Discord

[Seven Xu]

Spring 39, 512 AV

The port had died with the sun’s last light, and fog covered the ground like a shabby grey blanket that left the air damp and cold. Lanterns shone hazy and yellow through the gloom, littering the slapdash arrangement of shanties and shops and houses that were little more than jagged black shadows, unwavering in the darkness. A bell rang beyond any mortal’s reach of vision, and black brine lapped against stone pilings and barnacle-crusted wood columns.

Seven Xu stirred from his berth on one of a hundred roof tops. He had spent the day’s last bells on his back, watching stars wake one by one through the blur of grey-blue mist. Gooseflesh rose beneath his thin cotton sleeves, and clammy air clung to his neck and face. He groaned, leaned forward, and flexed the toes beneath his right boot. They were stiff. His entire leg was stiff; the cataclysm had left a glossy lattice of pink scars from the knee down where perfect white skin had once lived. The halfblood pulled back his trouser leg long enough to scowl at the mess before letting the cloth fall against his boot again.

There was a bed waiting for him, somewhere in Alvadas. Sooner or later, closer to the sun’s return to the sky, it would be filled with all the familiar warmth and smells that home’s comfort offered. It still hugged his shirt, or rather, his shirt—for he owned more soiled shirts, than clean ones.

A smattering of paper was left at his side. Through the darkness, his bastard eyes could still see dark points and numbers scrawled across a grid. Sequences spelled names: Fyrden, Shoyden, Swalden. He knew them all, and yet knew so little. Iraltu’s Observatory was a world away, and in Alvadas, no one cared about the music of the spheres. It was hard to even fathom inside the walls, when the Trickster could pour stars out of that upturned black bowl as easily as one could empty ale from a wooden mug.

The sky above patchwork port was less prone to the deceptions and perversions Ionu or His priests could weave. Seven pursed his lips. His back found the shingled roof top again. No sooner did his eyes flutter shut, did a puff of wind and a rustle of paper pry them open again. “Damn it.” He gave chase, but he was awkward and slow and could only crawl to the edge of a shingled precipice. “Damn it!”

Star charts littered a slick wet boardwalk, and a helpless white face peered out of the darkness. Seven’s wildly searching eyes were drawn to a familiar set of milk-glass horns and a gasp caught in his throat. He swallowed the lump. “Ho, ethaefal.” His lips were dry. How many could fall from the heavens? Perhaps Alvadas was at fault. The cynical halfblood had no love for them. Seven licked his lips, waited a heartbeat, and added, “Don’t step on those.”

[Pash'nar]

The unpredictable city of illusion made Pash'nar uncomfortable at best—his life was full of broken veils and shifting perspectives on a daily basis without Ionu to thank for any of it. His day had been spent poking about ships and their crew, most of whom were much more willing to shake hands with a well-worn Svefra than some statuesque ethaefal. Procuring business by sea was made all the more successful with tattoos and crooked smiles than with horns and opalescence. Not that Pash didn't take advantage of the powers of persuasion after his mortal seeming faded into the moonlight. It was just different business altogether. The sun had set and the stars had finally graced the sky with their reassuring presence. Alvadas still had stars, and, by the gods, still had the sea. The navigator took his time wandering back to the city proper from the Patchwork Port, soothed by the inky darkness. The docks were quiet now, and for a few precious moments, Pash'nar could still pretend to be anonymous despite his true seeming all but gleaming in the night. Once the fog rolled in, however, there was, unfortunately, so much less to look at. Ships and sails blurred into one giant swaying beast and the stars hid behind curled curtains of moisture. Reluctantly, he began to trace his path backwards from the moorings. As he reached the boardwalk proper, it began to rain paper. A few sheets, really, drifting lazily downward. From where? What for? Pash had come to expect the unexpected while stranded in this place, but the fluttering sheets caught the dull warm glow of lamplight and the lines traced on their surface looked oddly familiar. They were stars. Or maps of them. The ethaefal knew their curves and shapes by heart. He also missed his own, blurred and marred beyond recognition thanks to the damned djed storm's attempt to drown him at sea. Did the sea spit back out what it had destroyed? What a pleasant gift! A voice in the dark brought his slow, curious steps to a halt. As he turned to search the ocean's misty blanket for its source, he plucked the final sheet from the air before it found a final resting place on the obsidian point of his horn, answering quietly, "That'd sure be a waste." A black tide widened in his sea water eyes as he finally focused on the much shorter, though not quite paler man who had spoken. If he'd picked up on the other man's hesitance, it didn't show in the ethaefal's aquiline features. He held out the caught page, glancing down at it as he did so, "It's so petching hard t'find even a mostly accurate right ascension diagram of—um—wait—which is this?" The proffered page was lifted up again, absently, and Pash squinted at it in the terrible lamplight, forgetting for a moment the halfbreed it apparently belonged to.

[Seven Xu]

“It’s from last fall, of course it isn’t—” Seven’s words were lost to delayed realizations, and his lips hung open above a slack jaw, pale pink and glistening with spittle. The white apple in his throat bobbed as he swallowed another mouthful of disbelief and croaked an accusing, “You know what they are.”

Had the ethaefal chosen ambiguity, called the stray sheet a star chart or a sky map, Seven would not have paused. Technicalities, on the other hand, threw the cogs in the halfblood’s mind into motion and urged his aching muscles over a shingled cliff. Were they gifted with some intrinsic wisdom regarding the cosmos? Laszlo had never mentioned it, but it was too late to weigh ignorance against disinterest.

His legs came first. The left swung for a window’s ledge as he threw the bulk of his waiflike frame over the edge; the right dangled, fearful and useless for more than balance. Seven hesitated there. He tested his hold on the wide wooden ledge where a terracotta pot protested whispering leather, before releasing the extended lip of the shanty’s roof and turning to leap with a clatter onto the boardwalk. His good foot absorbed the impact; he exhaled a breathy moan and stumbled, but managed to save his balance before the ground could claim his dignity.

Stubborn pink clung to his neck and bled onto waxen cheeks, more from his efforts than embarrassment.

“This is from winter,” he stooped to scrape another leaf from the sodden ground. “And this, this is summer. And last spring.” When Seven straightened, he’d managed a disheveled pile of work already curled and torn with age. He was proud of them, his meager charts; though Seven had done little navigating on open water, he had come from the stars. Or, rather, a city perched among them. A thin smile was short-lived. “I should not be so careless.”

A white hand extended to the statuesque stranger, palm upturned. “I’ll take that.” His cautious reds darted between an unnaturally striking face and the mottled yellow-orange of parchment lit by lamplight. His black words bled through, mirrored and unintelligible from where he stood, but still familiar, still his.

Seven’s fingertips twitched.

[Pash'nar]

"Aye, I know what they are." The lithe, moonlit shard smirked without indignance, holding back a chuckle before returning to examining the sheet he held. He found it easier to resist conversing with all of the body motion and gestures of his earthbound seeming's native tongue once the sun set, but some of the flair still managed to always creep its way into his conversation. The charts, at least, from what he could tell, were well-drawn and certainly had more legible handwriting than his own self-taught scrawling. He watched the smaller man descend from the rooftop with a hint of surprise carving its way into his smooth, angular expression, noticing that he may have favored one leg over another just barely while he set about gathering up the other brine-laden sheets of parchment, "I wouldn't be worth my salt if I didn't." He dragged those words over the keel of his own tongue a bit—the subtle, hard edge of regret clung to them at drawing a connection between his existence in flesh and having to find some kind of worth. The sea was obviously inescapable to him, from his uninvited landing a handful of centuries to the body he found himself bound to once Leth relinquished his reign each dawn. At least, somehow, he was still connected to the heavens, though if only by vocational choice than anything resembling a form of honest devotion. The ethaefal blinked, shifting his gaze reluctantly from the chart he held in his uncalloused fingers to the small, white hand reaching upwards in his direction, "I wouldn't blame yerself in a city such as this." He relinquished his single driest piece of parchment into the impatient fingers of the halfbreed before him, feeling in the brief connection over the ruined charts a quiet moment of conscious generosity, "I'd offer t'help you replace 'em, but my own didn't quite survive the storm." Pash still counted it lucky that he, himself, had even arrived whole on the shore. "Though, I'm left wonderin' how you can even believe the stars are real here most nights as it is." He wasn't quite convinced Alvadas was ever honest. Or real in the way other places he'd been were real. At least, not yet.

[Seven Xu]

They hung like shoddy wet rags over his fingers, hemorrhaging murky ink. They were useless now, more so than they had been moments before. Indecipherable was worse than out-of-season. The trio of charts hit the Suvan’s calm black surface with a finite slap. The last, a grid forged between the haze of summer and the unbearable frost nights of winter was plucked from marmoreal fingertips with the same haste it had been demanded. The halfblood murmured his belated thanks as he turned the page over in his hands.

“You need to go beyond the city walls,” Seven explained, his eyes content to rove over a web of intersecting lines and notes and carefully placed splotches of blue-black, “Further than this, maybe, but I’ve never been led astray out here.” Seven had learned early, the temperaments of Alvadas’ keeper. “Not that I believe everything I see.”

One simply could not.

The paper rustled as bone-thin fingers furled it into a neat roll. “No one here cares what the sky looks like, anyway,” he shrugged. “I assume you must for a reason. Do you think you can find your way home? Do any of you?”

Hidebound venom clung to Seven’s words. He was unable to keep it behind his teeth. There was a pause. He slumped, and it made him look that much shorter. Laszlo had not been a bad ethaefal, but he had also been of Syna—reliable Syna, of the unchanging sun. Runas, the crazed one, she was subject to mood swings as diverse as the moon’s phases. She had left scars. This man, though kin with her, held a common ground with Seven. Something he could appreciate, benefit from. The pause grew as the halfblood considered.

Finally, he cleared his throat, and cast his stare at the blackness that lapped at barnacled wood. “I’m sorry. You’re an astronomer, then, or a navigator.” Seven’s head tilted away from the sea, and with it came the scrutiny of blood irises on the stranger’s taller frame. “Alvadas hates our kind.”

[Pash'nar]

The ethaefal watched the papers sink into the brined darkness out of the corner of his cerulean gaze, and though he may have tensed at their destruction, he said nothing. The drawings were somewhat replaceable—not exactly, of course—and the stars still remained regardless. Laviku couldn't swallow the real ones. Pash'nar's aquiline features turned sour at the far-shorter man's tone, thin lips tightening on a visage that already appeared carved from some mysterious, breathing stone. He'd heard it all before, of course, in some form or another from different lips, different faces, different lives, but the reminder of something so lost still managed to pick at the scab of a deep, unforgotten wound. He exhaled through perfect teeth, but held back his tongue at the words that were obviously more accusation than askance. It was easy to assume that all his kind were somehow pieces of the same broken system—this, he knew—for even he wondered if there was some truth to that vein of thought at some level of their divinely-crafted internal workings. However, the stars had thus far proven themselves an unreliable map home (gods, had he really come to hate that word so much?), no matter how accurate his attempts at charting had been. Even if there was a way, Pash certainly wasn't worthy of finding it. The shard of moonlight shifted when the halfbreed softened, and he chanced a quiet, cautious chuckle. Sculpted fingers strayed to loose strands of sea foam hair, still mostly up in a topknot hardly different from his false Svefra by day, and he tamed a few baubles of wave-polished glass. He resisted the urge to rub the back of his neck, knowing that no ink could be seen marring his opalescent skin. Perhaps revealing his less educated profession with the brokenness of his Common, he surged over the tide of silence with his voice, "It ain't just Alvadas, it seems, though I'm not really one for cities unless I have t'be. I'm a navigator by trade, but I s'pose it was in part to keep the stars as close as I could, short of holdin' 'em in my hands." The moon? That was a far different wound. "The city of illusion ain't your home, either," he added without judgement. Curiosity, perhaps, "Or else yer taste in hobbies is a bit self-defeatin'."

[Seven Xu]

oocDialogue is all over the place here. Sorry.

“I’m not from here,” Seven allowed, “but it’s my home now.”

The halfblood inhaled a lungful of saline air and tucked the rolled chart beneath the folds of his coat. The wind had picked up, tossed hair too white to be blonde away from a clammy forehead. A hand moved to fix it, but stopped beneath his ear, fussing at the delicate mark that sat there with a stout obsidian nail.

“Lhavit is as close as you can get to the stars,” he mentioned, unsmiling, “short of holding them in your hands.” He could never fully admit that he missed the milky crystalline towers and bridges of his homeland, but the longing for his sweet sister’s faces still nagged at him, threw hot pebbles of regret into the pit of his gut. They would hate him now, if they knew a symenestra’s bastard had killed their father. How could they not? His hand fell into the warmth of his pocket.

Seven’s eyes gaped at the black stretch of sky and sea. His countenance had dropped. His scowl lines had smoothed; his lips were a glossy pink ring; all the sourness had bled from his stare. Their mutual silence was eaten by the incessant pound of boiling surf down a rocky coastline. The tide was receding, leaving in its wake the reek of salt and decaying sea-grass. It stung his nostrils and pulled him from distant peaks. He blinked. His head swiveled back to the gilded stranger, and he pulled a thin smile across a reluctant mouth. Another apology fizzled on the tip of his tongue.

“You cannot map a city that moves.” Seven’s words were unhurried, as if to somehow remedy the lengthy pause; it made him look as if he had trouble maneuvering his words through the bulk of a flat tongue and ivory fangs. “I had to adapt. Fortunately for my sanity, it isn’t my day job.

“For that, I work at a tavern. Clean mugs, wet lips, that sort of thing.” Why was he mentioning this? Would the ethaefal care? He seemed to answer his own unspoken questions with a dismissive shrug, and curled his toes against the soles of his boots, and blurted: “Thirsty?”

[Pash'nar]

If anything had to be moving, he'd rather it be the sea. Pash'nar had heard plenty of stories about Lhavit, but the sailor had never seen the place with his own eyes. Yet to ever find himself working a ship that went in that direction, it certainly wasn't on purpose. The thought of being that close to the stars again made something in his chest ache, his stomach lurch like a ship caught in a storm. It was both tempting and terrifying, and any affirming noise that escaped his lips at Seven's words were mostly swept away by the ocean breeze. He let his thoughts drift for a moment, gazing at the twinkling sky, listening to the change of tone in the shorter man's voice with the beginning hints of a smile, "Oh, aye, durin' the day, I've been told I'm a bit unquenchable." The ethaefal laughed then, sea-farer breaking through the immortal veil of moonlight, feral and less tame than his visage portrayed, "But I don't mind a walk an' findin' new places to drown the sun once she rises." He might have winked, but the darkness and fickle lamplight made it hard to tell for sure. The navigator let his expression broaden and warm—thin, timeless lips curving ever so slightly into a grin—raising a hand to his smooth, mostly bare chest. Uncalloused fingers splayed where blue-black ink would be found in the daylight under tanned, wind-swept flesh and he diped his horned head in a small show of limited politeness (not a talent but more a rusty skill), "Pash'nar, by the by. Maybe you've charted my namesake once or twice." If he needed an apology, he would've certainly asked for one. Too many decades of too many reactions had left him immune enough. He only held one grudge, and thus far that was with the divine. "If not, I understand. Ain't a bright cluster unless Leth's face's hidin' from view." Unnecessary addition, Pash knew, but there was always a bit of weight to his own name behind his tongue, heavy like a dragging anchor. He slid his hand from his own skin to wave it up the boardwalk, the etched leather at his wrists catching lamplit fire with a polished glow, "I'll let you man th'helm, then."

[Seven Xu]

Two sets of feet pounded their chorus down the pier, rattling wood and unsettling stray stones and empty periwinkle shells that once housed the victims of hungry seabirds. He could manage an even stride, when he set his mind to compensating for the stiffness in his leg. “Seven,” fingers roved through the depths of linen-rimed trouser pockets, “My name’s Seven. Like the number, I suppose.”

A ligneous road turned to meandering cobble, and uniform structures sprouted up to replace the haphazard arrangement of colorful shanties. Alvadas proper appeared orderly compared to the disarray that made the face of the patchwork port, but any Alvad worth his salt knew this was the true testament to chaos, a trick that only fools rushed into with any sense of security. Seven’s toes pressed the soles of his boots as he leaned forward, swerving his white-capped head left, then right, before deciding to keep true to their route.

As if it mattered.

“I don’t have my keys,” he confessed, and wondered if the weight was lost on his ornamented companion. The sun had set, the tavern’s doors would be open, but there would be no suggestion in an iron key ring to lead Seven’s aching feet home. A thumb and forefinger worked over a loose thread in his left pocket. They turned a bend, passed a string of closed shops and one that remained open, with a keeper whose pinched face and vacuous stare reminded Seven of an owl.

“Your accent is peculiar,” he noted, dismissing the lilt of his own mountaintop vernacular, “You are from elsewhere—other than the obvious.”

[Pash'nar]

"As good a number as any, I s'pose." He chuckled with a shrug that loosened a few strands of sea foam hair from behind his too-perfect ears. His name was of his own choosing; where ever Seven's name had come from, be it a parent or his personal preference, was certainly no business of his own. Did it mean anything? Did his? Pash'nar followed his equally pale companion and understood the reference as the halfblood revealed they were wandering without a reliable compass other than Seven's familiarity, at least, as far as the navigator knew. He was at least thankful he didn't have to wander the often-dizzying streets alone. Nothing was reliable here even when you knew where you were going. "Th'Suvan's what you hear." The ethaefal finally answered, a smirk creasing his opalescent features, "I haven't much lived anywhere else. Woke up on th'shore of Saint Matthew's Bay an' I ain't really left th'sea very far from reach e'er sense." He paused for a moment, biting his lip before offering by way of explanation for his so-called accent (though in reality it was simply a purposeful lack of refinement and effort on his part), "That, an' under Syna's light, I'm Svefra." He wasn't sure if he needed to explain further, so he didn't. He seemed to be familiar enough with his kind, strangely enough.