Completed How You've Changed [Wrenmae]

[Kit Rowan]

It took a long moment for Kit to to regain her breath enough to formulate a response.

Kit scowled and held both her hands at her sides and did not hand the philter back "Oh yeah, they were, 'till my crippled excuse for a master threw them in the lake and watch them sink. Maybe you should have spent less time looking at my . . . clothes and more at my face!" Kit forced closed the flaps of her jacket and hid her embarrassed blush behind more anger.

"Did Ionu steal your eyes? Nah, I'd know. Maybe you were born blind, like a mole? I can't think of any other reason for you not to recognize me a foot from your gods-damned face!" She sniffed once and began fastening the straps on her jacket so she wouldn't have to hold it shut.

"Maybe I need to spell this out, in BIG letters?" Kit drew on the power of her mark and held up her hand, scribing letters there in glowing azure. She flipped her hand after each word formed, so Wrenmae could see the next word on the other side.

I

AM

KIT

"If you need more help, I can try to make them flash."

[Wrenmae]

So.

Let's recap.

Shipwrecked on the coast of Sylira. Attacked by dire wolves that were not wolves. Ambushed by slavers. Captured and tortured beneath a city by both a god and a man. Mind shattered he played gang conqueror for a time. Went to Zeltiva to bring the plague. Joined the Waveguard. Orchestrated the destruction of a city to further his plans. Spoke to Sagallius. Betrayed one of Syliras' ancient secrets to the God of Betrayal.

He could go on.


But nothing could have prepared him for the raw shock, the absolute dumbfounded surprise that assaulted him as Kit revealed that in this world, coincidences were rarely much more than misunderstood truth.

This time, the shock had impact to it. She may as well have blown him back with Reimancy, or assaulted him with a battering ram. Flailing at the open air, eyes wide, Wrenmae took two steps backward, wheeling, and then a third.

But he only had two steps of grace before the open canal.

For a moment, he was flying backwards, out over the still waters of Ravok's roads. And then, in a crescendo of deluge, he was gone.

Kit was left holding the gleaming bottle in a moment of, perhaps, unprepared shock herself.

But of course, her shock would only grow.

The bottle in her hand flashed, lost substance, and a floating, swirling, water...something, roiled over to the edge of the canal. Wrenmae pushed out of the water, gasping. The cloak around his shoulders, the clothes on his body, the weapons...every tiny piece of his ensemble left him with only enough room for a single desperate breach before Laviku tried to pull him back.

"Crapcrapcrapcrap!" The blob muttered, "Now, Wren, is not the time for swimming!"

Another flash of light and that water was the spitting image of Wrenmae, biting down on his own tongue as he reached down into the canal and caught the mage's hand.

Both struggled, but couldn't quite lift Wren from the mire he'd fallen into.

Whipping his head around, Zan did his best to address Kit while splayed on the rough stone beside the canal, nearly yanked into the deeps himself.

"Well? This how we do reunions now? Pardon-oomph- me for not understanding your culture, but I feel we shouldn't be celebrating a family visit and a funeral in the same day. So...Help?"

[Kit Rowan]

For a while, it was like watching a comedy at the Playhouse back home. Everything Wren did was like a routine. His expression was enough of shock to redeem the trouble of the chase, and the lack of recognition . . . Almost. He pitched over the side and despite it all Kit felt herself smiling on the verge of laughter. Until his philter came to life in her hand and muddied up the genre.

It turned liquid, flowed out of her hand and spoke. It ran across the ground and became a twin of Wrenmae in all but voice. For a long moment she just watched, mouth partly open, eyes scrunched up like a child with a puzzle box they didn't quite understand laid out in front of them.

But when Zan began to make it clear that there was danger, that Wren couldn't just get out of the canal and shake off the water like a character from a comedy, Kit extinguished her illusion and clamored to the edge of the water next to Wrenmae's watery doppelganger. "Clumsy oaf," Kit muttered, load enough for Wren to hear she hoped!

Course, he might have been a clumsy oaf, might have been a forgetful petcher, but he was still family, or at least something very close to it. She wasn't about the leave her uncle to drown. She reached for his hand . . . but years of living around him had taught her to fear contact. She hesitated, grabbed hold of Zan's arm and prepared to help him pull by proxy.

She had questions. They could wait.

He was heavy! It was a small cruelty of the gods that made her the one who needed to do the lifting; had it been the other way around, he could have dragged her from the water with ease. As it was, only Zan's aid kept Wrenmae from dragging Kit after him into the drink. "Alright." Kit hissed, her teeth clenched. "On three." This reminded Kit of a day a long time ago, on the rooftops of Alvadas.

"One . . ."

". . . Two . . ."

" . . . Three!"

She pulled hard and strong as her body could be made too, and prayed the doppelganger would do the same. Her sides, still sore and protesting from the run and the performance, felt alive with fire, while her arms demanded she let go now! For a long, desperate moment, she was certain that even with her and Zan pulling together, they wouldn't be able to drag her uncle from the canal.

[Wrenmae]

With two, even as awkwardly as Kit had decided to treat the rescue, they both managed to dredge Wren from the depths he'd foolishly fallen into. Straining, pulling, the man was finally able to swing another arm over the lip of the canal and pull himself up to the cobblestone. Zan let go and both he and Kit fell backward, leaving Wren on his hands and knees sputtering vile lake water from a prison of wet fabric.

Zan once more took his true form, moving, living liquid, snaking across the cracks between the stones and vanishing into Wren's person.

At first, the mage could only cough...spitting and cursing under his breath for his own stupidity and for Zan's hasty reaction. Not that he'd wanted the familiar to reveal itself before Kit...it left more questions than answers. Honestly, now that he grasped the earth again, part of him almost wished he could have sunk down and been carried away. Kit was in danger the longer she was around him...that much was true.

How long did she have? Days? Hours? No one was quite the same with the Blight.

Spitting another moutful of brackish water, he took the cloak from his shoulders and let it fall beside him into a sodden heap. The alchemized steel-wool felt like a prison on him with all the water. Certainly not a garment well suited to wearing beneath the water...perhaps something he'd explain to Rayage next he saw him.

It was a moment of silence too long when he found himself once again remembering what had put him in the canal to begin with.

He looked up at Kit through soggy hair, his mouth not sure whether it wanted to be disappointed or happy. In the end he settled for an apologetic smile, and another cough.

"Gods," he muttered, "You may have gotten better at acrobatics, but I think it's obvious to say I've gotten worst."

[Kit Rowan]

"You . . . haaaaaa . . ." Kit's breathing came ragged, worn, choked her words before she could get them out. She law sprawled on her back a moment while her abused body tried assert its right to not do anything. ". . . Walk off the edge into a petching lake. Get it . . . Not blind . . . Lost your wits, dumb . . ."

Kit stopped, her expression pinching. She shook her head aggressively, gathering her thoughts. Stop talking! Think. What did you just see? What just happened! "No, no!" She pushed herself to her feet and threw her hands into the air. "You can't do that! You can't change the subject. Not now!"

"That . . ." She pointed to where the Zan had retreated and fought to find a word that fit. ". . . Doppelganger . . . Thing!" She assumed it was magic, but Kit's knowledge the mystic were limited to the stories she had read in her father's Treval Codex before the thing got left on the side of the road. The only trick Kit had seen her uncle pull off while she was watching was making a little black dot in the air that did gods-knew what, a long, long time ago. But this? Kit had never seen anything like this in her short life, and if she'd heard of it then gods knew she hadn't heard enough!

She opened, closed her mouth, tried to sort what she saw into reactions she had words for. Her father had warned her away from magic and wizards so often before he died that there wasn't a single saying she could draw on to express it. It was one thing to make a little pinpoint of blackness that did nothing in particular; conjuring up yourself from a flask of glowing water was something else entirely; a magic of a scale Kit expected from stories. "What did you DO?!"

[Wrenmae]

Wrenmae was too exhausted to look up at her, to read the lines of horror, surprise, perhaps even fear from her face. Once upon a time, she had shown him how her hands could make the wind on an Alvadan rooftop and he had shyly showed her voiding...keeping his mouth shut about the manipulation his mind had played with hers.

Now she had seen Zan, a companion he had no right to hide from her in the first place.

But then and again, were mages not known for their secrecy?

He let the emotions run through her, ravaging her tired muscles and sending her mind to revulsion and reproach. He did not need to read her and certainly could not try manipulating it out of her. Such strong emotions were meant to run their course, like a heavy storm. Only when the thunder had ceased and the lightning stopped rampaging the earth could one attempt to rebuild what was lost.

Taking the material of his shirt from his chest, he twisted it together with both hands, squeezing water out and onto the cobblestone.

"Calm down, you're making a scene." His voice wasn't authoritative, just tired. He looked up then, unapologetic and yet somehow resigned. There were too many questions, too much coincided fate here. What was Kit doing in Ravok? Why would she dress in such a way?

Questions. And she had some for him as well.

Perhaps it was best to act in good faith.

"I've never introduced my familiar, Zan," he told her with a frown, "In Alvadas, I was lost in the Underground and a mage helped me escape...in return for my assistance in his troubles, he helped me make a contract with a certain creature. That creature is Zan."

From beneath Wren, the moving water swirled out again, bobbing and shifting almost...shyly?

"Yeah. Hi and stuff," Zan warbled, his voice strange now that it wasn't spoken with human vocal chords, "You'll know me from such favored memories as the-never-drunken-philter or that-water-thing-Wren-carries. You know, those timeless classic memories we all cherish."

Wren reached up to Zan and the familiar hardened into the same glowing bottle again. Wren stored him back on the belt, sitting back on his hands and taking a deep breath.

"I didn't expect to find you here in Ravok," he admitted, "What on Mizahar possessed you to leave Alvadas?"

[Kit Rowan]

Gods above, it had been so long since she'd been able to frankly talk of herself. What information the slavers had wanted from her they pried from her with bruiseless torments, every secret offered grudgingly. The opportunity was enough to shake her anger away, left her hands trembling oh so slightly.

There were many degrees of truth Kit could allow Wren. She chose to leave out the incident that had given Kit her mark, the grudges and enemy she'd left behind in Alvadas. She picked the other instead. "My father," Kit breathed. "I never knew where he was from. But I read his book and he kept talking about a University. I guess I have family there? I wanted to know if I really did."

"Then? On the way there?" Kit opened her mouth, shut it and scowled, downward, not looking at him, rubbing at a shoulder. Still she felt shame for being caught in it, though she could not think of a way she would have gotten out safe. At least not if she'd wanted out alive. She breathed in, out, shuffled her feet. "Well, you must've seen it."

Kit turned around, left her back facing Wren. It was easy to see where the Cripple had cut a hole in her jacket so anyone who wanted could look and see where she'd been branded; half a symbol of the black sun. she doubted Wrenmae could have been in Ravok any time at all without knowing what that meant. "That's . . . not an illusion," was all she said, her shoulders tense in anticipation for his reaction.

[Wrenmae]

"University," Wren breathed, taking a sleeve and squeezing the moisture from it before moving to the other, "That would be Zeltiva, to my knowledge...a fine place to learn."

He left out the disease that held the city in a vice of death a few seasons earlier, and his coinciding presence there. There was already enough guilt festering away in the dark corners of his soul, the places he tossed aside trash. It had been alright once, the plague. The only folk that suffered were faceless masses...no relation, no guilt. But...she had family there, family he may have very easily claimed. And perhaps he would see her face in his dreams now, accusing him as did so many others.

Those details were never for Kit, never for those close to him. In a way, it might have been considered his greatest betrayal to not immediately distance himself from those he cared for. Considering the mortality rate Vayt had granted him with mere presence, it was no surprise there weren't a lot of people close to Wren.

Even so, perhaps it was a selfishness in him that brought those he cared about ever closer to him...as if desperately sucking on the time that he would have otherwise abandoned were he a kinder man.

He'd left Kit behind in Alvadas for more than one reason, but he saw and felt no strong compulsion to push her away again now.

When she turned to show him her mark, part of his stomach fell from his chest and descended past the stone and water, plummeting into the deep-dark that lay beneath all things. When he was a child, his father had once taken him aside to show him a contingent of knights returning to the city. Between them, frightened and beaten people looked out on the city with something akin to awe-struck terror.

"Egyptus," his father had said, putting a hand on his shoulder, "Do you know who those people are?"

Wren had shaken his head.

"Slaves," his father said, "Branded and ready to be sold."

"But..." Egyptus pointed toward them urgently, "They don't have any chains any more. They're free."

Sighing, his father knelt next to him and shook his head sadly, "Look at their eyes, Egyptus. Each and every one is as chained now as they were before."

He stood and tugged Egyptus away through the crowded marketplace. "Those folk will never be free."


Wrenmae reached out and gingerly touched the mark, drawing back from it sharply. In a way, the slave mark reminded him of the gnosis marks on his own body. Sometimes they were honor, other times responsibility...in all cases though, they claimed some kind of sovereignty.

She had the mark of Ionu. This was just the mark of man, claiming to be god, and with that...the right to claim dominion over flesh, blood, and soul.

At first, he had nothing to say, only squeezed more water from his clothes and thought.

Finally, quietly, he spoke.

"I can remove it for you...if that's what you want." He hated how quietly he suggested it. Unsure, not his usual driven self. She brought out a lot of the young and indecisive self he kept hidden away within him. Vayt's servant could not afford to be indecisive, afford to be weak.

"I haven't been in Ravok long, but I may have some pull. I could...get you out of here or..." He dropped off and sighed, laughing heartlessly, helplessly.

"What does one do, Kit? I never knew with you. Do I help you or will you spurn it?" He threw up his hands and stood, wobbling at first, and then picked up his sodden cloak, "It's been a long time. Maybe I can help you...maybe I can..."

He trailed off, sighed, shook his head and stepped forward, engulfing her in a hug.

"Ah gods damn it all, Kit. I hate the circumstances but I'm so happy to see you."

Pale green res began gathering in his palms, wrapped around her back. He considered the pain.

Then he remembered the plague, and his res retracted swiftly. He let her go.

"How can I help you?"

[Kit Rowan]

Kit couldn't help but laugh at Wrenmae's offer, though it sounded bitter in her ears; get rid of it? "How?" She asked. "Did you find your calling as a healer?"

Was it judgment that Kit was afraid of? Nah, she thought better of family than that. What was she afraid of? What was she afraid of? Kit licked her lips and realized the answer was 'pity.' She only got more tense as he talked, and remembered again the chant the slavers had them since with the promise of punishment hanging over their heads. I am alone and no one will save me. She'd believed it, too. For a moment all she had was anger again, that he hadn't found her before, that now he'd caught her, too late to spare her from more indignity.

Kit felt something catch in her throat as Wren hugged her, something try to blur her eyes. Kit hadn't realized how much harder it was to face someone she knew. The faceless crowds didn't know what she was, the slavers didn't care. But Wren did; it was like he'd found her half-dead on the street. Kit's hands closed into fists as her whole body clenched.

When he finally let her go, Kit turned around to face her uncle, tried to keep her expression and stance strong.

"I'm halfway free already." Kit said, tight and controlled. She turned around back, eager to turn the brand away from him. "They don't know what I can do." She ferreted out one of the mizas she had earned in her performance. "This is the first time they let me perform, and it'll be the last. They'll be expecting this back today, but they won't get it. Trickster help me, by dawn tomorrow, Trickster help me, as far as Ravok cares I'll be a wholly different girl. They'll look for their slave, but they'll never find her." Look at me look at me I have a way out I have a plan I am not weak not weak not WEAK!

"Then . . ." How her voice wanted to break, how it wanted to crack and squeak right then, but Kit did not allow it. "Then . . . I dunno what I'll need. A guide to lead me in the right direction. There are no roads . . . And something to keep me safe." She reached back up toward her branded shoulder again, thinking from slavers. "I'll figure it out."

"I just want to go home." Her voice trembled with emotion, then steadied. "If . . ." You are alone and no one will save you. Gods above, her heart! Her face was twisted, an open war between the distrust of a slave dragged in chains for seasons and the niece looking at her uncle. "If you can help, I won't turn it away."

[Wrenmae]

He released her, folding his arms back to his side. Around them, Ravok continued moving. The Ebonstryfe kept ever vigilant, the slaves danced and worked, the nobles cavorted with eachother...in the grand scheme of things, their little moment was wholly ignored by the world.

There were few moments these days when Wren wanted to be free of Vayt. Most of the time he embraced the plaguelord who had showed him favor and mercy. But Kit was a memory torn from the pages of his past, when being Blight-touched was no blessing but a curse. Now, removed from people he cared about, it had never occurred to him to think much of the time before.

What life he could have had. Who he could have been close to.

"I have limited means right now," he heard himself saying, "At least till I find a way to rise to more importance in this city...but I will do what I can to get you home to Alvadas."

It was a promise he would have liked to make honestly. Perhaps in another time, it could have been. But the painful truth was that he was living for higher purposes now and people...connections, emotions.

He had to let them go now.

It was best for him to remove her from Ravok, to help her brave the wilderness home. With her here, his goals and ideas were muddled, perplexed, and ultimately compromised.

"Meet me in a few days time," he heard himself saying again, "Here at the canal. I'll see what I can do about gaining more position here and a place for you to stay...and we'll plan your journey back to Syliras...where you can get a ship to Alvadas."

He smiled without hope, but made it look convincing. She had changed somewhat, more grit perhaps, experience. The lash marks of tragedy still lay thick upon her spirit, and any physical growth she'd done was nothing compared to where she had to bring herself emotionally to cope with all this.

Lucky, she hadn't asked him much of his past...enough to make him lie to her, another crime upon infecting her all these years.

So instead he helped her to her feet. "I haven't been here long, but there appears to be a general order here. The Ebonstryfe and the Black Sun run the politics, but aristocratic families seem to play large roles as well. I'd suggest seeking out employment for the duration of your stay here, squirrel away the mizas you'll need for fare both to Syliras and then back to Alvadas."