Closed for every buried moment.

[Caelum]

for every buried moment. Timestamp: 11 Fall 513 AV The birds were silent in the trees. There existed precious things whose merit was so common or subtle that it went unrealized until it was gone. A man forgot to regard the value of his hands until one was lost to the butchery prevalent in both society and the wilds. A woman took for granted the fertility of her womb until no children’s laughter echoed in the autumn of her life. A heart was sometimes forgotten until it was threatened, but it continued beating even after it was broken. And the web of birdsong cast across a morning was the brightest when it was gone. The memory was pure in Caelum’s mind as he stood beneath the canopy of the live oak that stood off the road near the Sanctuary’s gate. Sunlight showered through the branches, turning the bottoms of green leaves gold almost as though in omen of the change this season would bring. It scattered and sparked on the ethaefal himself, causing the red in his hair to burn like embers and shining from the elegiac curve of his horns. He was changing with the leaves, the colors of him in ceaseless motion. He wore a ragged pair of riding leathers and a worn, plain linen shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The clothes were well made, but also well past their prime; and he knew that soon he would need to go shopping else he would be mistaken for a beggar everywhere he roamed. He was wielding a shovel borrowed from the barn and digging a hole in the ground in the gold and green dappled shadows of the oak. Yesterday he discovered an injured skylark in the pasture, by its wounds the probable consequence of a young raptor’s failed stoop. He carried it to the Healing Clinic and spent hours tending to its wounds to ease its pain and murmuring old stories full of sky and stars to ease its fear. A makeshift nest was formed from sweet, clean hay and an unused box that he carried to his room for the night. The bird died in the night, its little heart giving out in the wolf’s hour before dawn and Caelum woke to disappointment. He knew the bird had been unlikely to survive, but that was no excuse not to try. After allowing himself a minute of grim contemplation, he rose with the matter of fact air of a healer and determined the bury the bird after breakfast. By the time Caelum caught sight of the approaching bard, he was digging a grave for the skylark and all the birds in the trees seemed to have fallen silent in able to better hear his quiet litany of prayers to Caiyha and Eywaat. Syna and Rhaus.

[Tobias]

“I need-” and then the man fell short, and eyes like chestnut drew across the scene in which Caelum had placed himself. “What are you doing?”

Tobias was disheveled - more than usual, in fact. His hair, which was at best unruly, was a complete pigsty, and mud dappled his leather boots in a careless splatter. He was also positively out of breath, and if Caelum had cared to watch the ethaefal would have seen the bard coming from many lengths away, borne out of the gates of Riverfall at a breakneck pace that did not falter. Doubtless it was this impromptu run that had caused such a condition.

In his arms was a bundle of blankets, and beneath that, a cat, black of fur and bleeding heavily.

Confusion gave way to purpose as Tobias remembered what his was. With supplicating eyes he thrust the bundle out at the healer.

“I need help, sir,” the bard hastily explained. “Or, rather – he does. I heard this was the place for…for, y’know. Animals.”

The old tom had prowled along the dirty alleys and paths behind the Northwind Suites, a terror as black as sin with a meanness to match. For the couple days in which Tobias had seen him, the tom had held dominion over the creatures of those passages, rats and birds and other cats too. Though he wasn’t the largest stray, he was too clever by half and used it to his advantage. However, in time another tom had come upon his territory, and when it was over, it had been the old black lying wounded in a patch of grass.

Tobias had discovered him there in the wee hours of the morning, half hidden among the dewy green and bleeding from half a dozen wounds across his belly and face. He had hesitated. In his tour of Mizahar’s cities Tobias had seen hundreds if not thousands of strays such as this one. He knew some people – shopkeepers, mainly – who would like for nothing more than to see all such strays dead and gone, and Tobias half agreed with them. They were a nuisance…but then the cat had made the most piteous meow, and something inside Tobias had clicked. He had taken off running.

With the black cat in his arms he had ran around the city twice, maybe three times, before he learned from a violet-skinned akalak that the animal shelter was not within Riverfall, but without. With this new knowledge fresh in his mind, Tobias had departed the city perched over the sea for the Sanctuary that lay outside…and had found the ethaefal, crowned with Syna’s glory, at the side of a small grave.

“You can help him, right?” Tobias beseeched of the healer. “He’s not moving, and blood is flowing from his stomach awful fast…”

[Caelum]

Caelum chomped the blade of his shovel into the earth and slumped against the handle while watching the bard approach with his mysterious burden. Golden eyes were heavy lidded and curious, his posture relaxed into haphazard elegance; and at the stranger’s opening words, his eyebrows climbed right to his hairline. Droll humor curved his mouth. “I’m digging a grave,” he offered matter of factly. He had the misfortune of experience in it too. “For a bird,” he elaborated and then stopped in order to listen to the urgent plea. Slowly, his regard sank to the bundle in Tobias’ arms and his amusement faded like sunlight in the dusk of the soul. “Yes,” he said and reached out to accept the wounded cat. “This is a healing place for animals. I’ll try to help him.” Without further ceremony, he curved about on his heel for the Sanctuary gates and jerked his chin in rough invitation for Tobias to follow. “Bring that package there,” he instructed with a nod toward the cloth wrapped bundle of dead skylark on the ground. His voice was laden with calm expectation – not quite a demand, but certainly a hope. “I’m Caelum,” he went on to introduce himself. One hand slid beneath the blanket to dust across the cat’s fur. He summoned the stores of Rak’keli’s healing magic within his bones with the intent to assure the cat would survive long enough to reach the clinic. “Who are you?”

[Tobias]

“Oh,” was all that Tobias said when he heard about the bird. Inside, however, he was awash with a commoner’s ignorant superstition. Could this be a sign from the gods?

Perhaps…or perhaps not. The rational part of Tobias’s mind forced the rest of him down, and thereafter found further relief when Caelum accepted the tomcat and spoke, however succinctly. Some might have taken the healer’s reticence as a mourning bell, but the simpleness of Caelum’s speech was a good sign in Tobias’s eyes. In his experience, the men and women who were best at what they did tended to be humble about it; boasting tended to be a sign of misplaced self-importance. As Tobias’s old teacher had once put it, in that blunt and cant way of his, “the more a man knows, the more he realizes how much he don’t actually know.” Caelum had never once even said that he was a healer, and, ironically, that reassured Tobias.

With this paradoxical insight in hand, Tobias hastened at once to do everything the other man had asked. Wordlessly he picked up the bundle, even as his nose unconsciously scrunched in disgust as it caught the scent of what lay beneath the cloth. And when Caelum retreated back inside the gates of Sanctuary, it was with a disheveled bard nipping at his heels.

At the gates the healer’s singular question was caught and chewed upon. “I’m Tobias,” the halfblood mumbled at length. “I live in Riverfall – for now at least. I guess you could say I was a bard.” The straining notes of a lute did not accompany him on that chilly morn, however, and the man had eyes only for the feline whose blood spattered his forearms.

Tobias had never had a pet, and nor had he ever really wanted one. He knew that some cultures, the svefra and drykas chief among them, held animals in great esteem and (some say) had a certain type of connection to them, but the bard had never felt even remotely similar. For him there was just no appeal to animals. Humanity, and all its sundry offshoots, held far more interest to him – even the zith knew how to talk, at the very least.

In that moment, however, and against all odds, Tobias actually cared for the tomcat. The old feline had never shown him any affection beforehand – in fact, Tobias thought he remembered the cat hissing at him once or twice – and yet suddenly Tobias didn’t want him to die. But why? His teacher had always said he was a romantic fool. Perhaps that was it.

Then Caelum slipped a hand beneath the folds of the bloodstained blanket and Tobias returned from the ether of such musings. The movement, discreet as it was, brought about the bard’s attention and placed an uncertain look in his eye.

“What are you doing?” Tobias asked softly, realizing even as he spoke that he had no knowledge on which to base his inquiry. It was no accusation of negligence, therefore, but rather a question born out of simple confusion…but Tobias didn’t know if Caelum would take it that way.

[Caelum]

Caelum smiled a little. It was enough for brilliance. He couldn't help it. The sun was shining and it tumbled over him. There was no little humor in his expression either, something patient and a little wry as he took in Tobias the Bard out of the corners of his eyes. He strode loose hipped across the flagstones flanked on either side by horse barns. Before them was the clinic and the curve of the sky over the sea cliff beyond even that, past the pastures and the outbuildings and the tall walls that had not been here when Caelum had been by the Sanctuary last. This time, however, he was here to stay. What caused Caelum to smile was how Tobias had answered his question. Most people would reply with their names when asked who they were, but then that was what most questioners sought. Caelum always sought more and he liked that Tobias had added that he was a bard. Such an addition spoke volumes about what that meant to Tobias, not just about who he was but who he might become. Names were important because they held power, the banal power of definition and of calling; but Caelum knew from great experience, Caelum whose own true name he could not even say aloud, that the true power in names began only when they were trying to be erased. Caelum shifted his hand, still cradling the blanket wrapped tomcat against his chest. He flipped back the edge of the blanket to reveal his hand, flattened carefully along the feline's neck and shoulder blades. His hand was long fingered, the bones of it noble and riddled with callouses. The interesting part, however, was the golden opal light glowing softly upon the back of his hand. It was a needle thin design, swirling over his knuckles and down his fingers, slithering about his wrist until following the thick veins of his forearms half way up to his elbow. "I'm keeping the cat stable," he explained. His Common was fluent, but his accent remained thick despite the amount of years he had spent upon Mizahar. It tugged at the ends of his words and added odd slants to some of his vowels as if his tongue was in constant battle with the rest of him. Common was not the language meant for his mouth. The language that was, well, was unspeakable. That didn't mean it wanted to be. "That on my hand is the gnosis mark of the goddess Rak'keli," he told Tobias, keeping his voice mellow and measured. He did not want to frighten the cat any further. "She's granted me some small measure of her divine power to assist in healing." They climbed the brief steps to the clinic and he shouldered open the door, inclining his head again to indicate that the bard should follow as he just bypassed the empty entrance room and ducked into a back hall to select an exam room. "Tell me what happened," he suggested. "With the cat."

[Tobias]

His knowledge of the gods and gnosis was fragmentary at best, but even he knew what that mark meant. Caelum’s words made it all the more clear. “You’re marked by the Goddess of Healing.” Tobias repeated in amazed revelation.

“Are you part of the Opal Order?” Was that what the healer in Ahnatep had called her organization? Tobias couldn’t remember…nor did he want to, though she had been a pinprick of light in those dark times. He just couldn’t risk it; it was just too easy for such lights to flicker and fade when placed up such oppressive memories. The bard kept his mind on the present.

Through doors and down halls he followed the healer. He continued: “It’s just – well – azmashe!” The curse slipped out so the bile wouldn’t. He had just chanced a look at the cat and had managed to see through the folds to the wounded animal beneath. Tobias apologized: “Sorry…I ain’t too good with blood and the like.” It was a wonder Tobias had made it this far without heaving.

Tobias took a deep breath and began again. “What happened to him? I hardly know myself.”

“I think he got into a fight with another cat…one that he obviously lost. Those wounds there on his belly looks like scratch marks to me, and when I found him he was coughing up hair that didn’t belong to him. It couldn’t have been more than a couple bells ago that this happened…that’s about it, really.”

By the time he ended Tobias thought that even more blood had begun to flow from the tomcat’s wound. Tobias looked around the room, but all the tools were foreign to him. “Anything I can do to help?” he asked tentatively.

[Caelum]

"No, I'm not a member of the Opal Order," Caelum confessed. The sardonic humor in him loitered, marking his face as he strode into the examination room and stopped at the high, wooden table in its center that was large enough for a full grown man to stretch out upon. Sunlight illuminated the room from the windows and he tilted his head toward the shelves lining the far wall, the gold and rust of his horns glittering in the light. "Yes, you can help. Bring me that pack of bandages and the wooden box on the lower shelf." He hesitated, then added, "You can lay the bird on the chair in the corner there." The blanket wrapped cat was settled on the table so that he could begin to pull back the edges of the blanket, revealing the furry little beast and his numerous wounds. The humor faded from the ethaefal's countenance as he performed a swift, visual examination while keeping firm hands on his patient. The cat did not struggle, but that likely due to no longer having the strength for it. When Tobias set the bandages down Caelym reached for a square of them. "Inside the kit you'll find a selection of needles," he instructed in a calm, expectant voice. "I want the one made of bone that is curved like a sickle moon. Don't touch any of it before you've rinsed off your hands in the bucket there. The water in it is purified by a magic --" Kavala's rather impressive use of glyphs, in point of fact. "It will sanitize your hands. Once you do that, give me the bone needle." As Tobias went about his tasks, Caelum used a bottle of carbolic and the gauze to clean the worst of the nastiness and blood from the cat's injuries. He needed to be able to see how bad the cuts were across the animal's belly. All the while, Rak'keli's gnosis glimmered on his hand, doing what work it could. Caelum had significant practice at snapping his mind in multiple pieces so as to make optimal use of his strange collection of magics and skills. This was the most common focus of his meditation efforts, that of attempting to harness the gnosis of Nikali that whispered all the needs and desires of his feline patient to his soul while at the same time Caelum attempted to synchronize his knowledge of medicine with the divine magic of healing. They were different strings, he imagined, unraveled from the same rope. One end was tied to the gods and the other to the center of him, knotted fast about his heart. When strings unraveled from the rope, his only recourse was to try and braid them into the right pattern. Thus, one string screamed at his with the mouth of ranuri about the cat needing surcease from pain while the string of medical knowledge muttered onerously about blood loss. Rak'keli's string just sighed things about infection. Of course, none of it was actually strings and they certainly didn't talk to him; but it was the way he was best able to visual what went on his soul and in his brain during these hours. It helped. Most of the time.

[Tobias]

Tobias couldn’t help but say, “…Ah.” when the answer to his Opal Order question came back negative. His face was inscrutable. That didn’t raise any doubts…or did it?

In any case. The ethaefal began issuing directions, and the human began listening. A quick nod of the head, and Tobias was off and running, feet raising quick tap-tap-creaks as they made their way across the floorboards. The bandages and box were ascertained without too much difficulty. The human bard was about to make his way back when the healer’s additional words hit him like a lightning bolt, sending a brief jolt of a shiver down his spine. Tobias glanced down at the makeshift coffin cupped in the hook of his other arm.

“Alright…” he muttered uncertainly, and left the bird where Caelum had indicated.

The tools were set down as Tobias drew his glance upwards in order to receive his next direction. Orders did not come easily to Tobias, child of desert’s nobility, and one who was accustomed to knowing exactly what he was doing, and why, but there was something about the clinic’s atmosphere that stilled any rebukes he might have made. For all intents and purposes, Tobias was here now just to help.

His chocolaty eyes were thus complacent as he heard the ethaefal’s next commands and he nodded swiftly, feet already turning towards the faucet.

Despite himself, however, he couldn’t help but remark “But how…” as he examined the (apparently) magicked fountain before the aforementioned attitude caught up him and cut him off. Reassigned to his tasks, Tobias gave his hands a quick wash under the water before turning his sights on Caelum’s kit.

Uncertainly did he probe at it, unfamiliar with the medical instruments within, before he was finally able to find a needle that looked as though it was made as bone…or was it? Was bone supposed to be that color? Tobias wasn’t sure. It was certainly curved like a sickle moon, but…oh, petch it.

Shaking his head, Tobias returned with the instrument in hand. “Here,” he said, proffering it.

Tobias laid his open hand upon Caelum’s arm. Offhandedly did he realize how perfect and marble-like the flesh beneath his fingers was. The perks of being an ethaefal, my ass…

“Anything else?” the bard asked.

[Caelum]

“Rak’keli’s gnosis sanitizes, purifies,” Caelum muttered, absently answering the question half posed by Tobias. With one hand on the cat, Caelim flattened a square of muslin over the cap of the chloroform bottle. The thick, green glass was upturned in a swift, sharp motion, not pouring the liquid so much as lightly splashing it. The motion was so practiced as the be automatic, the calculations of necessary dosage for the feline done in the back of his brain without conscious effort. “Divine magic is like any other, Tobias,” he continued, distracted and easy as he instructed. The now damp muslin was gently pressed over the cat’s mouth and nose and he watched whiskers twitch until terrified, green eyes closed. “You can harness it with glyphs if you’ve enough skill.” Caelum shot a glance at the sickle needle Tobias produced and offered a short nod. “That’s correct. I wanted the curved needle because that is the best for stitching these type of wounds. Bone because its flexible and I don’t need anything sharper for this work. Also, I just prefer it..” He trailed off when the bard’s hand landed on his arm. It went through him in a buckshot scatter of images. They were backlit by emotion and the dim, guttural rattle of Nikali’s chains dragging across the floor of his soul. All of the bards desires felt to be in vast conflict, deeply at odds with each other. It caused Caelum’s skin to twitch until he blinked and focused on something simpler, grabbing onto it so that his vision could swim back and he could remember his feline patient. “You should take a nap,” the physician heard himself say, half a mutter. “When the cat’s stable and properly seen too, I’ll mix you up an herbal packet that will promote better sleep for you, Tobias.” Fortunately, Tobias also greatly desired the cat to be alright. Caelum sipped a glance at the man’s profile, wondering over all of those internal conflicts, and let the need take him, turning his hands to sewing up the cat’s skin.

[Magpie]

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Caelum :

XP:
Leadership +2
Observation +1
Medicine +2
Teaching +1

Lores:
The Power of Names

Tobias :

If you ever decide to return to Mizahar, let me know and I'll add your grade here.

Notes :

Somehow we ended up almost lore-less for you, Caelum. Mostly because I don't normally award lores related to vanished PCs, but if you'd like me to add those, just let me know. Overall, a very sweet little thread. Sad to see it didn't go anywhere.

If you have any questions or concerns about what was awarded, please don't hesitate to PM me.

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