Closed Mirror Face (Naia)

[Aislyn Leavold]

51st of Winter, 515

There was something off about Alvadas.

It wasn’t off in the same way everything always was, no, not in the way that trees turned pink and fish flew, but in the way that something was wrong. But that particular day, the feeling of off-ness was strong. Unnervingly so, in a way that made Aislyn wish she hadn’t ventured out at all. Then again, she had to. She had a job to do.
Or, a job she was going to try to do.

She had received a letter, ironically minutes after she had resigned herself to stay inside for the rest of the season, requesting a drawing of something strange.
Something strange, it had said. In Alvadas. Aislyn had almost laughed; it was her easiest job yet. Or it would be, if Alvadas did not push its strangeness in her face with the intensity that it was. First it had been the path, dropping off halfway, forcing Aislyn to go around. Then it had been an ocean, as she turned the street, the ground below her feet in the few ticks she let her mind wander quickly turning into hot sand. Of course, a street made of water was no street she could walk on, so once again, she had to turn around.
It was annoying how Alvadas seemed hell-bent on preventing her from reaching her destination. Not that she had a destination. It was really just one of her walks, looking for something, or anything, that was strange enough to draw.
Spontaneous path failure and beach-streets obviously weren’t strange enough.

After a while, the artist came upon a particularly staircase-like set of buildings, and, after finding a solid foothold in the shape of a large crate, Aislyn was able to make it to a fair vantage point with minimal falling. She could see forever from on top of the building, if forever was a couple street blocks and a street in front of her. Nonetheless, it was a vantage point, no matter how great.
Laying out her materials before her, Aislyn fixated on the streets below her. People flitted around below her, not quite ants, but not fully human either. Somewhere in between. Aislyn chose a charcoal with a somewhat in-between width to match. Long, thick lines to mark the borders of the image, utilizing the blunt edge of the tool. Thinner, more precise lines detailed the people. Faceless, at first. As they always did begin.

Pushing a strand of escaped hair back, Aislyn felt a distinct change in the air. Like the wind had changed directions, or the temperature had dipped just a few degrees. Something she couldn’t quite place. She ignored it for the moment, focusing on getting the curls in one of her faceless people’s hair just so.
Then the change happened again. Instantly, Aislyn looked up, trying to find something that would spark such a strange feeling. Nothing in particular. The street had changed angles slightly, which was unfortunate from an artistic point of view, but nothing that would cause such a strange feeling.

Then the wind began. Just a light breeze, at first, but then it grew louder, if louder was the way to describe it. Stronger, but not just in a strength sort of way. It wasn’t just stronger, it was, really, louder. More intense.
Aislyn ignored it up until the moment her materials began to take flight. One blank parchment, which the artist reached for, but didn’t catch. She weighed down the rest of her materials, placing the unnecessary back in her bag. But then the weights began to take flight, too. The thinnest charcoals rolled down the roof like it was a ramp, flicking off the edge, but never landing on the street below. Then, quickly, things began to go very, very downhill.

As if the whole rooftop had tipped, things began rolling. Aislyn’s hair whipped into her face, blocking her view for a few, precious moments, before she took her hands off her work in order to clear her vision.
An unfortunate mistake.
The piece she had been working on instantly took flight, heading towards the edge of the rooftop, as had everything else in the artist’s momentary loss of control. In a panic, Aislyn tried to reach after what she had lost. She stood up, moving quickly towards the end of the rooftop before she realized it was useless. She’d have to let it go.
At least the rest of her stuff was in her backpack- oh shyke.

The backpack took flight as well, passing by Aislyn in a blur. In a split second decision, she reached after it, her hand catching on the strap in one sweet moment of victory.
Until momentum and the forces of gravity took over.
Aislyn was yanked forward, which, when one was standing on the edge of a building’s roof, was not a very good place to go. The artist lost her balance, and was pulled towards the rapidly approaching and not-to-appetizing pavement below.

Then she, too, was pulled into the air.

[Naia Whitewater]

Speech | 53rd of Winter, 515 AV | Thoughts | oocSorry about the delay! Post Christmas rush was surprisingly hectic. Feel free to have Naia deposited somewhere near/after Lynn if that's where you get to in your next post - ALSO I did a quick edit about 24 hours later because I realised a sentence didn't make sense!

Naia did all she could to pretend not to notice.

Alvadas wasn't her city, it wasn't her business. It was somewhere where she lived periodically, and was destined to return to for a quarter of the year. It wasn't anything more, nothing less. She wouldn't let herself become attached to another damned patch of land when the sea would always call her. She was a child of the ocean, for Laviku's sake. No, no. It wasn't happening. She'd sooner turn to sea foam.

"Was I on the fastening duties tonight, or was it..." Speaking helped ease the anxiety, she'd found, about the work and sea especially. She'd found the whipping waves of wrong she felt on pavement gave way the moment she was able to cross the docks and board the The Mischief, but guilt had found its way to leach into her even there. She'd had to invent her own forms calming techniques to combat the swirling storm that wretched her gut, for it was increasingly apparent that not even The Mischief was free from the City's ailment, in one way or another.

The topic seemed ever present.

How 'sick' fellow sailors believed the city to be, tales so wild of what most recent 'strangeness' had been witnessed, and what the crew thought it would all culminate to, set the crew ablaze like wildfire. It was beginning to border on hysteria, she thought. Crews had turned to mutiny by less. Not that a docked ship was in danger of such. Right?

"No, I'm tomorrow night. Must be." The existence of a roster and alternation did its dues in ensuring the crew remained apt in all aspects of sailing, but it did little but garner annoyance in those that needed to check the damned thing thrice a day, "But if I'm tomorrow night, then wh-ARGH!" the pavement turned slick beneath foot, and Naia quite promptly skidded and fell to her hands and knees, blooms of pain sprouting from the consequential - however slight - grazes to her legs and palms, a sudden chill then splitting her spine.

Her painful miscalculation was that the distraction of thought and words didn't only mask the ill feelings she felt radiate from the city, it blurred the ground into a solid form, and washed all forms and faces into one solid mass. Children snickered to the far left, and even the vicious glare the Svefra shot them was not enough to make them sniffle their childish condescension, and Naia summoned all that was to be born the frozen north as she quite literally brought herself to stand on thin ice.

It wasn't real ice, she told herself. It couldn't be real ice. It stilled looked somewhat like stone. Illusions be damned.

And yet, she watched as another man ahead, whom she observed to be bravely marching forward, in a moment lost balance and found contact with his side, another shout of frustration filling the air. Had Naia not been so concerned of staying upright herself, perhaps she would have considered offering aid. Instead, in all ways of one who refused to deal with the situation presented to them, she turned on her heel stepped back onto hard, sturdy stone. She wasn't dealing with this today, not ever.

She chose to take the next left, reminding herself that all she wanted was to find a nice solid shop to browse, but soon found herself pushed forward by a trickle of wind. Strange. The air was near stagnant down the last street, wasn't it? She made a mental map, for all the good it did her, and took the ocean as her reference point. The wind seemed to ebb and flow as though the street behind her as though it was a tunnel, flowing through bends as though a river - another peculiarity which she wondered would make it back to The Mischief's rumour mill. Maybe it already had. The wind didn't come from the sea, she decided, nor directly from the land itself.

Another half a dozen steps down the street, though she didn't have much as option as to the direction which she traveled, and the wind seemed to lift, as though hitting some invisible point of topography that was causing it surge upwards. She tentatively considered the thought she may have hit a dead end (Were there invisible dead ends in Alvadas? Another illusion), and the woman stopped to glare as she considered the deception that was the number of people going about their business on the other end of the street. Perhaps what rush she felt was the end of wind, a strong current and turbulent upwards flow before peace. They didn't seem to have wind whipped hair or tussled clothing.

A muffling of sound caught her attention as the Svefra tried to figure how she would press forward though Zulrav's rapidly growing wind, if even Zulrav could control his breezes in such a wild city, before a shadow - the shadow of a person - briefly eclipsed Syna ahead.

Naia didn't have the chance to scream before she moved in some twisted attempt to break the fall of the flying woman, instincts as they were, the distance she would have needed to bound a good half a dozen steps greater than she could have ever managed in time, and she realised too late the strength of the wind's lift. In the space of the few ticks, not only had the other woman been picked up by the wind and seemingly in a relatively safe situation, but Naia's own feet left the ground as the gust that once pushed her forward lifted her up.

'This is why I don't help people.'

[Aislyn Leavold]

There was no reason for this. Absolutely no reason. To be pestered by the wind was one thing, but for her entire stake to be uprooted and pulled away was another. This was well past an unfortunate occurrence. This was on the same par as the street outright disappearing below her. Which it kind of had.

She experienced a brief feeling of falling, then… Nothing. Kind of like when she had sunk into the street during the whole quicksand-sidewalk conundrum that had happened a few seasons prior. The feeling of falling at first, but then once one adjusted to it, it just felt like being. Kind of like she was still on the ground, except for the fact that she couldn’t feel the ground, or anything at all.
Actually, that wasn’t true. She could feel the wind. However, what the wind felt like was not exactly what Aislyn would normally describe as ‘wind’. It felt much more like being carried. Like she was being pulled up by her arms, into the unknown.
It was not a good feeling.

Kicking out into the paper tornado that she was encapsulated in, Aislyn’s foot actually made contact with something. Though it was neither her supplies, nor the ground. It appeared to be…

A person?

Blinking out as she tried to get some bearing on her situation, Aislyn found another figure within her sights. Her foot had connected with the figure’s chest. Almost at the same moment, the hands dropped her. And everything else. She was left suspended in the air for one long, extended moment, before everything came crashing down.
Not before, however, something bit her arm.

Caught off guard by both the person, the bite, and the fact that she was now hurtling towards the ground, Aislyn’s mind began to play things in slow motion. First, she lost sight of the figure, who was no doubt in the same situation as she was, except with the wind knocked out of them due to Aislyn’s boot. Second, she hit the ground, landing in a convenient but previously non-existent sand dune that had almost definitely not been there before. Third, she got hit in the face unceremoniously with what appeared to be her own backpack,
Lastly, it appeared the figure that had been flung into the air with her had landed in a sand dune nearby.

Breathing heavily, Aislyn went over a mental checklist. Maya was still intact. Her hair had flickered into a deeper brown, but with a quick self-check, that was remediable. As she sunk back into the surprisingly not-sandy feeling sand, Aislyn closed her eyes, taking a moment to just be.
Sometimes, Alvadas was exhausting.

Eventually picking herself up, the artist began to gather her things. Backpack, charcoals (some almost entirely shattered) and somewhat less pristine pages of parchment. The wind had all but disappeared, leaving her to collect her possessions in peace before returning to the sand dune and climbing on top. Then, she crossed her legs, and continued what she was doing. Unfortunately, it seemed the ant-people were gone, either scared off by the falling people that had crashed down from above them, or simply now on a different street. It didn’t matter. She’d just draw it from memory.
Who needed a reference, anyway? She’d just be bitter, and draw the empty street, because that was obviously so strange. Under her breath, she cursed the petching commissioner that had decided that ‘something strange’ was enough detail to warrant a drawing. Getting pulled off your feet and into the air was certainly strange, but she couldn’t exactly draw that.

To the side, Aislyn drew a long, snaking line of varying thickness. It went from thin to thick to thin again. An indecisive snake. Wonderful.
Crumbling up the paper, the artist tossed it to the side, revealing the parchment that had been lying below her rejected drawing. An older sketch, from nearly a year before. Of a mirror, and a woman within it. Aislyn didn’t remember all the details of why she had drawn it.
It wasn’t too bad, actually, considering she had drawn it a year prior.
Looking up from the drawing, Aislyn was met with another drawing.

No, wait.
Not a drawing.
The person.
The person from before.
The person who had been in the air with Aislyn, who also happened to be the person from her drawing from a year before.

”Well, that is certainly strange…”

[Naia Whitewater]

Speech | 53rd of Winter, 515 AV | Thoughts

Naia couldn't claim that she hated the feeling of flight - of Zulrav's embrace. Of wind whipped hair and the rush excitement as one jump meters into ocean.

She did, however, find it incredibly distressing that she quite literally felt as though she was in someone's embrace, surging her further upwards, as though the wind itself was not enough, and every concern about the lack of the storm god's power shot through her.

'I petching knew it.'

Then she felt a rough contact to her chest - a foot? - having extended out from a whirlwind of paper, the woman that Naia had likely attempted to save apparently doing all she could to have the Svefra regret her decision. Whatever was holding her let go, or threw her, and she wished to feel the strange security once more as her body went limp and flung through the air.

She had almost wished that she had not twisted and turned on impact. That she didn't have to see the ground as her body approached it, as if having the wind knocked out of her was not terrifying enough. If her neck was going to snap, or her back break, she could have rathered it come by some surprise. Like the pool of water she was diving into was much more shallow than she'd thought, or a mast on the ship had collapsed and come down by surprise, or even if it was a simply slip and her own stupid fault, anything but one of the very few times she decided to try and do some good.

If it was Kelwyn that caused the pile of sand-snow to appear before her, then she'd have no choice but become and avid worshiper, but with the wind from her lungs still lost, contact with the dune was made with open mouth and flailing limbs. She must have sunk a good foot into the pile within an instant, and soon her mouth was filled before she'd stopped sinking further, and she coughed before there was air for her to breath back in.

She flailed again, and swung her head back as she struggled for breath, nearly tumbling further down the pile as she spat and cleared the offending grains from her mouth, a strangled woman's gasp for air then spluttering, and her lungs burned. No wonder people had died. She took two further shallow breathes before she began to take collection of herself. Her hair a wild mess of brunette curls, tears prickled at the edges of her eyes, and clothing tousled, but she didn't taste blood, and other than the pain to her chest and the whiplash from falling, it seemed as though she had left the situation comparatively unscathed.

What of the other woman?

Naia had been facing the ground when she fell, and was altogether blinded by her own pain to take further notice of the falling woman, but it didn't take long to find the blonde sitting in a dune of her own, her thoughts seemingly more drawn on books and implements than the woman she'd injured. Not that Naia would have been much different.

Familiarity then struck her, and through tear hazed eyes, the Svefra took in the looks of the woman once more that the grinds and gears began to click. The woman met her gaze, then, and Naia was all too sure that she was the one she thought she was. The girl from the mirrors. The one that she'd spent the last three seasons wondering if she'd ever really existed. "You.. May..." her words were coarse, rough from the fall and winding, and she coughed again before she could even finish speaking the name.

She cleared her throat and tried again. "Maya?" Good, even. She was clearer, her breathing slowly returning to normal despite the radiating pain. With such confidence, she tried her best to stand, the dune unstable under her weight, and soon what the woman had envisioned as a graceful walk down, onto lower ground, turned into a stumble and slide. Had she not grown up with sand in her shoes, she would have been mortified. "Gods, woman, where did you come from?"

Naia took a quick survey of the surroundings, satisfied enough to see that they appeared to be in the same street, and her gaze sought the roofs overhead. She cracked a small, dry grin, deciding that seeing a face she'd harrowed through a hell field of mirrors was at least a little worth being thrown around like a ragdoll. "Creepy halls of mirrors, and now creeping on people's roofs?" She loosely crossed her arms and tutted, "No wonder I was beginning to think I'd dreamed you up." A hand shot to her chest, then. To the point of impact, "You're definitely real." Naia had been several weeks off telling people of the ghost she'd met in The Hall of Mirrors.

[Aislyn Leavold]

”Maya?”
Petch, what was her name? The woman obviously remembered her “name”, but for the life of her Aislyn couldn’t remember hers.

”Where did I…? I-” She shot a look behind her, where the rooftop loomed overhead. Now that she was looking at it, that was a rather long fall, should the wind not have caught her. And then dropped her again.
Sand dunes; ever so convenient.
”I was just…”
Trailing off, she let the woman take over. Aislyn didn’t often meet people twice. Having a multitude of faces and twice as many names slightly hindered a person’s ability to actually interact with someone more than once. Not that she in any way disliked that. As long as the adventure was interesting, who cared where the counterpart of the journey went afterwards?

Or, at least, that was Aislyn’s usual philosophy. Now, however, as her newest old acquaintance was reiterating the events, she remembered why said philosophy didn’t always hold true.
”Naia! The woman in the mirror, Naia-”
Naia, that had been it. She’d known it was an A name. Not beginning with A, of course, just having a lot of A’s within it.
”The House of Broken Mirrors, yes.”
She remembered the sign. Do Not Enter. What an inviting place.

As Naia explained her experience, Aislyn found herself nodding along. Perhaps the woman’s name might have slipped her mind, but the events of the House had never left her. She shivered at the memory. Nothing ever truly surprised her about Alvadas. Next to nothing frightened her. But the House… The House had certainly… Unnerved her. It proved, as she had seen in the past few seasons, that there was much more to Alvadas than fable and whimsy. And that had only been the beginning.

”I believed you an illusion, as well- at least, I had before- not now, obviously.”
She smiled, with only the faintest trace of guilt in her expression as Naia motioned to where Aislyn had accidentally kicked her. ”Sorry about that, by the way.”

Pushing herself up from the sand, Aislyn had the intention of getting up, though all she received was a burning sensation in her arm. Letting out a sharp breath, she rolled up her sleeve, revealing a rather deep bite mark.
That, too, was certainly strange.
Magical winds didn’t often have teeth, and certainly if they did they didn’t bite people. But Naia certainly hadn’t done it, and by now there was no one else around. And at least some of the teeth- judging by the pinpricks of red forming on her skin- had been sharp.
Another instance of a rather hostile illusion. Just one of many, it seemed.

Looking from her arm, to her work, to Naia, Aislyn decided that perhaps something strange was easier to find than she’d thought. Putting away all but the old sketch, Aislyn began work on it again. No longer matching it to Naia’s likeness, but something… Stranger. Stranger than a woman whom Aislyn had convinced herself didn’t exist after spending a very long night cooped up in a den of nightmares with. Inspiration struck in surprising places.

With her eyes flickering between her work and the subject, Aislyn maintained the conversation,
”You must have noticed it by now, haven’t you?”
Long stroke, short stroke. Sketchier, then a long, connecting line. She accentuated the eyes, leaving the inside clear enough to draw something else inside the pupil.
”I remember you’re akin with the seas, but you’re still Alvad enough to have noticed.”

Inside the eyes, she drew the Suvan, tiny versions of the Mischief adrift inside. After that, the hair. She’d already drawn it falling flat, but now Aislyn wanted it floating upwards. The question was, how? She couldn’t erase the already-made lines, but perhaps if she added more, it would blend in like she’d always meant for the hair to seem like gravity did not confine it.

”The fear, the chaos. The…” She paused, nodding upwards in homage to the winds. ”...The illusions.”

The end result was the drawing-woman looking like she had quite a lot of hair for just one head, but it certainly looked strange. Since the sketch had never been finished, her body faded out to the end of the page at just below the shoulders. There was room to add more, but it was, of course, only supposed to be a bust portrait. So that’s precisely what she did, tracing old lines to the edge, refreshing them with new strokes. Soon, a sketchy, slightly fuzzy image of a mirror was held in the woman’s hands.

”It’s all… Wrong.”

The end result was sketchy and unfocused, since it was only quick, but she had time later on to go over the lines with a more assertive piece of charcoal. For now, she had an old interest to rediscover.

”I wouldn’t suppose you have any idea what’s going on this season, do you?”

[Naia Whitewater]

Speech | 53rd of Winter, 515 AV | Thoughts

The Svefra was beyond the point of babbling, but she couldn't help the rush.

From the adrenaline at the sudden lift and throw, and then the physical impact and excitement of meeting Maya once more, her usual cool and ease had been perhaps too easily forgone. Her wild running words had not seemed to be of annoyance, however, and the brunette's gaze raked over Maya's face and formed, and it seemed as though recognition had taken a moment or two to click - perhaps it wouldn't have at all hadn't her words fallen as they did.

From the blonde's words, it seemed as though the Mirrors had done its part in tricking and mixing the girls up perhaps too well, and the Svefra coaxed the gooseflesh to subside as a knot began to turn in her stomach. Illusions could make you believe the darnedest things, or not believe, as the case seemed to be.

Naia accepted the apology with a smile and a hum, and was a word off speaking her own apology for skipping the reintroduction, when the sudden look took to the blonde's features spelt trouble, and Maya's arm was the center of her attention. She, herself, was at perhaps too far of a distance to be able to take note of anything other than white skin, and so she took the opportunity to make her way closer to the woman, but evidently not quick enough to find out what the source of the commotion was.

Maya delved into her drawing, though her gaze and attention seemed divided, and Naia was glad not be lost in whatever had swept the woman's thoughts.

The following string of words were no less disconcerting than the winds themselves, she felt, and given Maya's mind was split among words and actions, Naia reclined herself to enjoy the moment of peace. Each few words and mention was fed into a broader thought as the Svefra raised her arms to stretch, then twisting her side as she felt another shard of pain radiate from her front. It seemed like being loose an helpless on impact had served her well.

Of course she'd noticed it. Laviku's tug and pull grew stronger each time she stepped into the city, but she figured that was perhaps something of her own making. The more that Alvadas began to fall into... whatever this was, the more reliant she had been on the oceans to keep her sane, and prayers to Zulrav for clarity were becoming all too frequent.

It wasn't the paranoia that set her at most unease, or the fact that the winds could have killed her, or the streets trap her for an eternity, no. Perhaps the most unnerving thing of all, was that Maya - the girl, the Alvad girl, who walked with her through the Mirrors - regarded the happenings with such dire concern.

"You know," her chuckle was dry, heavy. It didn't take much to hear her own tension, "I was really hoping you could tell me." Her expression turned whimsical, and her fists tightened, her own little snark obviously not all that she wished to speak. "Rumour spreads like a flashfire on board The Mischief, I've so far heard every consideration from 'Ionu hates us' to 'Ionu's been usurped,'" she crinkled her nose as she regarded the suggestions she'd put forward.

"No crew that I know of have lost their gnosis, though - so I'm sure its..." she frowned, surely the God of Illusions had not allowed his city to fall into such a state for no good reason? "Along those lines, probably. Just not... that." Guilt then riddled her, and she took comfort in the tug of her sea, rushing to make her own correction, which once more turned into a tumbling string of words, "I'm sure your god has not abandoned you. But... surely something has..." She remembered how much the people of Nyka revered their Alvina, Naia wasn't about to cause insult to one of the very few people she'd made any significant acquaintance with.

She couldn't imagine the horror she'd feel if someone suggested that Laviku had turned his back on his ocean, on his children. She couldn't imagine how those who saw this Ionu as she did her All father felt.

[Aislyn Leavold]

”That’s impossible.”
Ionu couldn’t be dethroned. That wasn’t something that happened to gods. Gods didn’t just fall out of power, usurped into some other being like a stepping stone to greater power. One, sole deity controlled an entire city. One controlled the sun, the moon. They were immortal. Constant. Gods didn’t just die.

That’s not true.

She’d read about Sagallius, about his rise to power. About the death of a god and the rise of a new power. What wreckage that had caused; what chaos. That meant it was possible. But that didn’t happen to Ionu.
Then again, who would know?
No crew have lost their gnosis.
There were crew aboard the Mischief that held Ionu’s mark? How had they gained it? When?
Aislyn had seen many marked by her deity’s power, but personally met very few. She knew no other stories of Ionu, of how they had appeared, of how they bestowed their power and why. Why she was chosen, or anyone else, for that matter. Why they were special.
The illusionist’s shoulder ached. She couldn’t lose her mark. That couldn’t happen. Ionu couldn’t die, or be overtaken, or anything. She had nothing but faith in the grandeur of the deity, and nothing but confidence in their power. Confidence in her own power.

”Gods don’t die.” She felt the sympathy pulling at Naia’s words when she spoke about the possibility of abandonment. ”Or, at least… Ionu doesn’t.”
She felt a pang of annoyance. Surely Naia knew how powerful Ionu was. She’d been in the city of Alvadas for long enough, as far as Aislyn knew.
”Ionu certainly hasn’t abandoned us, either.”
Her tone was sharper than she intended, almost snappy. But she was careful with her words. Us, not me. People were perceptive to words, and Aislyn was not ignorant to that. She was Maya, after all, and she was speaking to someone who “Maya” would rather like to speak to again. It would be no good if she seemed too attached, too personal. "Maya" wasn't marked by Ionu, and Aislyn had to make it seem that way.

”It’s just… It’s probably…”
Naia didn’t have an answer. The Alvads didn’t have an answer. Alvadas didn’t have an answer. Ionu was nowhere to be found. Her prayers were left unanswered and the creeping feeling of something wrong hid around every corner.
Aislyn hadn’t felt abandoned. Not until now.
”Ionu has a sense of humour we can’t understand. Gods have more power than anyone could understand, after all. Perhaps they just grew bored. Wished to change something, make something new.”

Abandonment didn’t feel like a lot of anything.

”I’ve been here for all my years. Ionu has been here forever. If we grow used to the illusions they bring us, then there’s no fun in anything at all. If I- you- we’ve grown accustomed to Alvadas, imagine Ionu.”

It felt like a whole lot of nothing, actually.

”I mean, it’s got to get boring, hasn’t it?”

Aislyn leaned back into the sand, her knuckles turning white from her death grip on her notebook. Her gaze fell to the sky, where a deceptively cheerful flock of lacey songbirds glided above. In the back, a contrasting member of the flying party lagged behind. A stark contrast to the iridescent feathers of its brethren, the bird was almost entirely black. Squinting her eyes at the scene, the woman watched as the bird fell farther and farther back, until it let out several distressing calls to the birds that abandoned it. The others continued on, until eventually the flock- and then the lone bird- drifted out of Aislyn’s vision.

”Lonely, even.”

[Naia Whitewater]

Speech | 53rd of Winter, 515 AV | Thoughts

Ice took to Naia's veins when it became quite apparent she'd misspoken, and she picked at her clothes and fiddled with her hair to the settle down her storming mind.

For all her time in Alvadas, she hadn't heard such earnest dedication. Not to say that those she'd thus met didn't dedicate themselves, life, or any other aspect to the God of the City of Illusions, but it wasn't what she would call an honest devotion. Usually it was something sung, hummed, or theatrically announced. It may have been said in truth by their hearts, but it was no honest display she was familar with.

To her, the truest dedication to Gods were stripped down and bare faced.

None the less, those strange acts, and Alvadas' strange disposition in general, were how the Svefra had come to define its people, and its God Ionu. It was almost off hearing words of gripping faith slip from the lips of someone she'd thus deemed 'normal', and Naia was forced to suppose that a different kind of faith to the one she and her people harboured, and different again from those in Nyka, was what what enveloped the city.

Maya seemed to be as tense as Naia herself was, and gooseflesh rippled on her arms as she saw the woman's death grip on her the book, and she damned herself for opening up such a can of worms and derailing what could have been a very pleasant conversation. Still, she was somewhat glad that she could have opened it up, for as quickly Maya's tongue had turned sharp, it seemed to take to a pathway that she hadn't considered.

The boredom of Gods.

Now that was a terrifying thought, if the Svefra had ever heard one.

Maya reclined on the sand, and seemed to continue her depth in thought, and the brunette could think of nothing else to do than to take her own seat amongst what she assumed was sand, digging her fingers into the substances as she scrutinized what what it was truly supposed to be. Maya made the mention of loneliness, and the Svefra couldn't help snorting.

"I'm sorry, I-" a small grin stretched acrossed Naia's mouth, a girlish giggle slipping from her lips, and she hoped to wave off her rudeness as she turned towards the blonde woman. "I do not know your Ionu, but I know my ocean Father Laviku," she pressed her lips, and sought a manner in which she could speak respectfully, while still conveying her meaning, "Before he found his mate, he sated his loneliness in what some would consider very mortal ways. We have many Alvina of the sea." The thought was a jarring one, though more so her choice in words. The Gods indeed were not mortal, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cause you offense in misspeaking of your God. I'm just... worried. I'm very worried."

[Aislyn Leavold]

”Surely, you’re joking.”
The casualness in which Naia spoke of her god amazed the illusionist. It was certainly a… Different approach. All the reverence she’d seen, been brought up to have, and had displayed in her life was a respect above all else. A lesson that the gods were above them, better than them, and powerful in a way they didn’t understand. That mortals were not like gods, and gods were most certainly not mortal. Or… Moral.
But with Naia, came another view.
”Laviku…”
Aislyn had never given much more than a passing thought or an unconscious respect to the ocean god. She’d never looked into his origin, or his followers, or his ‘life’. Did gods have lives? They were undying, of course, but did that make them unliving as well? Did they have pastimes, or favourite things to do? Aislyn had always known them to be on a separate plane of reality to mortals, but…
If what Naia was saying was true, the god must have some life to him.

Despite herself, Aislyn laughed.

It felt good to laugh. She hadn’t done that- or at least, couldn’t remember doing that- in quite a while. With the state Alvadas was in, and Aislyn’s aversion to people in general, there had never been much of an opportunity for anything convivial. The Svefra’s presence was such a refreshing one, it seemed, despite the circumstances in which they had met. And she brought such fascinating views as well. Even if the illusionist felt some of them were... misguided.
Drawing her eyes downwards, Aislyn’s smile faded again into an uncertain expression as Naia continued. Mortality, immortality, the ways of the gods. A circle of uncertainty and… Abandonment.

Strange.

”I’m not…” She chose her words carefully, ”I’m not insulted, don’t worry. I know you mean well.”
Aislyn was worried, too. Who wouldn’t be? It seemed like the whole city was on edge, after the announcement of the Speakers...

Looking up from the very interesting grain of sand the woman had busied herself investigating, Aislyn turned towards Naia. She had a question to ask.

”Were you there? Last season, the final day. The Speakers-” Her thoughts fell over themselves, tangled in her mind. ”The… Announcement. The Speaker’s festival, I mean.”

Finally releasing the death grip on her notebook, the artist began flipping through it. By now, it was nearly filled- she was going to need a new one, soon. Every page filled with sketches, observations, journal entries, the like. Most every thought calculated to leave no conspicuous information, should someone who was not Aislyn go through it. She’d considered encoding it once, or creating some language to write in after someone actually had gone through the book, but that was still a work in progress. For the moment, she wrote in common, and drew in charcoal.
Near the end was a drawing, of Alvadas that day. The stage, the Nuit, the Speakers, and the crowd. The crowd that seemed to be all of Alvadas. The question was, was Naia a part of it?
”There’s so many things left unanswered after that. I just… Haven’t had anyone to properly speak to about this.” Aislyn didn’t speak to a lot of people in general.
”...I’m worried, too.”

[Naia Whitewater]

Speech | 53rd of Winter, 515 AV | Thoughts | oocClasses came back like a slap in the face- sorry for how long this took!

The laughter had been sweet enough a chime to the Svefra's ears, but the proving that seemingly no long term damage to whatever relationship between she and Maya was sweeter.

There was a short weight that then took to her, and seemingly to Maya, Naia too awkward to think clearly, still edging her beating heart to calm from her merriment. Her Lias had always criticized her for being so blase` of the Gods, but truly, the brunette saw no issue is acknowledging their immortality while making plays on the near humanity of some aspects of their lives. Of course, the fact that she was ocean born made all the very bit of importance. It would have been unforgivable for a Non-Svefra to make such plays as she had, and she further understood Maya's position. Though, the demi-gods of Nyka still threaded prejudice through her veins.

Try as she might, and much like Nyka so many years ago - she was still somewhat of a stranger in the streets.

Breaking the harsh silence between them, and all of a sudden reminding Naia of the outside world - Maya mentioned the season before, and took to flipping through her notebook. Last Season. Festival. The Speakers. Unanswered Questions. Her brow furrowed, and she tucked a wild lock behind her ear as she mediated the words. She didn't have a damned clue what she was talking about.

"The... no, not at all I-" Naia wrung her fingers, and began almost numbly counting the freckles on her hand, wondering if any of the dots and spatterings on her skin took to form constellations, her eyes then gliding up to her forearms, and she traced over the thin scars she'd gained the night she met the blonde woman. For the longest while they were the only tokens of truth that made her belief that some kind of reality had occurred.

"I'm a sailor- On board The Mischief, only came into port on the 3rd, as I'm sure you know," she drew in her knees and better shifted her position. She knew as well as any other the difficulty of wishing to speak on something that no one else was willing to hear, and thus she conveyed all that she could that was the aura of complete willingness to listen, her small smile soft and gaze easy.

After all, she couldn't claim that Maya's ominosity hadn't made her want to know.

"I'm not sure at all if I'd like to hear what you have to say- but I'm a willing ear."