Remembering to Breathe

[Seven Xu]

Fall 69, 511
Half-past the tenth bell

“Curious.”

Seven’s gut worked to settle a wave of dread that had prickled hot over his skin and coaxed bile to his throat. Astonishingly the wall of water he’d uncovered hadn’t burst through the aged doorframe and swallowed him whole. In fact, it looked all-together placid; like the surface of a pond in the dead of night. A hand knotted against his chest as if to calm his thumping heart, and his waxy face listed sideways to examine a hard-to-miss warning scrawled across the inside of a well-saturated door. “Please remember to breathe,” he murmured the polite notice aloud as one slender brow quirked over a set of ever-sour cardinal irises and a wan smile. “Thanks for the tip, door.”

He inhaled through his nose. Color returned to his cheeks, and he could feel the pull of earth beneath his feet again. Leather-wrapped toes curled against worn cobblestone and he shifted his weight from one hip to the other, leering into what he had come to understand was Alvadas’ only library. An anemic hand snaked forward, coaxing ripples across the wall’s glassy surface. Seven could only imagine what condition the library’s books were in—sodden and unreadable, more likely than not. His slender arm followed, blindly grasping at lukewarm depth with wriggling fingertips. In a moment of profound absentmindedness, Seven’s toe caught a low-hanging lip across the foot of the archway and he stumbled bodily into the Sunken Conundrum.

Remember to breathe. He was immersed; thick water pounded at his ears and crawled into his nostrils and when he opened his mouth to gasp, it emptied into the back of his throat and forced a violent cough. Tendrils of panic seared into his chest and split his sides. He floundered again, but this time the floor refused to rise to meet him. Suspended, expression twisted in panic, Seven’s hands fumbled with his sodden jacket, then the linen shirt beneath. He nearly ripped the buttons from their holes in an attempt to uncover the source of an itching discomfort.

When a black-tipped index finger caught beneath a fold of pallid, feathered skin above his pelvis, Seven nearly fainted. Remember to breathe! It was his burning lungs begging for air that reminded him now, and he begrudgingly wheezed in another mouthful of water, fully expecting it to be the end of him. This time he managed not to choke. After a second’s delay, a current passed harmlessly through the gashes in his skin, and his chest loosened. Seven inhaled again, and again, gulping down water and releasing it through twin sets of gills above his narrow hips.

He was inexplicably a fish. No, fish have scales. When his head cleared and he finally managed to absorb his surroundings, Seven was met with several sets of eyes swimming in perplexing judgment, annoyance, and amusement. His foolish display had attracted the attention of most in the otherwise quiet library.

“Heh.” Seven’s face did not fail to ignite his embarrassment. Gathering his jacket into his arms, he managed to push from the floor with enough momentum to drift from the spot where he had caused a scene. “S-sorry.”

[Ifran]

The Eypharian élite had made a long practice of noticing the nuances of society's flow around them without seeming to do so. Just so, Ifran of the House of the North Winds made careful not of the entrance of the slender man who must have some Symenestra blood, though his dark blue eyes never left the pages of his book except to move to another. Three hands held books open, the others moving occasionally to keep him treading water. In the strange internal environment of the library, his dark hair made a light corona about his head, his cloak billowing in the water, the artificial gills visible on his bare chest, slits between each of his ribs. He supposed he looked like one of his ancestors had fornicated with a Charoda, but most people in the Sunken Conundrum had an element of the strange to them. Cutting a stunning figure was how he earned a living, but now he was perusing the history stacks, looking for the mythology of the Alvad people, with an eye both to write new material for the theaters of his people as well as tracking down a path to Ionu and Its favor. There had been no Apparition at the Temple of Ionu, and the lore found in the books seemed coded to obfuscate rather than enlighten. He wished that Aru were there, his sounding board, to dissect each passage with his cold logic. Aru was the only one he trusted implicitly. Ifran was a desert creature, but he floated tranquilly enough in the watery habitat, quietly marveling at how the books and all were caressed by water but did not get wet. He even kept tabs on the gawky Symenestra boy. One never knew what lay beneath the packaging in Alvadas.

[Seven Xu]

Seven had never been an adept swimmer; a short life lived on high airy peaks gave him little reason to learn. Fortunately, he was clever, and after the panic of potentially drowning had subsided, he found use of both arms to propel him through colonies of stacked and organized books. Without end, a set of fingers would fumble along one or two feathered gashes, forcing Seven’s face to take on a constant perplexed twist. By the time he loosed it, his cheeks and the corners of his mouth ached.

He knew what he was searching for, though where exactly he’d find it was starting to beg a louder question. Fingers tripped across a row of leather-bound tomes of varying thickness and dialect. Whether it was another trick of illusion, or whether Alvadas’ streets and his dreams were trying to point him towards something, Seven had taken on a recent interest in rumors regarding shadows; or rather, their sentience. The halfblood clambered weightlessly up a column of books, loosening one waterlogged tome labeled simply across its spine in silver ink: Akajia.

Akajia was no stranger to the youth; her name was mentioned in the same breath as Zintila in countless songs from his homeland. She was the canvas the Alvina painted upon; the secretive darkness that Syna broke through every morning; the impenetrable shadows that had once swarmed the streets in a suffocating tide while he was lost and wandering. Seven let himself drift; forgetting to tread water in a body that held no current sent him on a slow journey back to the floor.

He bumped shoulders with an unseen stranger. Swallowing a drowned gasp, he turned to offer a mumbled apology, but a familiar and unmistakable outline made him blurt out a quizzical, “Rhode?”

[Ifran]

As the slender slip of a girly boy swam through the stacks of divine lore, Ifran noted his selection, and paid him only a little heed, otherwise poring over the pages of his own books. All it took was one moment's inattention -- a failing for which his old master would have beat him -- to collide with the shadow seeker. Of course, it was probably not Ifran's fault at all. And yet, all the same, he was no longer in Ahnatep where a stranger would abase himself before the blood of the House of the North Winds. "Pardon," he said, his voice strong, deep, and resonant. There was a pause, a slight cock of the head, and then he shook it briefly. "I am not he. Ifran, I am. And you would have better luck chasing the Lady of Shadow to Riverfall. The blue men worship her as a mother alongside Wysar." That said, the pale creature would like as not be mistaken for a girl by the blue men and used for procreative purposes. If the blue man were drunk enough, he might not notice his mistake for a while. The idea made his lips curl up at the corners. "And you are?" he prompted.

[Seven Xu]

Ifran. Seven mouthed the name as if to commit it to memory, a warm pink tide swarming the thin column of his neck. His eyes narrowed apologetically. “I’m sorry. You look like someone I know.” Or knew? Gods be kind, he had no idea what became of the haughty Eypharian that exited his life as abruptly as he’d come. A critical garnet stare pored over this Ifran for a moment, before he tucked the book to his chest and extended a hand, hoping to catch one of six in a friendly gesture he’d adopted over the warmer months in Syliras. “I’m Seven.”

A perplexing comment and a candid smirk forced Seven’s attention back to the tome huddled in the crook of his elbow. “Oh, I, uhm,” he stammered for a response—but frankly, he had no idea where Riverfall was, or what the significance of these blue men were. “I suppose I would have better luck in River… fall,” is it far? “But being as I am currently in Alvadas, a city with a functioning library, I will make due.”

A question itched his tongue. Instead of parting ways, as many would have after a brief exchange of words, Seven lingered. “What do you know of her?” His brows looked to be attempting to meet as his face took on a perplexing twist. “Akajia. You say blue men worship her; what else?” He knew little. She was the goddess of night, or shadows, of secrets; she was painted as an alluring woman, as deep blue as the night’s sky, often with a crown of Zintila’s stars, on frescoes in Lhavit. As with anything he fixed his attentions on, he wanted to know it all. Seven’s crimson stare darted from book to book in Ifran’s hands, before settling on a scrutinizing set of blues.

[Ifran]

"Ah," was all he said by way of acknowledging this supposed similarity. He could only assume this Seven -- and there had been a moment of confusion that would not show upon his face as he gathered that Seven was a name rather than an age -- had known some devastatingly handsome Eypharian traveler, for he was far too pale to have come from the sun-blasted sands of Eyktol. "Well met, Master Seven." Whether he actually went to Riverfall did not matter to this scion of the House of the North Winds; he had offered small counsel, and would leave the action to the young man himself. He considered for a moment, recounting line after line, stanza after stanza, of poetry written in her honor for the stages of Ahnatep. Translating them into Common made him want to cringe, so he tried to cull the basics for this one. "She is the knife in the dark, the whisper in the shadows. She is the darkness, but she is not necessarily evil. Beloved of Wysar, mother of the Akalak. She teaches her chosen to speak in the language of the shadows, Makath. Her sigils are the dark triangle, often blue, and the new moon."

[Seven Xu]

The book was palmed again and fluttered open as the Eypharian recited his knowledge on the goddess of secrets. Seven feigned apathy; a self-important intellectual as he was, it was difficult to allow the budding look of excitement to draw across his features. He kept his honest reds fixed on a wealth of pages wrapped in soggy leather. How long had he thought of this dark woman, dreamed of her shadows and basked in the dim of her night? So many had made pilgrimage to Alvadas seeking Ionu; Seven had come blindly and without purpose other than accompaniment, only to let his curiosities slip over to the divine. But, it was not Ionu that interested him; even if it had been His will* that drove Seven to the shadows in the first place.

“Brilliant,” Seven’s pale fingers traced the outline of a triangle, inked in blue, so large it spanned two pages and dove into the book’s spine. “Strange, when you think, that those chosen by Ionu are gifted an inverted triangle.” Victor had told him that, once—or painted it on his wall, he could not remember. Another dismissive laugh heralded the turn of a page. “I apologize for getting so introspective on you, Ifran, I’m not usually one to really care.”

That was a lie. He was constantly troubled by catching Ionu’s attention with his attempts in discovering a pattern in His City of Illusions; he wandered streets aimlessly by night, avoiding the judgment of a rotting face that haunted his dreams and starving his curiosities. There had been shadows, once, but they were an illusion of the city—they had to be. “Makath,” he repeated, “is it written somewhere? The language, that is.” He began to thumb through the old book’s pages. “I should like to see it.” Finally, two rubies lifted and settled their stony gaze on the statuesque Eypharian, “Shadow language; so they speak? They are alive?”

*Just an FYI because I haven’t outright said it; Seven’s often encumbered by black specters or shadows in his attempts to map out Alvadas for the Scholarly Abode. It’s a frequent illusion he suffers, and in an unconscious attempt to fill a hole in a city so centered around a god, he’s mistaken it for some divine calling.

[Ifran]

Ifran studied the young half-breed with a quiet intensity, as if he might be asked to be him within an ever shrinking amount of time. The study of people was a part of his art, though, and the weak-willed either looked or ran away. The brave ones stayed. Seven was trying to bullshit the professional bullshitter now, and Ifran saw right through his act, though he did not let on. It was better to let people keep their illusions, especially in Ionu's city. "Strange? Perhaps. I imagine there are more connections in and between the pantheon than we imagine. Certainly there are celestial lovers, lines of descent, and the like. My own people come from the blood of a river god who has retreated to the Ukalas when the Valterrian dried up his bed." He cocked his head slightly. "I do not know that any have dared codify the language of the shadows. Certainly, they are alive from the perspective of a night stalker, but you would have to meet one and be taken into their confidence to know the details."

[Seven Xu]

Celestial lovers. Lines of descent. Of course there were. Seven dropped his gaze, inwardly cursing his candid inability to carry on proper conversation. “I don’t suppose you would know where I could find one of those, a shadowspeaker, would you?” That was a stupid question to ask an Alvad. He exhaled in a halting snort; an entirely novel gesture, considering the slits in his abdomen that he’d begun to mull over with an absent and free digit. “Never mind.”

Silence blanketed a library that would surely be coated in a thick layer of pale grey dust if it weren’t submerged in an impossible lake. A vacuous red stare drifted past the chiseled Eypharian shape to examine a length of narrow corridors beneath a soaring ceiling. Here and there, a hearth was set deep in a dreary stone wall, though not one of them was at work. Flickering orange moths seemed to flutter above their heads, lanterns lit by something he could only imagine was as incongruous as the rest of the building.

An unseen current tugged at a crop of alabaster and coaxed Seven from the inky depths of his own mind. The halfblood dipped his chin and offered Ifran a tremulous smile, wondering if the vacancy in his face during a long pause in their exchange had been at all noted. Should he linger? It seemed inappropriate to invade a man’s privacy, interrogate him, and leave, though Seven often balked in the face of prolonged conversations with a stranger. “Sorry. I’ve not been getting much sleep. Am I keeping you from your books?”

[Ifran]

"Wysar is the lord of Riverfall, and Akajia his mistress. The logical search without any other clues would begin there." The repetition seemed to gain little ground in the strange man's mind, and his gaze went elsewhere for a while. Ifran watched his introspection for a time, then went back to his books. When Seven returned to the here and now, he shrugged off the apology. If he wanted to read more than to converse, he would have ignored the strange one. "No," he said, following up on the bodily dismissal, and, "If I wanted privacy, I would find an empty carrel or reading room." He paused. "I do not suppose that you have an inside track of the patron of Alvadas?" he asked. "I seek Ionu among other things, but Ionu seems distracted."