Shenanigans [Victor]

by **Seven Xu** on October 29th, 2011, 2:18 pm

The pocketed hand surrendered to a light tug on his sleeve and ash white tangled with the olive hue of imploring fingers. Seven wasn’t so sure that Alvadas was what mattered, let alone the centre of the world, but Victor had a habit of recycling words beyond their definitions until even he knew not what they meant; his introverted fool was always lead wholly into that game of semantics before he could even realize it. The Ravokian was smarter than he appeared; not that he was particularly stupid—no—just reckless; contagiously so.

Seven’s brow raised above fiery rubies, catching a mussed line of bangs, “A lake; so that’s what that blue behemoth on my wall was.” He half-smirked, elbowing his companion to punctuate the playful jape at the expense of his artistic skill. It was unfair; he’d finally coaxed the tale of that city beyond the Wildlands from Victor, only to be disappointed in his sour recount. Sober logic was not accustomed to the socialite’s oft-laughing mouth. At least the sentiment was short-lived. At least he’d learned something—if not biased. That’s what mattered, right?

He may have scowled himself, had he not already broken away from the hand to take lead, forcing mirth to scare off what unsettling thoughts plagued his mind and flattened his countenance. Seven pushed himself into a jog. There was more to see, and more to learn. He huffed through his nose and his knees complained of an incline that he hadn’t initially noticed; the dried mud beneath his feet had turned into a blanket of smooth stones, loose in places. Seven nearly tripped and sent a polished rock rolling down the edifice he’d unwittingly climbed.

The green walls hadn’t lost their looming height in his ascent.

Seven turned bodily, shielding his eyes from the emerging sun with a line of fingers. “Hey, Lark,” Victor seemed to hate it when Seven addressed him by his surname—uncongenial, it lacked the compassion that the first two syllables of his name often accompanied—but it was satisfying on his tongue, like some obscene curse, and he grinned, “They say Ionu can take on any shape, right? Male, female, animal—objects? How are you going to find him, or her, or it? I mean, you do want to find Ionu, right?”

by **Victor Lark** on October 30th, 2011, 9:42 pm

Victor chuckled half-heartedly, leaning into the ascent so that his fingertips brushed the rocks before his feet found purchase. As much as he had lauded his family’s accomplishments, hearing their name on the tongue of another made him remember why he disliked the word: A hollow knot fell from his throat to his stomach and made his mind wander to every vain discomfort and idle frustration of his well-to-do childhood. Victor frowned before he caught pace with Seven, but when he looked at him again, he was smiling.

“No,” he answered. There was no question. “You don’t find Ionu.” He finds you. Victor had thought long about the very thing Seven proposed, and had since concluded that there was no use in trying too hard. He embraced the illusions he encountered and created those which suited him; he knew there was a temple around somewhere and he would seek it out eventually. If that unseeable god turned out to be yet another of the city’s silly tricks, he could convince anyone that he had not been the fool who believed it. With the risk of revealing any real passion looming over the front of his mind, Victor punctuated the assertion with a wary wink.

A burst of energy pulled him in front of Seven, granting Victor the temporary lead in their endless race. The height of the incline was nearing, and he was certain there would be something remarkable on the other side. The path began to widen until it cambered out on both sides into a wide fork. The hedges around them flailed artfully in either direction, offering two different curling and meandering paths instead of the sharp corners of their journey previous. But at the very end of the tiny clearing, a gap in the hedge invited Victor to forego them both and continue forward. Just beyond the gap, the stony hill fell into a hard ridge, nearly a ten foot drop, to more stones and more paths. Despite the height they had reached, the hedges persisted in denying them any view outside of their immediate surroundings, their present choices.

Victor’s heart pounded swiftly against the cold ache in his lungs. Opting to sit at the summit, he threw his legs over the edge of the short cliff and slouched at the garden. He did not look up, only assumed that Seven would join him. “What do you want to find here?” The inquiry bordered on defensive. “Would you seek Ionu out, or are you content to garner her attention by irritating him with maps?”

by **Seven Xu** on November 1st, 2011, 1:39 am

A chorus of gravel sang down the shallow cliff beneath Seven’s feet as he stooped to a crouch at Victor’s side. “I’m not looking for Ionu either,” he remarked with a sigh, the low exhale attempting to calm his thumping chest and mask his exertion. Failing in his endeavor, Seven released a breathy laugh, eyes rolling sideways to catch a flash of mercury. “And I doubt He gives two shits about my maps.”

It sounded almost like a challenge.

Below them lay four distinct passages: one narrow and muck-covered as if an early fall rain had passed through it, another as pockmarked by cobblestone as their current, and two more that looked to impossibly turn into each other before being obscured by lush greenery. The sun had dipped behind another heavy cloud. A pair of birds buzzed above them in formation, mocking the unfortunate earthbound pair with a warbling duet. More stones pattered down the incline as Seven relinquished his akimbo squat in favor of sitting. His hands pressed together and he began to brush away small stones that clung to his palms, finding reason to tear his eyes away from that disparaging grin.

Seven tested the resolve of the cliff face with the soles of his boots. “I’ve never been a pious man. I respect them—the gods—and, I mean, I’ve seen Zintila my entire life, at festivals, painted on walls, written into songs. I’ve read the Viratassa and I do not disagree with Viratas’ teachings; but I’m not about to bend the knee and pray my life away.” He laughed again, and clapped Victor on the shoulder. “Maybe I just haven’t found the right path.” It went unsaid, but he was sure the aforementioned path did not lead to Ionu.

The hand slid away as Seven took the plunge down a cliff face that nearly doubled his height. He underestimated the fall; a surprised gasp punctuated his landing and he stumbled over himself. A pair of skinny arms shot forward to break his fall and he skidded to a stop. “Shit,” he exhaled, wobbling to his feet again and inspecting his palms; they bore fresh strokes of wet scarlet muddled with the offending pebbles that scraped wan skin open. “Let’s keep going.” Seven’s voice rose with a hint of pained annoyance, and he wiped streaks of blood on his pant legs. “I don’t want to still be here after dark.”

by **Victor Lark** on November 15th, 2011, 7:38 pm

“We probably will be,” Victor answered through a smirk. He tipped carefully forward, gripping the edge with his hands as his feet found and clung to solid notches on the rock face. Without pause he dropped down after Seven, but his legs found an easier time perceiving the depth of the fall; they bent for an instant, then he fell forward and rolled swiftly over one shoulder. He was brushing the gravel from his back even as he rose to standing, stealing a vain glance at his friend before he regarded the paths available. “But what of it? You’re not afraid of the dark!” He gave an encouraging slap to Seven’s shoulder blade, stepping in the direction of the rockiest path. “I’d bet the Garden is even more fun, at night.”

He was laughing as he took the lead again, skipping rapidly ahead when another turn presented itself, dawning between the rustle of hard leaves. He had assumed Seven would follow his lead and keep moving despite the fatigue in his heart and cold burn in his lungs. But before he heard his pursuit, another noise flourished up behind him, the chilling echo of a too-familiar event. Victor stopped, hesitated, and turned around.

The last of the conquering green rolled into itself at the impossible height of the maze’s latest hedge wall. It starved Victor’s hungry eyes of the path from which he had only just come, and definitively divided the inseparable pair. “Seven,” he declared, reeling for the wall as if he could walk through it. His hand dove between the branches; he managed to part them up to the elbow before he used his other to pry them apart, snap them out of the way, create even the slightest crawlspace. “Seven!” He repeated with more earnest, hoping that the noise of his effort would explain what his tongue could not.

For every leaf he pulled, for every branch he broke, two more grew in their place, weaving around his arms and prodding at his fingers. Victor did not care. If the hedge devoured him as he moved through it, he would be that much closer to the other side. But then the groping appendages were tightening around and pushinh back at him. He was suddenly flung away from the wall and off of his feet, and for a moment he felt nothing but air.

As soon as he collided inelegantly with the hard ground, he was scrambling up again. He veered towards the newly created path on his right, calling out breathlessly, “Go left; find a path that goes in. We’ll go around and meet on the other side.” Jumping through the turn, he pushed a laugh through his desperate throat as he disclosed his changing location with another “Seven!”

by **Seven Xu** on December 15th, 2011, 4:02 am

“Calm down,” Seven shouted through the impassable verdant cluster of leaves, thorns, and stubborn branches. “And be still.”

Still. His mouth tipped into a sour frown as he mouthed the word a second time, raising a pair of hands to give the persistent wall a futile push. Tangled branches brandished their sharp green leaves, tossing a few at his feet. Seven heard the scrabble of rocks beneath panicked feet, and felt frustration turn to dread in the pit of his gut. He tongued his upper lip, walked his fingers across a length of coiled vine and limb, and wrestled uneasy vacillation from his voice. “The wall will go away. I mean, it has to, eventually. The entire thing moves. If we keep running around, we’re only going to get further apart.”

The maze nearly starved Seven of muffled laughter, and he could only guess at the knotted mien that had produced it. Victor had a habit of making the most peculiar faces, paired with what came from a sometimes brutally honest mouth. Honest with Seven, at least; on many occasions he’d watched the Ravokian spin a tale as easily from thin air as if it had happened in truth. More often than not, it was to their benefit, and the demure halfblood—who himself was clumsy in the game of deceit—had no reason to complain. He followed the wall another arm’s length to his left, watching mismatched fingertips trip across the object of their mutual aggravation.

It took a few more adroit steps for Seven to close the distance Victor had made in his short attempt to best the maze with a running start. A smile broke across his waxen mouth when the stubborn wall exchanged its silence for an unmistakable breathy pant. “Vic,” he tore away a handful of leaves, and the labyrinth dutifully replenished its coat, “you’re right. I’m not afraid of the dark, and the Garden probably is more fun at night. What’s the rush?” An unspoken plea wrenched its way between Seven’s carefully chosen words; had Victor decided to pursue an exit, or some junction that would reunite them, they could lose each other for days. Nightfall was of little concern to him, that much was true, but the fun had been sapped from their excursion. Uncertainty flared around narrow channels of jeweled red. Seven sank to his knees, before turning over and sitting with a back propped against the Garden’s mulish face.

“I will teach you something.” To another fluent in the Symenos tongue, Seven’s attempt was crude, tainted by a dialect far more direct and halting than seduction’s incarnate in language, whispered underground on the other side of an impossible mountain range. To Victor, the collection of words were likely as captivating as the venomous mouth that spoke them. “I’ll teach you something,” he repeated again in the Common tongue, lilted with a growing smile. His head slanted over his shoulder, as if he could see the man on the other side. A hand smoothed over a patch of dry dirt and displaced stone. “But only if you’re calm.”

by **Victor Lark** on December 25th, 2011, 6:14 pm

Victor stopped, and so did the whisper of his shoes against the stone beneath them. He did not want to admit that Seven was right about keeping still, because he thought Seven was wrong about the state of his bird’s temper. He had been trying to come up with a solution. The presumption in the command aggravated him, but it did not occur to him to show as much to no one. He turned to the hedge, and the man beyond it. His hands were fists, but his voice was smooth.

“I’m calm.”

Then he sat, slumping noisily against the prickly wall that separated them. He folded his arms and perched his elbows on his knees, peering at the greenness opposite. It was all identical; he thought that amusing at first, but it had become mostly irritating. Everything had. He was irritable, and knowing as much irritated him more. He should have been afraid: afraid to be lost, to lose his dearest friend, to be killed by angry tree roots. There should have been a lump in his throat or an emptiness in his gut, the way people described. Instead, he was irritated.

There was a hard, thin branch protruding from the hedge wall beside him. With a lurching rustle, the persistent plant shuddered between them and Victor tore the thing from its place. As he inspected its shape and strength, Seven’s voice echoed between his ears, words he did not recognize in full, but sounds that reminded him of falling. His curiosity stirred like a tiny candle flame in a heavy darkness, burdened by extra thoughts. “Tell me what you said, then. Teach me what you said.” He paused, trying to remember the syllables, but he could not recall enough even to repeat them wrong. “Is that how they talk in Lhavit?”

He pulled the stick close and it hooked against his navel, between his shirt. If fear was an emptiness, maybe there was just too much stuff in him... he dismissed the thought before he had finished thinking it, rolling his eyes at himself. Instead, he stared up at Ionu’s blasted hedge. If anyone could scare him, it was Ionu.

“I dare you,” he muttered, to no one in particular. Then he threw his toy at the wall, a mockery of an offering.

by **Seven Xu** on December 30th, 2011, 1:15 pm

“They speak Common in Lhavit,” Seven snapped, copper virulence lashing through his words and drowning out Victor’s sardonic proposal.

The last time he’d tried the Widow’s tongue in the presence of another on the peaks of Kalea, he’d been met with a swift backhand and a string of insults that boiled down to bastard. He swallowed, traced a line of teeth with his lip, and tipped his chin so that his head rested against the rustling barricade and he could stare vacantly at a darkening sky. Dusk had imposed its banded clouds of pinks and yellows against a low-hanging sun, shadows grew long, lean, and dark, and the wind carried night’s chill.

The venom in his voice was exhaled in a long sigh, and when he spoke again, there was an unspoken lilt of apology on his accented tongue. “I learned Symenos from a book; the Viratassa. You know, the red one with the letters you can’t read.” For a man that found little solace in faith, it was odd he carted the book across the sea and back—a reference to a language that no one dared speak too loudly; however, knowing a gathering of hymnals front to back do little for one’s conversational skills. A grin spread over Seven’s face, and he shrugged a gathering of withered foliage from his shoulder. “It was written by the god of krevas. Blood.”

He then tongued a longer prayer, one that was scrawled across the pages of his thin scarlet devotional more than once: “Moz seh krevas dav’ene obris zhevat. Mos-say-cray-vahs …” again, slowly, hoping that his human would catch on, waiting for the inevitable butchering of Widow-tongue, “… dav aynay, obrees, zay vat.”

A raven winged a lazy circle above them. Seven’s bony knuckles reached blindly for a fresh handful of green, but the labyrinth had tired of fingers picking apart its coat and shied away from the halfblood’s touch. Two sets of shoulders knocked together and Seven’s hand managed a stygian mass of thick hair. “Warm,” his murmured comment was chewed over, revisited, and ended in a gasp of astonishment. “Vic!”

by **Victor Lark** on January 7th, 2012, 7:52 pm

“Krevas,” Victor echoed instantly. Despite his efforts at imbuing the word with high Ravokian elegance, he tore the consonants from their creeping cadence and bit down on the word like it was a piece of steak. He wondered who this God of Blood was, what he looked like, but could not imagine it. He dug a soft nail into his thumb, as if it would somehow break his skin and show him the meaning of the word. A pale spot was his only reward, flaring briefly under pressure and filing with the color of life as soon as it was released. “Krevas,” he repeated.

They went on slowly, patient and lazy, as the beauty of dusk burst and faded and turned to heavy blackness. Blood, he learned, and Life, as the stars flickered between red and green and the brightest blue. The early evening was wasted on a few more phrases and prepositions, none of which Victor’s agitated mind allowed him to retain. But his tutor persevered; as the stars exchanged places in the sky like a thousand dancing comets, Me and He and You were thrown on the heap of knowledge at the front of his mind, alongside Teach and Learn and Know and so many others. Long before he grew bored of the improvised lesson, he managed to tame his tongue to the delicate inflections of at least a Lhavitian’s voice, however odd it felt. The game of learning, inside of the game of distraction, stirred in him a greater appetite for the language than even he had anticipated. The djed of his effort shrouded his throat, made him crave and copy Seven’s voice. In the morning, he would excuse it for his desire to be close to his friend where it was otherwise impossible; he would not be able to reproduce the talent.

Perhaps it was because the froth of Symenos still floated in his ears that Victor thought to mumble a few words in Common, glancing up to the faint rainbow of stars above him. “Soon,” he prayed absently to Ionu. “Or eventually—”

Then he was interrupted by a strange sensation on the top of his head. He started, only to be greeted by that too-familiar voice, suddenly clearer without the hedge to stifle it. Victor fell into a turn and he crouched inside of their new threshold. “Seven!” He replied with a laugh, scrambling into the opposite lane just in case the wall decided to close again. He coughed heavily mid-stride and lost his balance to the hard dirt; instead of rising again, he stole Seven’s wrist and pulled him down beside him. Victor released his fool just enough to warm his hands on a mane of white hair, murmuring in a harsh Symenos that did not match the evening’s progress. “Hello!”

He kissed him again, eating whatever words he might have otherwise spoken with lips that hungered for venom as much as validation. When he broke away it was only barely; the undulating darkness made the world seem more private, whatever the Ravokian believed about Ionu’s eyes. His own flew toward his brow in a mockery of contemplation as he tried in vain to think of the words in this new language, but they would not come. “Seems we’ll have to stay the night,” he chuckled, squirming where he lay. “Which way shall we go?”

by **Seven Xu** on January 8th, 2012, 11:18 pm

An afternoon’s collection of falls and scrapes had caught up to the halfblood, in his respite; when Victor’s cloying fingers introduced him to the dried and pebbled earth again, his shoulders protested, marred lines on fleshy palms ached anew, oozed beneath drying scabs. A pained groan was stifled by a mouth’s unspoken demand, and again he obliged, and a tart burn left another layer on a carefully fashioned brand.

“Go?” Laughter tickled a nearby ear and offered the warmth of stale breath that lingered in a collection of swarthy tresses; cool night swept in, stole it away, leaving gooseflesh in its place. Seven’s hand rose to the offense, as if he could smooth down olive skin with the tips of his fingers, but soon retreated to stifle a yawn.

Rolling onto his back, he ignored the cry of stiffened muscles between his shoulders as an arm bent and served as a pillow between a head of white and the rutted ground. In the crush of velvet darkness, above the smell of dying leaves and distant salt air, Ionu painted a tapestry of night unlike any Seven had seen before in a life lived among the stars themselves. “You were talking to Him.” He sucked in his bottom lip, fingered a growing mound on the back of his head that was loathe to being touched; but he did not turn to leer, or speak to accuse. A cloud stole the moon’s hoary glow, became a great nebulous mask. It stared down at two men, content in being hapless victims of a shifting labyrinth.

Seven’s lips hung open for a time, poised to question, or tease, as was hinted by the curl of one side of his lip; but after a few heartbeats, closed.

“We’ll sleep here, tonight, find our way in the morning.” A sigh, “Provided we aren’t rained on, or snowed on, or fall victim to the stars themselves dropping from the sky onto our heads, we should—” Seven paused. The body that warmed his side had stilled, content to nestle a black mound of hair beneath the halfblood’s arm and commit to slow, rhythmic breaths. He swallowed the thought, dipped his chin, and murmured a belated good night in the Ravokian’s newly acquired tongue.

Where blankets failed, a set of lanky fingers attempted to compensate. Djed’s weave of violet shimmered across his fingertips, painted lines down his bird’s nearest arm; it promised relief from a chilly night, but the saccharine whispers of sleep caught the fledgling mage before his task could finish.

It would be long gone by the time the sun pulled them from their dreams.

by **Mirage** on January 20th, 2012, 6:26 am

The Truth Within the Reality

Seven Xu :

Victor Lark :

The Truth Hidden by a Mirage :