mush. She could feel it growing squishy in her hands and almost squirmed with glee.

The intricacies of what he explained to her took hold. The idea of a 'Web' was fascinating to her. She was glad to not be the only one, of her own race, to find spiders alluring and interesting. But the way he spoke of these 'carriers' caused a slight frown to crease her brows again. She understood little about the harvest, and her knowledge was based entirely around what she'd overheard people mutter as she passed. She had been under the misconception that the harvests were for food, but here it sounded like the Symenestra kept them in their Webs. Maybe like the spare food a spider will stow away when it is hungry?

Lifting her eyes to him she slowly whispered her thanks in Symenos, speaking a word she rarely found use for other than with her horse. She lowered her eyes again as she listened to his questions.

Did she remember some things? Yes. Not much, but enough to give her a hint of who she was as a person. She did retain some of her skills, such as her ability to befriend most animals. But people still evaded her. Why she was hurt in the first place had not yet shown up. Even the little flashes of memory consisted only of feeling so far, not much of seeing people.

Slowly, with a little frown, Asara answered Dhalvasha. She spoke in a quiet voice, and her eyes had become shadowed from thought.

"I remember... A pink room I think, like a cave. I think the walls were glistening and sharp, and they were very pretty. I can only remember hiding there from people named 'Dra-' before their given names. I'm not sure. It's very blurry." The Symenestra wrinkled her nose distastefully as she thought about her headaches. The pains that left her wincing and, internally, angry. "Oh yesss... I suffer headaches and migraines. When I'm hungry most often. They are always there." Her voice came out in a poisonous hiss. The pains were a nuisance she didn't want to suffer.

"Would you explain the harvest to me..?" She asked this faintly in Symenos after having explained herself in Common. She had inadvertently switched languages to match the generous, curious male. He was a... surgeon of sorts, and she had an obligation to help him as best as she could while conversing with him.

After speaking, Asara began to eat off the peach. She ate as daintily as ever, not wanting to make a mess on herself.

[Dhalvasha]

Dhalvasha nodded absently, back to poring over her scars with enraptured interest. One may consider the blow to have been nearly fatal, but here she stood despite all odds. Whole and conscious no less. With prodding, he had begun to push at the boundaries of her condition, noting how the wall was paper thin and gave easily to stressors focused on recalling. Perhaps part of her did not want to recall the past, perhaps she avoided the idea. If so, her mental injury could have been self inflicted, a willful denial of the past in an attempt to begin a new present.

Or perhaps to bury a secret.

"Rose rooms, yes, yes, Quartz cavern in Kalinor, quite fetching." He wasn't thinking about crawling along the glittering walls, alone in the damp with only echoes for company. Kalinor was a lovely place, but the political atmosphere was thick...cloying.

And there was...

But the notion was pushed away, a tiresome reminder of his own weakening emotional fragility. Perhaps it was the stress of such extensive travel, but he thought more and more of his surrogate these days. She questioned the Harvest, bringing him sharply from perspective.

He released her, his hands suddenly sick of her touch, her questions. Leaving Kalinor was not an exercise in widening its doctrine. Even in the tall grasses he was questioned, queried as it were, to the nature of his pale skinned brethren.

"Very well, I will abate your curiosity. The Harvest is a task set to the oldest member of a Web, or family, to retrieve a female from outside Kalinor and return with her. Once returned, she will be impregnated with a Symnestrian child and die during labor. A Symnestrian baby releases a lethal dose of toxin before being born that kills the mother, especially potent in her weakened state. Dra is...a title of sorts."

He rubbed his hands together, feeling the friction of his fingers and palms. Dra were hardly better than human, a genetic aberration polluting Symnestrian gene lines. But their adaptable nature might overtake their predecessors one day...they were not murderers at birth.

"Dra means 'little'. It refers to a Symnestrian born with a Symnestra mother and a different species father. The product is more a slightly modified human than a Symnestra...but they are more common these days as the surrounding cities have grown tired of the Harvest."

Taking a bite of his own peach, Dhalvasha did not taste the pulp. His mouth was dry and angry, swallowing his food like sawdust.

"Have you any more questions?" It was almost patronizing.

[Asara Willow]

Asara's eyes narrowed on his at seeing the response in his eyes before he responded, and she was confused as to why. The way he explained the Harvest was both deeply intimate as well as almost cruelly. It was as though he was displeased with her, and she felt some kind of anger resonating in her at that. A simple question should not have brought out such a response in anyone. She just wanted to understand what it was she was constantly accused of, and while the knowledge hadn't yet registered, she found Dhalvasha's attitude to be frigid.

Asara felt herself turning from him at the anger she felt pouring from him at her innocent question. She glanced around quickly for an escape before moving back a step and placing down her half finished fruit.


"I apologize for offending you. I have no more questions oF you now. Are you satisfied with me?" She spoke in a forcibly soft voice, although inwardly there was turmoil. The female continued to back away, wondering if she should go back to that street and still try to get across. She had been asking him if he was done investigating her loss.

The female, being put on edge by Dhalvasha's cool words, clenched her hands tightly enough to dig the sharpened edge of her nails in. She had pretty much given trust to him before knowing him, and she felt terribly wrong for such a thing.

[Dhalvasha]

"Of course not, a naturalist cannot identify the measure of venom in a snake by mere sight, neither can a medical practitioner divine miracles of only a cursory examination." He was annoyed, an irritated sigh escaping with his words. Not only had he allowed his emotions to get the better of him (And after so many years no less), but in doing so he had alienated his patient.

Although her reaction to him now did not sync with her earlier disposition. Watching her edge toward the entrance of the alley, Dhalvasha wryly compared her to a doe. A sharp breeze would send her scurrying for the shadows. Perhaps the blow to her head had also amplified her survival instincts, pressing them to an uncomfortable din of distrust and cowardice. While taller, he had certainly not presented himself in a manner to foster distrust. His curiosity, while uncomfortable, certainly wasn't frightening.

"Are you a mouse or a spider?" he found himself asking, raising an eyebrow and the hint of a smile at the edge of his lip. Putting both hands behind his back, Dhalvasha leaned against the wall and regarded her. Shadows bounced and bounded with the chaos of the marketplace beyond, but here there was a measure of sheltered silence...privacy.

"I apologize for my tone, if it offended. It has been a long day and the sun is still high, a product of irritated eyes and a slight headache." He lied, but it didn't matter. It might as well have been.

"I haven't finished my examination nor questioning, and you still have learned precious little of your life in Kalinor. If you wish to quit my presence then you have every means to do so...however," he paused, picking a thread or two off his dark clothes and flicking them to the wind, "However, you won't recall your memories jumping at every shadow and stressing at every meeting. The choice is yours."

Taking another bite of his fruit, Dhalvasha chewed it thoughtfully, his mind drifting. When she was calm and curious her memories seemed to seep back into her mind. It was a theory, of course, but one founded on observational science. That, so far, was the best he had short of opening her head. He took another bite of the peach, imagining the process or tools he might need to open her cranium and somehow preserve her life.

He hadn't the means.

Unfortunate.

So his experimental hypothesis would need to be tested, relaxing her easily frightened nature and posing simple questions that pried deeper into her area of loss memories. She remembered her name, Asara, but it could as easily have been a fabrication from hearing another Symnestrian name. Likewise, there was no apparent reason why she was here. A girl with her measure of meekness should have avoided Syliras, perhaps set her on a course for Zeltiva. Was it curiosity which drove her to the streets or some other reason?

Most he knew of her was theorized and built off the little she remembered. Still, it might be enough to rebuild her identity. Certainly if she had been born and remembered crawling in a Chrystal cavern, had remembered to be wary or distasteful of Dra, she might have lived in Kalinor when he did.

How curious the paths of mortals, how curious indeed.

[Asara Willow]

Asara tilted her head at his words, focusing entirely on him as he spoke and crossing her thin arms slightly, looking as aloof as she could while listening. Her gold eyes flashed with secret emotions, things she felt deep down where the angry voice in her lived.

"A mouse or a spider..? Hmmm..." A smile lifted the corner of Asara's lips. It was probably the closest she had gone so far to laughing gaily. She'd never been asked such a question, and it amused her. "What if I am neither? What if I am a bull moose and you just don't know it yet?" The female doubted she was, yet she didn't say that either way.

Slowly, Asara sighed and turned to lean against the wall again, keeping her distance but relaxing, then made a dismissive gesture at him for him to continue his questioning. She forced herself to relax and her smile turned bitter and almost mocking. "Did I not offend you with my question, though? I had only asked because the first human I ever met referred to the Harvest when he saw me before... Well, I apologize if I did annoy you..."

She lifted her eyes to look at him in her awkward fashion, her slanted eyes narrowing as she scrutinized the male before she shrugged. "I will stay. I wish to learn more, and I will continue to share with you, if it pleases you and does not distress you. We could go somewhere cooler, to avoid the nauseating light, but I am not sure where exactly. This is that hour when humans scurry more fiercely."

She then turned to look up at the sky and frown at the clouds scuttling across the pale blue vault.

[Dhalvasha]

Holding up a hand, Dhalvasha shook his head. "No, no, here suites my purposes for now. Perhaps another time we could..." he trailed off, not knowing how to finish it. They could what? Examine each other? She his mind and he her body? Was it truly a doctor-patient relationship if he paid her knowledge in exchange for study?

No matter.

"May I examine your other wound as well? Our kind do not scar as readily as other races, by part due to our fragility. If it isn't too much trouble, I'd like to examine how the wound healed." Stepping toward her, fixed his red gaze on hers, gently lifting her shirt to trace along the second scar. This one was far more prominent, a cord of muscle and hardened tissue...a belt across her body.

"You don't remember your attacker do you? Try to think about it with a calm mind, push against what you can't remember...but do so gently. I'm no expert in these matters, but it seems you are capable of recalling certain details if you practice relaxed memory retrieval."

Gently, his hand smelling of the street and faintly of blood, rested on her shoulders and guided her to sit. He followed after, never breaking eye contact, never disrupting their link. Times like these he wished for a mobile laboratory, at least some out of the way location he could work without prying eyes or wagging tongues. Although they were not in the center of a thousand people, the alley was still a farcry from privacy.

"I want you to try and remember the Crystal cavern, the color and what you were doing there. Don't strain yourself, simply push at the void and see what it will relinquish."

He leaned away from here, putting some distance between them. Trauma victims sometimes were like to react violently and although she was slight even by Symnestra standards, he could do without the physical assault.

Closing his eyes, he remembered the city of Kalinor. The silk strands almost reached out to touch him, almost grabbed him, wafting over his skin and sticking lightly to his palms. "Kalinor is suspended above the darkness, a city of webs and stone." Beauty only spoke in so many languages, some universal and some so secret not even the eye of the beholder was aware. Kalinor, while dark and even dank by most standards, could not be outshone by any city in Mizahar.

It wasn't pride of his race, nor a sense of nostalgia, but in all his travels nothing had compared to the sheer timeless beauty of the webbed city. It was a shame most other races only saw the beauty as a deadly prison, a place to be impregnated and killed by the life growing inside. Still, it was a necessary evil.

"Red thread marks the roads we use, but only a true Symnestra can navigate them." There was no guarantee she would remember, that her time in Kalinor was even remotely recoverable. But medical science was pioneered on trial and error. One certainly could not succeed without a little error first.

[Asara Willow]

With a tilt of her head, Asara conveyed confusion at the cut sentence that had passed Dhalvasha's lips. He was going to say something more? But what? And why did he stop.

"We could do what..?" She whispered her question faintly. She didn't know if he heard her, but it wasn't in her nature to repeat herself without some serious snapping and sarcasm. Anyway, the query quickly fled her mind at his abrupt question. Without consenting, he was touching her.

Asara had to fight down the urge to wrench away and hiss in defense. The contact felt too... intimate... It was alien to her and it caused her slight, if existing, muscles to bunch up instinctively. She had to convince herself to hold his gaze, like a mouse hypnotized by a cobra. She allowed herself to calm down and sit at his gentle insistence, although she kept ready to lunge if he moved threateningly.

Slowly, a smile curled her pale lips at his question. "I remember feathers. Just... Feathers..." She had to fight just to pull up that memory. There was a deep pain she couldn't identify with the memory, something associated with it, and something feathery. Like a bird or something. As Dhalvasha also sat, Asara moved away slowly. She was getting uncomfortable here with the contact he insisted on. Some perverse thought flashed through her head that now she knew how the people she touched felt.

"You are inquisitive, aren't you? ... I remember some people. Symenestra. And hiding in a place filled with pink crystals. Is that satisfactory?" An edge had crept into her voice, but it wasn't really of anger or irritation. Her head was starting to pound in protest at what he suggested she do. While she managed to retrieve bits and pieces, every flash cost her a stabbing internal pain. The female looked down at her fingers and stretched them, looking to distract herself and ignoring the fact that he'd also drawn away.

When he began to speak again of Kalinor, Asara let her pale eyelids slide over her golden eyes. She wished she had a real memory of Kalinor, some memory of fitting in among a population of her race and their 'surrogates'. The mention of the webs stirred some faint recollection, nothing too monumental. It just sounded greatly familiar. And Dhalvasha spoke of the city with an almost loving tone.

"Do you miss it there?"

[Dhalvasha]

He pushed against her consciousness gently, lancing Djed from his eyes as he spoke to her. The trick to his work was in assuring the patient that they were in the best of hands. Was he as trained as the Hellebore progeny back in Kalinor? Unlikely. But unlike the so called master healer of their kind, Dhalvasha did not sink gross amounts of time into projects which only led to death. Poor poisoned surrogates all lining up in perpetual imprisonment. Captive in the darkness, captive in pregnancy, and then captive in death. Their life was not one to envy.

"Yes, feathers, perhaps something to do with your accident? A surface trip perhaps?" He noted the furrowing lines of pain meet in her forehead, lance her eyes shut and twist her form away from him. He let her move, curious. The nature of her trauma seemed to have deeply painful repercussions in dredging. Perhaps the nature of the injury was not simply a physical symptom of such cranial trauma but paired with an emotional trauma as well. An enigma wrapped in an enigma, all the result of a single event cleaving her past from her present and future.

Of course it wasn't gone, it was rare that memories were truly forgotten. She simply did not want to remember, or at least gave that distinct impression.

Settling away from her, maintaining the hypnotic bond between them, Dhalvasha smiled lightly and chipped a bit of dirt off from the inside of his index claw.

"An Inquisitive nature seems universal among our species," he commented wryly, "Like most spiders, the trouble we find ourselves most oft within is that which we have wandered into ourselves."

His voice echoed with traces of Djed, a powerful sedative on her 'flight' instincts should his investigation prove too personal. He noted the harsh edge to her voice, a defensive measure he didn't care to scale presently. Rupturing her personal sphere, opening a conduit of his Djed to hers, he assuaged her feelings, coaxed trust of distrust and tried to weave her emotional state to generosity rather than caution. "Yes, that memory at least proves you once strode within Kalinor, although I'm not confident it's the answer you're looking for."

He produced a book, weathered with journey and turned midway through its pages. Settling at one, he began jotting the notes to the day's discoveries, neatly titling them 'Asara, Symnestra female, young'.

"I miss Kalinor as I would miss any place quiet enough to afford me time to think, and in most of my travels I have not yet settled on a location to rival its tranquility." Glancing up from his notes, he stood and packed the book away. "What is it you remember about where you were before? Was there any sign of an attacker?"

[Asara Willow]

Asara reached a hand to rub at her forehead, kneading her own skin forcefully as though that would help her headache dissipate. She couldn't help but look again into Dhalvasha's ruby red eyes. They were strange, she decided. She couldn't figure out a better word to describe their effect. It was like he could see her mind layed out before him, but if that were true he wouldn't need to ask her questions. She had to figure this out, discover what it was that was soothing her instinct to flee. Was she growing to trust him? Or were his eyes stealing her desire to flee?

She smiled at his description of the inquisitive nature of their kind. She was hungry for information, she'd pursue it to the end if it intrigued her enough. Maybe he was the same? She had no desire to ask him at this point. At this rate, every thought she dismissed would eventually come blurting out of her over-ful skull. What a lovely image.

"I was in the Wildlands." Asara already had found this memory. She could remember waking, but this one was of the heartbreak, the agony of what had happened, of who had attacked her, before she slipped into the peaceful, dreamless darkness of the comatose. There was a voice speaking, she knew, just before she went out. But the words were a garbled mess. All she could tell was that the voice was a female or a very young male, a Common-speaker. "I remember the moment I went out, if that helps... But it is very indistinct." Her words had once again become subdued. She didn't know what to say to describe those last moments. She had already given them up, unable to collect anything from them or to extend the memory. Maybe he could get more from them than she could?

Irritating.

Asara smiled slightly at Dhalvasha and looked down at her clothing. She felt very small at this moment, small for reasons she couldn't even explain to herself. She shouldn't feel that way. Why should she? She confused herself briefly, and her gold eyes flashed up to his red ones again. She felt like a fly caught in a web now. A moth circling a flame. Both aware that they could be destroyed, but unable to fight back. How sad, the life of the insect.

"Why did you leave Kalinor, Dhalvasha? Was it to explore, to gain intelligence on the anatomy of non-Symenestra creatures?" Asara tried to turn the questions to him, in an attempt to defend herself from any too-personal question on its way. Maybe she could distract him from her plight? Most likely not. Of every being she'd met, he seemed to be the only one who knew what he wanted and how to get it. To say she envied him would be an understatement.

[Asara Willow]

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