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 Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2017 9:02 pm
In all the lurid violence from days past, his phone hadn't forgotten the arrangement. Its chime pounded int his ears, chasing away his fitful sleep until he recognized the darkness of his own closet. His knuckles throbbed their angry displacements. Sleep's shroud unveiled cold memory. He was awake, and alive, and aware.
But he wasn't okay, he knew. Tea was his only choice of breakfast before he left for that lonely, familiar place. Faustite's mind snapped to it at once — too clear, too keen to all its sharp lines. The way the fence sang under too-long fingernails. The curve of the grass bent double in its eternal work under the moonlight. The shop windows reflecting back all the haunted eyes from faceless strangers. The thrilling spate of auras each grazins his skin with their reaching hands. In an instant, he was there. In an instant, he felt the stutter-step of time give way to those chilly months. He could see his breath as before, and the weeds still stubbornly clawed their way from the ground.
But his knuckles still moaned their sad stories. Comfort broke like a pain of glass and struck its splinters through his throat.
Oberon will be here soon, if he isn't already. He pressed the palm of his hale hand to his forehead. Frayed nerves only continued to crack and fizzle as awareness caught up with him. He smiled grimly. I'm not ready for this.
What if he found something pivotal? What will have to come of that?
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Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2018 4:44 pm
This meeting was important. He’d collected the information that he could, compiled it together, and tried to come up with something worth sharing with his part-youma acquaintance. He could feel the aura flood his senses the moment Faustite appeared, and Oberon closed the golden book that held all of his compiled notes. It was a magical book that would never run out of space, and he intended to make good use of it. It was just a bit cumbersome to tote around.
“Hey, so I was looking through my notes,” he chirped as he pushed himself to his feet from where he’d sat with legs crossed on the ground near the fence. “I’ve heard some rumors about a knight of Cosmos that might have been a youma at one point… and a negaverse officer before that,” Oberon started, but paused when he looked up to see Faustite fully for the first time that evening.
“Woah… you look like s**t.”
Probably not the best way to express his concern, so Oberon cleared his throat and tucked the awkwardly weighing book under his arm. “Uh… are you okay?” Because he certainly didn’t look okay. Oberon eyed him skeptically, and then reached down to dig into one of his many pants pockets and pulled out a small bottle of water he kept with him, and then dug in another pocket for a granola bar.
“Want either of these? They’re not old.”
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Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 11:54 am
His heartbeat rattled frivolously in his ears, but it settled to a white noise as Oberon leapt straight into business. Faustite, in response, pushed himself to focus on it — to latch hypervigilance to every detail, from enunciation of every word to their very meaning, to all the permutations, to the murky identity of this officer-turned-youma-turned-knight and all those sullied details, and all the ways in which such rumors may be outright wrong or simply metaphorical.
But that hair-thin, tenuous, sorely needed line to normalcy snapped in the instant Oberon remarked on Faustite's condition.
So Faustite watched with a sigh as Oberon corrected himself, as he set aside a suspicious-looking book, and Faustite wanted to brace his hand against the fence but a ubiquitous throbbing warned him against it. Instead he stood awkwardly thrumming with restless energy, with his mind altogether split in a thousand different directions.
The question roused a sardonic laugh. The water was accepted in wordless thanks, though the granola left for a time not dominated by nauseousness. The gut must be where my sins languish. I haven't eaten since then. There will be time for that, he knew.
The bottle required some finagling to open around broken knuckles, but it was finagling executed while staunchly refusing any help. And when he finally managed a few desperate swigs, the world's weight felt a little lesser. His parallel to Sisyphus felt that much more overdramatic, despite its parable. There weren't repercussions crouching in the shadows here — and there wasn't time to contemplate the results of completed action. There was only Oberon, his strange book, and his questions about youma.
"I need to move through it," he managed at last.
Slowly his frazzled thought churned around the message. "You said a youma became a knight of Cosmos. How can that happen? Their starseeds are shattered by chaos. There's nothing left. You can't unbreak a pot."
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