Welcome to Gaia! ::

He had a feather, like a sliver of night sky. He’d taken a bit of cord and tied it for now, around the core of it, wearing it now under his shirt as a curious new pendant. A tickling trinket and memoir to what he’d just given away.

The memory of seeing his face there, adorning one great wing was… haunting still, but he’d made his choice and he felt perhaps it could have been worse. He had something that he could…almost call a friend. In so much as he thought anything here could be called such.

Heliodora, he just needed to find her, then he thought he could get answers. He could ask her about the ice he’d ‘remembered’. He could ask her about… the story of the Indian Princess, and the man with blue eyes. He could ask her a lot of things, and he could hope for answers that might not lead to more questions.

He could hope and ask for a lot of things, but he could still doubt the likelihood of a good outcome.
There Were other things in this ‘Ashdown’, this rain soaked otherworld filled to the brim with things that made him think they inspired the ‘Kindly Ones’ and more.

Zac froze too, like the rain, suspended mid motion, mid thought. Caught up in the darkness like it was some eerie amber. He broke his own stillness for a moment, uncertain but reaching in a twisted wonder for the rain where it stopped for a moment, frozen there in they air.
The world stuttered, blinked like a strobe light between a flicker of sun and the lack of -light.

That voice… her VOICE.
He almost turned, because he wanted it to be her. He wanted her to be alright, he wanted her to even have done something foolish like come looking for him, even if at the very same time he didn’t want that at all.

That…
That made him afraid to turn, but he did, cautiously and slowly, hoping that maybe, though unlikely it would be the creature from who’s presence he’d just departed. The…could you call it an Owl? The masks, No-Face the Owl.

“…Y…you’re not her.” Though he doubted what certainty he felt made it to his voice.



"...Tick tock?"

He added frowning. Time... time was moving forward? Running out?

What did that even mean? Seeing is believing? We believe what we’ve seen?

They’d seen…magic so they believed?

But…

Aleksy saw things -differently.

“Stop that!” he said frowning to hear his own voice, but it didn’t get any better, just more familiar parodies.

Maybe he was reading too much into this, he wasn’t sure he was brave enough to go back and see the young man and his flowers. Sometimes you didn’t want to be ‘seen’.
“Who are you? What are you?” He tried, twisting to try and see, though he doubted there was anything there somehow. Or if there was, maybe he didn’t want to see it at all.

Frustration, confusion. He turned, searching, looking for the mocking voice.

“What do you -want?!” He called, expecting the question to mirror back to him.

Finn’s voice, and all he could do was shake his head. He was glad no one else was here right now, He took a breath and squeezed his hands into fists.
“I’m not making more deals. If you’re just doing this for a lark…”

“What?”

It was such a -stupid- utterance he thought immediately after the fact.

He kept searching, kept trying to find some source, something he could cling to that might imply there was a logic to any of this.

He didn’t want to chain the stuttering phrases together, but he did. Of COURSE he did.

We believe in what we’ve seen, what we’ve seen… is you?
Stupid, STUPID thought. It was just taking pieces of what he’d said to make echoes back at him.
…sort of. He hadn’t said that they believe what they see, had he? Not….here at least, not recently that he could remember.

“I don’t understand…” he said, anxiety and frustration at war with each other.

He was left, shivering, staring for a long moment. There was the most dreadful feeling that he… had set something in motion.


- fin