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 Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2011 1:41 am
It was as if he was breaking into his own home.
This was an exaggeration, of course – Leander still had his key, and he could get in easily without trying to be stealthy about it.
That didn’t change the fact that he was entering his home suspiciously late in the evening, ashamed and silent and just a shadow to the nearby village. Everyone knew, after all, that Leander di Laurentius had left aboard The Rosa, and that he had a task to accomplish. Dust had already begun to settle on his belongings – not, Leander would admit, an entirely unexpected consequence of his extended absence.
It had been three entire months since Leander had set foot in his home, and he wasn’t sure why his body didn’t rest at the bottom of the ocean instead. He wasn’t even sure that he knew whose bodies did. None of them had mattered to him. He had said farewell to his fellow survivors – or what was left of them, anyway, because it wouldn’t do for the deaths to stop once they reached shore again and left that cursed ship behind – but he wasn’t sure that he was ready to return to life on Panymium again. It was strange. Leander had known before making the trip that it would be far from a smooth journey. Other nations and states were not blind to Panymium’s rampant plague problem. But he hadn’t expected things to go quite so wrong, and he hadn’t expected that he’d be back in Mishkan without even attempting to ask for some sort of help.
His brother rarely extended an invitation to Leander for mid-summer dining. Neither of them were connoisseurs of fine food, and both of them were pleased just to fill their stomachs without any sort of conversation. Leander would not expect a letter from Lucterius, not this soon. He wasn’t sure that Lucterius even expected him to return for another year. Lucterius had hope for him and for Panymium.
Pink and purple light filtered through Leander’s window. Nothing had changed since April, he thought. But at the same time, everything had.
He was certain that he’d been tainted by the plague, or something very much like that. He’d spent so much time around the plague, these past few weeks; it was really unavoidable. And yet here he was.
He’d returned here to see his world again. The little landlocked village with low rooftops and no sails – Leander had needed the familiarity, because he’d seen so much that was alien that he wasn’t sure now why he was here in the first place. Here – Panymium, Mishkan, still in the living plane. His home had been the core of his experience for such a long time. It would continue to be, of course, but it would be difficult for Leander to forget his journey at sea. He thought perhaps the sight of his family might help with that sort of matter, too (Leander’s family had always come first in his affairs, after all), but Leander wasn’t sure that he wanted to guarantee their doom as well as his own. It would be better to die alone than to perpetuate that death and spread it among his family, wouldn’t it?
He found Lucterius’ old gift to him, though – the battered horse’s bust, and atop it the white unicorn horn with its black, black stench. He breathed it in, and then wafted the stench away with a hand. It was terrible.
It was familiar.
“It’s strange,” he told it. “And to think that once I was so sure I’d be a hero. You were always…” Lucterius hadn’t quite been the rational brother, no. But he’d certainly always had ambitions within his own reach, and he’d always been able to achieve those ambitions. “I don’t know why I’m not…why I’m not with everyone else.”
Inanimate objects did not talk, naturally, or listen, or respond. Leander didn’t expect a response – he had simply needed the feelings articulated aloud. Perhaps it’d take another change of setting to decide how he could start again on Panymium, and perhaps to give the disease time to work (his days were numbered, after all). He didn’t want to forget the Rosa entirely, after all.
Imisus was across the continent, and he hadn’t been there for a long time. And Leander really did some space to think.
(He didn’t think, however, about the news of the many deaths aboard the Rosa already having reached his brother, or the trek his brother would inevitably make personally to Leander’s home. He took the bust, though, because he wasn’t sure that he’d ever kept any other gift from Lucterius, other than those so small and insignificant that they could easily be mistaken for others.)
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Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 2:36 pm
more break-ins - mid-spring, 1412
Perhaps it was not home anymore, but it was far closer to that than any place Leander had visited in the past year. He couldn't deny that he needed it, though; it had been his base of operations for a long while, and its quiet and solitude would be welcome before the busy hub that Lucterius' manor home had always represented in Leander's memory. A week, he'd told himself, and he'd sworn it on the pearlescent unicorn's horn, still shamelessly intact despite the condition of the horse's bust upon which it rested. But a week would be plenty of time - a letter sent ahead of him ensured that.
Well. The letter had probably arrived, by now. His brother's manor was not so far, and Leander...perhaps it was cowardice. But he could not deny that his remaining time with his brother was precious. Even if, as he'd suspected for a while now, he had some immunity to the plague (supernatural or not), time ticked on. Leander was aging, and Lucterius...was probably aging faster. He'd always taken it upon himself to shoulder the world's burdens, Leander thought with a smile. And family was important. Leander certainly couldn't deny that any longer.
He glanced up - again - to see the proud little house with its garden blooming mightily. Strange, thought Leander, but more of the town had changed since he'd last been: a new door on his friend Mr. Gibson's tannery, fresh flowers lining every path. It'd been like some welcome celebration, but that no one applauded in awe at Leander's approach, and neither did they stop their work. It'd always been a practical, diligent town; Sunday would see Leander catching up and saying fare-well again. It looked cleaner than Leander would think it, too. His house, he meant: there was nothing about a Panymese town that was clean. Well, he'd best see to the horse's stabling first...
Yet it was over all too soon, and Leander fingered the key gently. He was only truly here to set his matters in order: pack up the most necessary tools and most precious belongings, and cart them all off again to Lucterius'. A week would be plenty of time.
And yet as Leander pushed through the garden he saw movement - not the lonely scurry of a rat through grass but a wave of movement, and colorful: it looked as though flowers migrated, if flowers had colored stems and lacked, well, leaves and roots and all the other things that made flowers not humanoid. He stopped in his path, just as a small voice sounded -
"Watch out!"
- from somewhere far below him.
Leander looked down.
A trio of little excito carried a large branch into his path. "Mayor takes appointments in the back!" a copper-colored one called, and they moved on their way.
What was going on? Leander stepped over more excito in his path, confused, and turned the key in its lock cautiously when he reached the door, although by now - by now the movement behind him had stopped, and a rabble of voices rose in anger. Well, if some damned plagues wanted to take objection to Leander's homecoming, he could simply walk in and shut them out. So he did.
...well, he thought he'd shut them out. He certainly had been careful not to let them follow him in the way into the house: though he knew plagues could hold grudges (as that albatross had, aboard the Rosa), he did not think they needed him to be so submissive to their wills as to invite them in outright! And yet - and yet the house's main room was peppered with little plagued creatures about the height of Leander's palm. "What is the meaning of this?" Leander asked, brow furrowed. There was no conceivable way the excito gathered knew about the albatross' plight: Leander did not think animated disease could, well, read, or gossip with those the emperor held in favor, and...well, as far as Leander had heard, plagues did not have some sort of collective memory, or telepathic ability. Did they?
The excito gathered hushed, and several departed the room in quite a tizzy. Good, Leander thought: those, at least, had some sense of propriety. He glared at those remaining, but they did not much more than look away from him. It was a while before an answer emerged: a little fellow in creams and blues, with a large hat like a ship, strutting in from the direction of Leander's bedroom.
"I'm the Mayor," he said officiously. "Although I really don't think we can fit a human in the Settlement."
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