Welcome to Gaia! ::

((OOC: Waiting on Ikken/animelover...))

((OOC: Because I'd forgotten when you were to be back. Thanks for clearing that up. I like the name, by the way. Forteresse de Terrain Vague...Indefinite Terrain Fortress. Or something. Am I right?))

Tekira looked over the rail. "It's huge." she muttered, embarrassed at the obvious awe in her voice. Her own small city of Terrieze had been all she'd ever known before this, and the huge expanses of space she was seeing these days often left her close to speechless. "You live here?"

((OOC: Are you sure? I've never seen 'wasteland' written like that...granted, it's not a word that comes up in my everyday conversation.))

Tekira accepted one of the whistles uncertainly. She ran her finger along it, trying to decipher what kind of bone it was without actually asking. She had an idea that that would be rude.
She'd already decided that she would leave just as soon as Aer and Janika were ready. If they didn't want to go with her, she'd go on her own.
This place made her uncomfortable and she was already ready to move on.

((My deepest and most heartfelt apologies for the delay. I was held up in Southern Illinois by a group of what I had thought were Trollocs, but were apparently my relatives. O.o

Now, since I didn't get to do what I wanted to do... I'm going to rewind and do it anyway.

No, Rivus isn't going to try to kill Tekira and Janika. 3nodding ))

Aer was--

Aer? Was that his name? Yes. Air, breeze--Old Tongue, of course, surprised himself that he'd never made the connection. 'd'Mors'? What did that mean? Mors... Aer forgot where he was for a long time as he tried to remember the meaning of his own name.

"Mors," he whispered. "Death."

A bright flash caused him to shut his eyes tightly, before he realied that it wasn't hurting his eyes. He slowly opened them to stare into the white light before him. It was ringed in a prism of colours, and for a moment he thought he saw a face in the light, but then it was gone. Aer approached the light slowly, cautiously, and reached out.

A lamp. The light was not so bright after all, he realized as he touched the top of it and found a handle. He picked it up and swung it around to peer into the shadows. The light extended out perhaps ten feet into the darkness, and there the light ended in a sharp ring, as if it were barely holding the darkness back. Aer clutched the lantern to him and realized that his teeth were chattering. It was cold, he knew suddenly. So cold, it fact, that his hands were numb. He couldn't let go of the lantern, and tiny tendrils of the metal, as if it had melted, were stretching out and covering his fingers, binding his hand to the icy lantern. He shook it wildly, trying to get the lantern off, but suddenly the light vanished and he stopped moving. He could still hear his teeth chattering.

"You are the Breeze of Death," he heard a familiar voice whisper, but he couldn't quite place it. The voice echoed through the darkness.

"Water," Aer murmured, trying to remember. "You are... water?"

"Almost," came the anticipative reply. "Come now, Breeze."

"A... a stream, a river..."

"Precisely."

"River of Death."

"Can you name me?"

"The river... d'Mors... Rivus, my father?"

Aer spun around, peering into the shadows, but he could see nothing.

"Yes, my son."

Aer flexed his hand experimentally, and jumped when the lantern snapped off his hand, falling and clattering to the ground. He heard glass shatter, and he heard laughter--a new burst of laughter with every clink of every tiny piece of glass that hit the ground, and it seemed that it would overwhelm Aer. He turned away from the voice--as much as he could tell, with the echoing--and started to run.

"Yes, my son!" the cackling voice repeated. "Run away! You are so very good at it!"

Aer didn't pay any attention. Fear gripped him like the icy air, flooded his veins, gripped his lungs. He could barely breathe--it was as if the air itself was frozen. He coughed, and tasted blood, wiped his mouth and kept running. Every step he took exhausted him more, though, and every breath he took pushed more blood into his mouth. Eventually he fell to his knees, panting hard.

A hand cupped under his chin and jerked his head up. Out of the darkness, suddenly, he could see a pale face.

"Rivus," he whispered. "Why are you doing this?"

Rivus only laughed. "Why not?"

Aer sat bolt upright in the white bed, soaked with sweat and panting as heavily as if he had been running.

"...destination, and my homeport!" It was Rhackam's voice.

Ignoring the man, Aer clutched at his stomach; there was no pain, but something was there that should not have been. Looking down at himself, he remembered.

A thread of Spirit. He laid a hand over his belly and felt, tentatively, with a few Spirit thread of his own. He had never been very skilled with Spirit; most of his dubious skill lay in Air and Fire. But he felt with a handful of Spirit threads, and found the one he wanted--the one that he snaked its way down his throat before. Now it lay in his body, dormant. Dead. Its purpose had been served. But why would Wraith have such a thing on his ship? And lying in wait as it was, just ready for an unsuspecting victim to stray into its path...?

He twined his own threads around it and yanked it out. He felt a litle tug, but nothing terrible as it came out fo him. He dumped it in a corner, where it would slowly dissipate, and banished his own threads. He fell back onto the bed for only a moment, but all exhaustion was gone. He had slept well, if plagued by nightmares. Shaking his head, he got up and followed the others out. When offered the whistle, he first searched for magic in it, then took it listlessly.

'Forteresse de Terrain Vague'? Another language, but not Old Tongue, at least not the Donnol Old Tongue. Aer didn't speak the Donnol Old Tongue fluently, but he recognized it when he heard it, and that was in some third language.

He shrugged it out of his mind and walked to the railing, standing to Tekira's right. He did not know how to conceal his magickal weavings from others, or he would have tried to block out his words from Rhackam's ears without the man knowing about it. Instead, he leaned over the rail, panned his head to the right as if surveying the inside of the hangar, and then to the left. He leaned a little further, craning his neck as if he had spotted something interesting. As he did so, he murmured in a low voice, "The whistles aren't booby-trapped, at least not with magick, and I don't know how to look for poison, but I don't think there is any. My gitacr is behind the ship, so if we need an easy out, that's it." He pulled his head back and laughed suddenly, and in a normal voice, said, "Oh. I thought it was a... It's a wheel." Grinning, he glanced back at Rhackam, wondering where Janika was. Perhaps still in her ensorcelled sleep...?

((Oh, poo. The only part that I consciously took from Jordan was the idea of the lamp barely holding the darkness back. And what, exactly, made you think of the Black Wind? I read over it and I never mentioned anything like it...

How did you like the lantern melding to his hand? I'm particularly proud of that imagery. 3nodding

I can' 'elp but notice that ye've dropped yer dialect, Master Rhackam. xd ))

Aer turned to face Rhackam and, summoning every last bit of courtly experience that he had, swept a bow that was for all the world exactly as his father would have done.

"I do appreciate the invitation, Master Rhackam," he said, wishing he were wearing a new--or at least clean--outfit. Well, his manner would have to make up for his clothing. "But I--"

He broke off, suddenly, staring at a point past Rhackam's head.

Water... flowing... dying... killing... Rivus. He's here.

Aer changed what he had been about to say. "Oh, but I am famished, and I would love to see more of the Forteresse, if you would allow. I'm sure the Lady Tekira and her companion will agree with me, if they do not have prior arrangements?" About halfway through the last sentence, he stopped talking to Rhackam and began talking to Tekira, turning slightly to face her with a questioning expression.

Hopefully his seeming change of heart would not trouble her overmuch, but he had to find out why his father was here--if, in fact, he was here at all. For that matter, Aer also wanted to find out why he, himself, was suddenly so certain that Rivus was here.

"Excellent! Now, if you will please follow me." Wraith led them through the hall into a circular art gallery of sorts, comtaining maybey thirty paintings around the perimiter. Halting before a particular one, a still life resembling an elaborate dinning hall, he focused his gaze upon it and extended the proper weaves of magick.

The painting rippled and took on a three dimensional appearance. Life also came to the painting as several servants appeared and began setting the table.

"Ladies first." Wraith gestured to the artwork, his hand passing through it and into the dining room to show it as a kind of gateway. Walking over to Aer he muttered something next to the pilot's ear. "If you would hang back for a moment, I would like a private word with you."

((Oh, come on! I assure you it really leads to a dining hall!))

"As you wish, m'lady." Wraith stepped through the portrait quickly to issue an order to a couple of servants who were fumbling around with a rather large pork roast. "Sorry," Jack said, stepping back through the portal. "Just didn't want them to ruin the main course."

((Sorry for the confusion, SSD. Bard and I do that a lot. We're talking about a series of books called the Wheel of Time, by author Robert Jordan. Don't worry about the references, we won't do anything that requires you to have read the books. None of our stuff is solidly connected to it anyway, we just talk about it a lot. sweatdrop ))

Aer stiffened a little when Rhackam spoke to him, but nodded and backed away from the painting, standing aside. What could Rhackam want to speak to him about? Something in the painting caught his eye, though. A man had just walked into the room, when Rhackam wasn't looking, and peered out at them. Then, before Rhackam looked back, the man left the room again. The man was familiar, but at this distance, the image was slightly distorted, and Aer couldn't tell who it was. He had been wearing a long red robe, and was bald, but had a tattoo covering most of his head, and some sort of facial hair. Aer only wished he knew who te man was, but he was gone before Rhackam might have seen and told him.