True Colors (Lillis & Sam)

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

32nd Spring, 510 A.V.

Intimidation was not a skill innate to Sam, but he understood enough of human nature from understanding horse nature that he knew to dismount before approaching the gate guards. While he was whipcord thin and dressed in a patched and worn hodgepodge of homespun and the like, he had managed to hit his growth spurt and was now rather tall. Adding Horse's sixteen hands to matters could only put the guards in a more defensive mood, and Sam never wanted trouble. The last time he had, Nel's bastard of a friend Doc had stolen his purse.

So he was walking on his own two feet when he noticed the fortune-teller's stall, Horse walking along with him without the need of a hand on the reins. He did have the big brute trained within an inch of his life.

Following a hunch, because he fully expected the gods to send him invisible nudges like that from time to time, he walked over to take a closer look, both at the stall and the woman, who appeared to be reading someone's fortune somehow. Sam wasn't sure he wanted to know his future, nor to open his palm that someone might read his past. It was a bloody, fear-soaked history that he was much happier ignoring, but of late he had been troubled by dreams that he only half remembered.

Something was coming.

When he approached, he tried to look like he wasn't listening to the reading.

[Lillis]

The fortune teller's stall, as it was, boasted a little table covered in pale violet silk (a little worse for the wear around the edges) and two stools, upon which sat Lillis and her most recent client, a young girl of about 20 or so with her thick, ash-colored hair worn long and covering her face. Atop the silk lay a few stones that, to anyone with any brains in their head whatsoever, would look to be what they were: polished rock that held no more divination power than a sack of flour. Nevertheless, Lillis picked up these stones in her hand and dropped them again on the tabletop, studying the pattern in which they fell.

"Mm," she murmured quietly, as the girl looked eagerly on. "That's interesting."

"What? What's interesting?" The girl leaned forward and tucked her hair behind her ear, revealing the remnants of some very severe scarring on one side of her face. Where she had once been lovely, she was now pink and raw, disfigured. Lillis did not so much as flinch.

"You had a question you wanted to ask?" Lillis probed, eying the girl with remote curiosity. "Ask it now."

"All right." The girl cleared her throat, letting her good eye come to a close. "Will he come back to me?"

It was enough to rend the heart. Heaving a sigh, Lillis tore her gaze away from the stones and it was then that she caught the boy glancing her way. Storm-sky eyes lingered on him for the length of a heartbeat before returning her attention to her client.

"You've... suffered greatly," Lillis said, and the girl nodded. "This accident -- work-related, was it?" Another nod from her client. "You're a... maid, of some kind..."

"A cook at the Inn," she said, enraptured.

"Yes, and your..." a quick glance to the hands of her client, wringing but empty, "your lover has gone."

"Yes."

Heaving a sigh, Lillis swiped the stones back into her small fists and cast them out again, cerise lips tightly pursed. "He will come back."

"Oh, will he really?" One side of the girl's mouth curled up in what must have once been a beautiful smile.

"Yes -- well, the stones are telling me that he's... being detained somewhere. He's trying to get back, but he will come. He will."

"Oh, thank you," the girl said, and reached out to clasp Lillis' hands -- but she recoiled quickly and gave a shake of her head.

"I didn't do anything. It was... it's just..." she gestured down to the stones, as though to indicate that it was fate who foretold the future, and she was but an interpreter. Never had she felt more like a fraud.

The girl dropped her coins onto the table and stood up, brushing past Samael as she went. Lillis glanced up at Sam for a moment, before returning her attention to the coins on the table in front of her. She hesitated for only a moment before plucking them up and putting them in her purse.

Scoffing, she lifted those large, round eyes to Samael once more: "Care for a reading?"

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

Sam was startled by her question, as if he had been reading a book and suddenly it asked him for a ham sandwich. He considered, then, curious, nodded to her and sat down at the chair opposite her. A quick glance skittered after her previous client, then back to her. His simple, brown eyes peered into hers, which might have been limpid if they weren't so guarded. There were secrets he didn't want to share, but he had doubts she could ferret them out.

He looked at her questioningly. He had a plan.

[Lillis]

She smiled warmly at him as he took a seat opposite her -- a little appraising of his look told her that a handful of rocks wouldn't suffice for such a discerning customer. She tucked the polished stones away and laid her hands plainly, openly on the table in front of her, interlacing her fingers and leaning forward.

"Parlor tricks," she said by way of explanation, "and I'm not even very good."

She studied him carefully for a moment -- she looked the part of Konti as much as he looked the part of Drykas, and just as his mark was hidden by a leather cuff, so was hers by the sleeve of her deep, purple gown. Nevertheless, the gnosis mark was there, resting on a bed of scar tissue, and it meant that she could, in fact, tell him his future.

Well. At least part of it.

"So, what'll it be, then? Tea leaves, tarot cards, palms? Reading's free if you choose the rocks -- I could use the practice."

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

"That's a good discount," he said. "I'll choose the rocks, then."

He recalled then a time when the world was still good. Sitting at Nana's feet while she taught his sister about time. Her eyes were white, covered over with cataracts. She couldn't see anymore, but she said that just helped her see what was important; got rid of all the day-to-day nonsense. Nana was so old, the Ankal's mother. That meant she was wise. Her hair was white too, and her hands were crabbed with veins and rheumatism.

Nana said people either used tools to focus their intuition or to charm the gullible.

He wasn't sure yet to which category this woman belonged.

[Lillis]

With the arch of one slender shoulder, she poured the stones back into her fist and gave a short nod of her head. "All right," she said, and spilled them out across the table.

Typically speaking, a person would focus so much of their attention on the stones that they would not notice her stealing glances at their person -- what kind of clothes they wore, jewelry, if they had callouses on their hands and dirt around their fingernails, if they appeared tired, if their eyes were red from weeping. Even individuals who professed themselves to be "guarded" had subconscious, tell-tale signs of their lives, what they were. This boy, for example -- although, she was forced to admit, his expression betrayed nothing -- smelled faintly of horses.

"What would you like to know?" she asked, saucer-wide eyes focused intently on his face. "Ask yourself the question twice before you ask me, to make sure you really want to know it."

She had been content to lie to her last client, the poor wretch. But there was something about this boy that inspired an irritating inclination toward utter honesty in Lillis. Perhaps she recognized in him something that was mirrored in herself, some past he worked to keep hidden, just like she did. She offered an encouraging smile, focusing her attention back to the stones. She could rattle off some benign details for him, if he preferred parlor tricks. Parlor tricks were surely the safer bet. But curiosity had already gotten the better of her, and she resisted the urge to reach out and touch his hand.

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

Sam considered her request, trying to recall if his inclination to linger had carried with it any one question. The ultimate question of his life for the past ten years had been survival. There had been points, of course, where he reconsidered whether survival was really all it was cracked up to be, but for some reason, be it fate, instinct, or some thing other, he had always erred on the side of life.

Life had taken him far from home. The Ankal had taken them out of Cyphrus. The slavers had taken him all the way to Sunberth. His own travels had taken him around the North, and now he was here, in Syliras, closer to Cyphrus than he had been since he was a seven year old man. Now he was seventeen and felt less a man than he ever had, even though he had managed through wit, luck, and the grace of Kelwyn of the lost causes, to last against the odds, he was finally starting to wonder what for?

Few were the Drykas elders who would have singled him out for future existential crises, but they were gone and he lived yet, whatever that meant.

Where am I going? he asked himself before he realized that he was complying with the woman's wishes. Then again, Where am I going?

There was a quiver within him, like a chord being strummed on lute strings. Resonance. Oscillation. Vacillation. Perhaps he was still part of the great Drykas web.

"Where am I going?" he asked, and if he gave little away, there was the faintest tremor in his voice that resonated with the need of her last client. The stupid one. Well, perhaps he was stupid too. Or maybe this woman would tap into something, on purpose or by accident.

"Where am I going?" he asked again, his voice firmer, his eyes curious.

[Lillis]

She looked at him, looked down at the rune stones, and answered simply and honestly: "Home."

Lillis focused her attention on the runes and turned them all face-up. "Home," she said again. "Home..." She lifted those stone-gray eyes and focused them on him, "but not necessarily back." Lacking the finite skills in runecasting that were needed to further interpret his reading, she focused on his face and began to read the colors that swirled naturally around him and, indeed, all of the creatures on earth. Grey's and black's were overlaid in places -- to be expected for someone who spent so much time hiding their nature and protecting themselves. But there were bright spots of red, a fierce lifeforce, and the yellow of optimism and happiness. But the aura was bruised and murky, difficult to read.

"You have a lot of forgiving to do," she ventured carefully, "Many unresolved karmic issues that are holding you back. You'd do well to remember that going through things alone does not prove that you are a man, it just makes you go through things alone." She poked idly at one of the runes, brow furrowed as she tried to properly interpret it's placement. Another glance up at his aura. "You are very young, and not so terribly far from home...?" She was unsure of this. "That is to say, you are not physically far from your place of origin." Lillis pursed her lips. "There is no purple whatsoever," she muttered, perhaps giving away that she was relying on her auristics to pick up the slack where her runecasting left off. "No mother, or maternal figure. And you seem to need one, badly, if only to prove to you that it's all right to be taken care of from time to time."

She swept the runes deftly off the table and tucked them away. "Home," she said again. "When you can go home, you will go home. Or find that you are there already. But this life, this one now? It will not always be thus. You will do more than just survive."

[Sama'el Sunsinger]

He tried hard not to react to her words, to let them drop into him and interpret the ripples for himself. Home, that was a place he didn't know anymore. The pavilion was gone, physically and with regard to blood and flesh. Who did he know in the other pavilions who would recognize him? Endrykas? For what purpose? To be adopted by some other pavilion and seen as a charity case?

His mother was dead; his family was dead. All he had now was Horse, his equine brother. Home is where the heart is, and his was mobile, but she was right about one thing, he was physically closer to his place of origin than ever since he left.

Still, despite the welter of thoughts and emotions her reading brought up, he wanted to say she had some kind of a gift.

"Where did you learn to throw the runes?" he asked after a while. She had looked at him more than at her rocks once she gave them her initial once-over. He didn't know a lot about these things, but it seemed to indicate that the runes weren't really the source of her Sight.

[Lillis]

A slender shoulder rose and fell in a shrug: "Picked them up from watching others," she said, which was basically a non-answer. While she could make a rudimentary analysis of the runes, they were, in essence, simply a ruse, something for the client to look at while she read auras. She could expend less energy in these brief aura-readings than she did in a complete reading, thus she charged less -- or, rather, tended to charge less.

"My aunt taught me the cards, and she had just started teaching me the runes when I left home."