Unhinged but Aware

“But wouldn’t you want to know?” The words come in a quick rush, oblivious to just how much of himself is tied into the questions he asks and the way her words settle in his head. Ghosts that he never asked for, the kind that had haunted him all his life and still could. If he hadn’t learned how to control them. 

How to silence them.

“If this is something you can control, if you can will it to come, that means you can will it to go, too. There’s balance to everything like that.” It comes out too excited, that urge to help, to make himself useful, still too ingrained in him. 

Even if there’s the darker thought that it might not be something there’s any real solution to. 

“Maybe you should try it. Sometime.” happy or healthy or any of that other bullshit. 

“I...” Shia isn’t sure how to answer, listening to the way that Niko’s words each other out of his mouth. 

The echoes are her burden to carry, and she has wondered before if her mind shattered before they came, or because they came. The labcoats helped her along, but even so she’d not been happy or healthy or any of that other bullshit. 

“Maybe? It’s...hard to translate. I don’t think I can call them up, i’m a...conduit, and if there isn’t any electricity there is nothing to call me forward.” 

She doesn’t try to explain further. Not about the scars on her back to tell her how often she’s been rushed forward, or the terrible things she’s shown there. Blood and death and mayhem and madness. She would rather stay here than call forward a hell not yet come to pass. 

It’d be too easy to get lost, forget a totem slash and never find her way back to when she should be. 

“Maybe, if I try...I ask for help.” Her voice went very quiet. “So that I don’t get lost in what hasn’t come yet. Maybe.” 

“more monsters than people now.  you want to be invisible, find way to make happen for real.  the one time it no work, you could be dead.”

there’s a raise of one hand - a snap of her fingers - a demonstration of the quickness of the moment in which life or death often hinged.  she’s not trying to be cruel.  she’s attempting to throw a little realism her way.  one day… simply being quiet and withdrawn, just hoping to go unnoticed wouldn’t be enough to save her life.    

“and if they stayed… would you have stayed?”

she does wonder if the woman is here because of a solid decision, a choice made for herself.  or if she’s here because others had made those decisions ( whether she was a factor in them or not )  and she’d simply decided to… tag along.

but the question aside, she gets an explanation, and in so far as the woman doesn’t say so directly, there’s a word which comes to mind.  one which had been used to describe a few others.

“prophet.  stream forward is future, da?”

there’s a glance up, then she’s picking up the small pot, taking a spoonful of the watery substance and blowing off the heat before tasting it… it’s not exactly a la carte…  more broth and liquid than much of substance.  but there’s enough nutrition, even if it’s rather devoid of flavour.  

“i can be prophet.  i tell you future of this soup.  is make good food for plant.”

there’s a slight wrinkle of her nose as the pot is set to one side.  there’s another of those shrugs - and she invites the other to try it if she wants.

“can eat, but not tasty at all.  have some if you good at forgetting about flavour.  and… future should be uncertain.  cloudy.  is no fun if things all predetermined.  is why we have free will.”

Shia heard her words but didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure what to say. Of course, it would be easy for a monster to see her, snack her up. There wasn’t much she could do about that. Unless the echoes warned her first. It had happened before. 

“Mmm. Maybe? One place gets stale. I like the wind and trees and road. No bars for my windows now so I am not trapped in place.” She shrugs. 

There are reasons she left, and reasons she didn’t stay. They are similar, but not the same. She didn’t stay because of the ruins of the tower, and the future of a ground covered in blood and ice. Averted maybe, but the memories had still followed her around like ghosts. 

She’d left for more space. Less walls. Because of Masha and a few others. Plenty of reasons, but not a single motivating factor that made the choice for her. It was easier that way maybe. 

“Mm” Shia nodded her head in agreement, eyes lighting on the soup when she’s offered some. 

“I like your future better than the ones the echoes send me. But I like food. Is tasty almost always. So bland in the white rooms with the labcoats.” She made a face, and moved in closer. “You’re right. The echoes show me a maybe future. Too many options though, so it’s never for sure.” 

The answer she gives him shouldn’t be comforting, he doesn’t imagine it’s anything that sits well with her. That it rarely takes a coherent shape, too much converging at once, and his brain still fights to put it into perspective that he can understand. It’s being a child again, too many voices ringing in his head, his hands covering his ears trying to drown out the wailing of the dead as they try to get inside that warm living body he inhabited. 

Before he knew he could make them stop.

It leaves him cold even considering it, but there’s still some odd relief that she couldn’t tell him exactly how all of this ends, even if he asked. It feels selfish as soon as he feels it, guilt swallowed down because maybe it would be easier for her if it were.

Some direct line from A to B, not the mess she’s describing for him, too many lines overlapping, every one of them might be a life. Someone’s choices, someone’s mistakes.

“Can you do it on purpose, or does it just… happen?”

“Sometimes I can...step into the stream, let it carry me forward. Other times when it comes for me it’s grip is weak and I can stay if I want to.” A finger traces shapes in the dirt. “Like today.” 

The question has merit, and she turns it in her mind. Poking at it from different angles. Curiosity blooming inside of her like a bloody rose. If she concentrated could she make the whispers come? Ask the stream to pick her up and ferry her forwards? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Easier to fight it when it captured her, than asking for it to appear. Better a curse than a gift. 

“I know when it’s coming, but I don’t make it happen. Not sure if I could, if I’d even want to.”

Niko’s lips press together in a thin smile, empathy is a cruel bitch even if he can’t relate for all the same reasons. Still, his head is just as uncooperative, he thinks they might have more in common than she does with Alice, and that image of blood staining her fingers isn’t helping anything. 

He can’t tell if it would be kinder or simply selfish to volunteer it, if it’s smothering what she’s trying to tell him with pain of his own. If it might help to know that she’s not the only one here who’d been damned by what they saw.

He saw the past. If he’s making sense of what she’s telling him… she sees the future. Maybe putting it in that perspective explains more fully why he was drawn to Alice so quickly.

It’s forward.

Curiosity follows, an instinctive thing, an urge to ask, but that gets caught behind his teeth too, some inherent terror of what it might look like. Life, as he knew it, was already strung together on thin strands, wires cobbling together those moments where he could pretend he was happy, string up the things worth living for like they were fairy lights, hoping to find some comfort in their glow.

He doesn’t want to know what’s ahead of them. He doesn’t want to think about the future, he doesn’t want to hope for anything. He doesn’t want to see it stripped away.

“Is it just your own or…?“ He stalls, nothing seems safe to ask, he’s trying to get something off his tongue though, so she knows he hears her. “Did you know the end of the world was coming?”

“Complicated. So many strands in the web.” She frowned, trying to translate what her mind knew and what her lips were willing to pass into the world. Not an easy task on the best of days, and this wasn’t exactly one of them. 

“Sometimes, it’s just me ahead of now.” Her tongue darted out, wetting her lips for a moment. “Other times it’s...bigger. The tower was that way. No me to place, but the blue eyed monster was watching, his armies marching across the cold, cold, ground.” She frowned. 

“Hard to translate when you don’t speak the language. Things get blurry. Too many data streams converging changes the destination.” 

“problem is, is not people who are ‘seeing’.  is monster, vampire, revenant, hellhound.  you are exactly what they want to see - flesh, blood, soul.”  

she honestly doesn’t want the young woman to fool herself into thinking that a shade in society, someone who went unnoticed among a populace of ‘people’ equated to the same in the world as it stood.  it didn’t.  the change in the world was visceral and stark.  primal… not societal.

there’s a snort at the word ‘polite’.  seemingly so out of context.  that something like manners would mean that people were any safer or any less prone to being eaten.  she gets the gist though.  perhaps polite wasn’t the word for it, but if she’s looking out for others - even if, seemingly it’s only a select few, then dascha isn’t exactly going to critique her choices.

“is just as many stayed as left.”

a shrug - the rationale of ‘numbers’ didn’t hold water.  if anything, that base was more secure now than it had been before the other group had arrived.  as many staying behind as those who chose to move on.

she does, however squint at the next set of phrasing.  the ‘to be’ sounds familiar.  something that raises a suspicion about the nature of the girl.  there were rumours that the order held people with special gifts, people who could not only see the ‘what is’, but the ‘what might come to pass’.

“explain ‘to be’.”

it’s not so much a question, rather a prompt - a statement to see if that hunch might well bear fruit…

“Not a trick for monsters.” Shia paused and nodded her head. “Only monsters wearing human skins. Still plenty of them wandering with eyes that can be tricked.”

Shia knows the difference between a hellhound and a monster in human skin. One tells you right away that it is a beast, the other prefers to bide it’s time until you are wrapped in its claws with no easy escape in sight. She prefers the former to the latter, even if it is more likely to gobble her whole and leave nothing behind. 

“True. But I like the Masha nurse, and the Rachel doctor. They are worth following.” 

She didn’t need more of a reason than that. Masha had been kind to her, never made her want to snap her teeth as a reminder that even without a blade in hand she was dangerous. And she had made her neck work again after the tower. Not a small thing in Shia’s book, though it probably would have been for others. 

Shia cocks her head at the prompt, trying to find the easiest way to explain. “When the stream takes me I go...forward. Sometimes is something about to happen, sometimes what could happen. To Be gets murky, so many paths and not all of them lead to the same conclusion.” She scratches at the back of her neck. “I never stay longer than I have to. Never a fun game.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste, glad the echoes were quiet for once, even if it made her edgy. 

taking another taste of her dinner, the contents of the pot beginning to bubble and boil, dash takes another pause to look up.

“is difference between playing invisible and actually be invisible.  is things that can do that you know?”

she wonders what might make the woman think she’s beyond notice, unless of course she is one of those that held a certain manner of magic or trickery within.  or… a darker thought… someone who could whisper to shadows, could hide the light, could call upon a sovereign darkness from beneath her own skin.  dash hopes not.  a curse was a curse, no matter the effect or advantage that might come along with it.  and so far, there’s a smile and an honesty to her words that remind the ex-hunter of something she might call innocence.

“nyet.”

comes the reply.   their paths had crossed enough times now, and she had loitered in their presence for probably longer than she can put down to mere coincidence.  but still hadn’t crossed the line in her own mind to admit to being - part of something.

“i am myself.  they are their own.”

it’s as much of an answer as she has to offer right now, so there’s a quick change of subject, directing the focus of inquiry from herself back to the other.

“why you decide to leave?  is not easy life on road, not easy to walk away from place you call home.”

“No true invisibility. I’m just good at being what people don’t want to see. Eeyes skip right over you if you do it right.” Shia picked at an errant thread on the sleeve of her hoodie. 

True it wasn’t quite the same as it had been before. Back on the streets nobody wanted to see her. No place to be, half mad even on her good days. It hadn’t taken long to figure out how to make their eyes skip past instead of lingering. Some survival instincts came in handy. 

“Ah.”

She had played that sort of game once. When you lived on the streets (or more accurately the park) you got used tot he same faces. Same people. Didn’t mean they belonged to you, or you to them. It was something she could understand. In a manner anyway. 

“It was just a place.” She tries to explain gently. “Walls meant safer, but only by degrees. I came there, I left there. Besides, I like some of these people. I will follow and watch and make sure nothing tries to eat them. Polite.” 

She doesn’t explain that she’s never had a home. Not really. There were the foster homes, and group homes, and then the hospitals with their white walls and the straps that held her in place for treatments. After there had been the blocks she walked, the park she knew like the back of her hand, and then wandering and wandering until the people at the base had found her. 

Moving wasn’t strange to her. If anything this felt more like the life she’d known before. She could have stayed behind, or done something else. But that had just seemed to boring. The people here was fun to watch. And there were a few she kept her eyes on, like the Masha nurse that had fixed her neck after the skeleton had tried to pop it off. 

“Easier to stay with than stay behind anyway. Safety in numbers when the To-Be pulls me where I. don’t want to go.” 

“No, sorry. I mean I get it. I get what you’re saying. Just… don’t call her that.” 

Ride or die after all, meant no one got to call his girl diseased. 

Still, it’s similar enough to magic in theory that he can understand that much, that it was easy to label someone a witch, but that could mean anything. Prophet could have the same degrees of separation, Alice summoning tarot cards not the same as whatever put the woman in front of him in a hospital, those images of labcoats and needles crawling to the forefront of his mind.

It’s a reflection of one of his worst fears, that terror of being something broken, seeing things that he knew couldn’t be there, terrified that someone would call him on his lies when he swore he didn’t see them anymore.

He thought he found an easy solution to that. But life was never easy.

He lets out a sharp breath, but it’s all he can manage at first. Because he can’t agree.

He wants to, part of him desperately wants to, as if saying the words with any kind of sincerity might finally make them true. He shapes them in his head, tells himself she’s right, it’s better to be here even on bad days, but they’re nothing but words. Just syllables and sounds that don’t mean anything when he’s listening to her talk and he can’t help but relate far too strongly to that sense of displacement.

Maybe the difference is one she’s already noted. It’s all relative. That he thinks there was some place kinder and warmer waiting for him, and he didn’t get to stay. He doesn’t know where she goes, and there’s little point stopping himself from asking now.

“Where else do you go?”

“That, I can do. Trying to explain is just...problematic. My brains get mixed up and nothing comes out right.” She sighs, shoulders slumping for just a moment. 

On the days she could communicate without trails of something else following int he wake of her words, she savored it. The way words just worked, brain and mouth understanding one another. 

Days like this though? They made it more difficult than it needed to be. Nothing but misunderstanding and metaphor. Her mind still worked, much as it ever had, but it was as though the messages couldn’t make it past her lips correctly. 

“Forward. Sometimes my memories grab me and try to replay whats already happened, but always when the stream scoops me up it’s forward.” 

The echoes have quieted since the tower went down, same way they had in the first weeks after everything had gone to hell. Like something so large had happened that it had rippled out and adjusted the future, changed it on a molecular level. 

“No rhyme or reason past that. Not really.” She shrugged, with a small wan smile. 

“Alice isn’t diseased.” He says it too quickly, incapable of sitting here and hearing that without defending the woman. It didn’t matter how wrong he might be, it didn’t matter if Alice herself might disagree, he still dismisses the label. “She’s special.” 

Still, on a removed level he understands the analogy. Both capable of something similar, but in drastically different ways, and it’s hard not to feel something selfish looking at the woman in front of him, the red she scraped off into the dirt.

Wondering if that’s the kind of future Alice had waiting for her.

He hums when she responds to his name, but can’t get himself to reply. Thoughts already too dark before she has them shifting over to any thoughts of his parents, a subject that’s rarely any easier to take. He never knew his mother’s name to start, and if it’s easy some days to joke about just how thoroughly he was abandoned, he can’t summon the right kind of humor now. 

It’ll just come out sad and lost, that aching curiosity who had left him there and why they’d found it so easy to discard him.

“That’s alright. Some days it’s better to not be here.”

“Tch.” Shia clucks her tongue at Niko. People took her so damned literally.You’d think they’d never run across a metaphor. Or someone a little bit cracked. 

Okay maybe than a little, but still. 

“You’re right. She is...we are...similar but not the. same.” She chooses her words very carefully. Trying to find the best way to try and explain. Not that she really knew, not any more than anyone else did at least. 

Wheels turning bethind those dark eyes. She could recognize it for what it was, but lacked the reason why. The context to put it all together. Another puzzle missing its damn pieces. Story of her damn life. 

She tips her head to the side in response, trying to explain. To find the words. To be here and now is always better than to be somewhen else. She just wishes she was someone else. Better to be lost in the world than in her own mind if she’d had a choice in the matter. 

“Here is relative. Better to be here than not here. Most days anyhow.” 

she glances up at the woman, pausing for a moment to take in the details - her features, build, stance, clothes.  committing them to memory with the first occasion of their meeting.  remembering details was important.  sometimes, all it took was one detail, in the heat of the moment, to save a life… or take one… depending on the moment in question.  they’ve never spoken.  not an encounter before this.  but now there are a lot more new faces… the group rolling on with a seemingly unstoppable snowball effect.

“in old world rain is fine.  in new one… not so good.”

her eyes return to the pot and she gives it a little shake, swirling the contents around to spread the heat more evenly.  words coming almost distractedly as she sets about making some manner of dinner.

“stay dry.  always a different smell in the air after first rain.  dirt smells.  trees smell.  grass smells.  everything stronger, different… moisture carries scent… ever smelt damp dog?  is easy, da?  – if human can smell, then hellhounds can smell more.  is dead giveaway.  track you.  kill you.  eat you.  stay dry.”

there’s a nod.  definite and slow.  as though some kind of punctuation to those words.  a trickle of advice which might prove useful.  might not.  she’d offered plenty of the same before.  it was really up to the listener to decide whether to heed it… or not.

“is best not to be anything.  no smell.  no sound.  no movement.  be invisible.  be nothing.”

one hand moves to rumage in the sack by her side, pulling out a slightly bent metal spoon and stirring the pot contents properly this time before lifting to her lips to taste… a small shrug with the words, simply conversational in tone.  as though they weren’t about anything as drastic as survival and might well have been a conversation about something far more… inert.

“stay alive longer.  which is good.”

“but is no rain now.  so… enjoy sunset all you like.”

Shia cocks her head, listening to the other woman’s words. A warning as it were, given as she cooks as though it’s of no more importance than talking about the whether used to be. 

Not that Shia ever really talked about the weather. But still. 

She raises an eyebrow as the woman continues, nodding along in agreement. Seems pretty straight on. Shia knows she can handle herself (mostly) but as far as tips in the end times go, this one is worth gold. 

“Seems solid. I’m good at playing invisible anyway. Easy to slip past when nobody knows to look for you.” She grins sharply. “Alive though is good. I like alive. Much better than the alternatives.” 

She watches again for another moment, feeling the ground steady underfoot. “I’m Shia. You’re from the people who wound up at the base before the tower...right?”

there’s a small spark… having set up just outside of the shack type thing that might serve as some kind of shelter for the night.  a small flicker as kindling catches the heat and rouses into a gentle flame.  a moment later, there’s a ‘clank’ as a small metal pot is settled on top of the fire.  the heels of daschas boots dig into the dirt as she leans forward to feel the flicker of heat that casts a haze into the air… catching what warmth was offered as the day moved toward dusk and the heat from the sun faded with the light.  

she’s aware of others milling around.  picking out spots, shifting back to the safety of their vehicles once their limbs had been stretched and sated.  there is however, a slightly wry smile that flickers on her own lips as she hears the question.  whether it’s rhetorical or not, or whether its’s not particularly for her doesn’t really matter as she provides an answer anyway…

“da. unless is raining.  then maybe stay dry and not smell like damp leather is better option.”

Shia looks over to where the voice had come from. Someone she didn’t know. Not strange considering the size of their band since the others had joined them at the base. Still, she was curious. 

She lets her hand drop to her side, letting herself wander closer to the other person. They’d found a shack of some kind, started a small fire. Shia had always like fire, the way the flames danced and moved around never quite in the same place. 

She could understand that kind of change, always moving, never in the same place twice. Sort of like her mind. 

“True. Summer thunderstorms are worth it though. Moving too fast, almost over by the time you realize you can’t get to cover.” 

She closes the last of the distance, crinkling her nose. “But generally, I prefer the dry over damp leather smell.”

His gaze lingers on her hand, drawing patterns in the dirt that don’t look like anything to him, and maybe they don’t mean anything at all. The words she offers do, a name given before she tells him that’s not the real question, and it’s nothing he can argue.

Though for a moment nothing else she tells him makes any real sense. He understands magic, he understands magical bloodlines, and for a second he wonders if that’s what he’s looking at. A thought shed just as quickly, because if she were a witch, why wouldn’t she use that to protect herself int he monolith? 

This was something else, something strikes a chord when she says seer. “You’re like Alice,” he blurts, regretting the words almost the second they’re past his lips. Because it might not be anything she’d want spread around, even if she was quick to admit she was a fortune teller.

The real deal, and he had no reason to doubt her, even if he had little desire to know what she saw when she looked at him.

“Niko,” he tells her, answer just as simple at first. 

“I uh… I’m not anybody’s son.”

There are better definitions he could give of himself, he could tell her he’s lord of the dead or something equally as dramatic. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind, it’s not the first thing past his lips when he’s still putting together who and what she is.

“Do you think you’re mad?”

When he blurts out Alice’s name, a small smile tugs at Shia’s lips. She had met the Alice seestra. They had drunk old wine and talked about things that stayed hidden when sober. 

Shia liked her. She was spunky. 

“Mmm, alike and not. Same disease, different symptoms.” She scrunched her nose, shooing the thought away. Everything around her felt crumbly, like she wasn’t quite here. 

“Niko.” She tastes the name on her lips and then actually smiles at his comment about being no one’s son. “Was a...saying I think.” Her smile turned wry. “Not that I remember my mother’s name anyway”

“Isn’t that the question of the hour? Some days. They locked me up and poked me and shocked me. Left things a bit scrambled. Some days i’m all put together and others...” Her voice trails off. 

Shia knows what she is. Down to the marrow of her bones. She was never crazy as they thought she was, okay maybe a bit touched here and there. No excuse to strip out all her puzzle pieces and then jam them back together at awkward angles. 

Rude. 

“Others I am not so here.” She met his eyes again. “Least there are no labcoats though.”

Outside the walls was more dangerous than in, but the echoes had been quiet since the tower had fallen. It made her wary. More good days than bad was liable to make her get complacent. 

And then where would she be? Falling through that internal landscape until the whispers came a calling. 

So instead she ducked out the back door with her bag, looking for somewhere to curl up for the night. Cracked asphalt and packed dirt. Fresh air though, and slight wind through her hair. Better than her solitary walks by a long shot. 

She barely remembered how she’d wound up at the base and after so much time behind walls it seemed so very, very, wide. Her eyes lifted to where the sun was setting on the horizon, slipping shut as her skin soaked up the last few rays of sun. 

“Sunsets were always my favorite.” Her voice murmured, hand reaching up to obscure the sun.”Better in the open air though, don’t you think?”

He doesn’t understand and at the same time he does. The things she’s telling him filtered through a more selfish lens, his own experiences, his own beliefs, the only thing he has to filter them through. 

A totem on her skin is something that rings all too loudly, a tattoo on his chest serving the same purpose. Even if it stopped bleeding years ago.

He knows, objectively, that if she’s telling him she’s hurting herself, it’s not good. He also knows, less objectively, that there’s power in blood. Substance and meaning, even if it’s not magic, and his gaze follows the red on her fingers before that gets wiped off on the dirt. Purpose served, and if he sorts through what she’s telling him then he thinks it’s what’s grounding her here. 

Pulling her out of time, she tells him. He doesn’t know where to start guessing whether that’s true or not, aware that there’s enough magic in the world that it might be. There’s still something deeply personal about what he’s playing witness to that for once it’s harder for him to summon anything to say in response. Watching her with a furrowed brow. The way she phrases it enough to make him want to promise he understands, his own uncertainty keeping the words to himself.

“Who are you?“ It’s all he finally manages, as if that’s such a simple question to answer. A name won’t tell him what he’s looking at, whether there’s really a future pulling at her head, or just her own mind playing traitor.

Shia watches him with quiet eyes. Hoping he could understand, seeing something click behind his eyes. An idea, but not understanding. His question though, that drops something into place. 

“Shia.” Her voice pulls out the syllables and a smirk curves her mouth into a sharp point. “But I don’t think thats the real question.” One hand traces through the dirt as her eyes dip from his face. 

“Someone used to tell me we were Daughters of Cassandra. Seers that go back and back and back. Someone else said prophets. Plenty said we were mad.” She shrugged her shoulders in an elegant gesture and lifted her eyes back up, face dropping into a placid expression. 

Her mind shifts, rockier here but not trying to pull her into the stream. No this is just the internal landscape she has come to hate, shards of herself sticking at all angles. Puzzle pieces that no longer fit together. This is what she gets for talking about totems and prophets. 

“So who are you?” She asks, trying to distract. Curious about the sharp-faced man and the way he drew the dead to himself like old friends. Dangerous, but fun. 

Masha-nurse, there was only person who called her that, and she certainly didn’t come looking for her on her own accord very often. Call it a once in a millennia phenomenon. Masha’s smile lit up as she put down her notes and left the bedside of one patient for another. 

“Shia! You are here! Welcome come in, what do you need what can I do for you.” Masha asked, slightly overly excited at the prospect of Shia coming in because she knew she could rely on her. It had taken quite a long time to gain any amount of trust with the woman, and was hard earned too. Time to reap the rewards of such a venture! 

“A monster tried to squeeze my head off and now my neck doesn’t work.” Shia’s voice was dry, trying not to try and bend her neck to see Masha. 

If she was a bit taller, this would be so much easier. But no. Easy was rarely in the cards for her. Which was probably how she had gotten herself into this predicament to start. 

“Help?” She asked, voice piteous. She hated it. Knew it was necessary, but really, truly, hated it. 

The sight of blood isn’t a startling thing anymore. If anything it’s too familiar, raised by a blood witch who had fully embraced every ounce of his own power. The amount of blood he’s shed for the man, the amount he’s seen spilled from his own skin, it’s almost second nature to see red, but it still leaves him cold the second he sees it covering the woman’s fingers.

He’d meant to find her at some point. Ask her name at least, because they’d ended up fighting together in that monolith, and to him that signaled some kind of bond. Even if it didn’t run as deep as the ties he held to his coven, nothing really could.

He just doesn’t expect to find her like this, bruises still healing on her throat, looking almost worse than she had when the dead were trying to kill them both.

“I know.”  He says it like he does, like he has the first clue what she’s talking about, or what those tricks might be. And maybe he does, maybe it’s something as simple as that river of souls that would’ve eagerly swallowed both of them up. Right now, he doesn’t think so.

It strikes too close of a chord. It’s his own voice, smaller and quieter, trying to tell his foster mother about the ghosts in his room. Those haunting specters that wouldn’t let him be, and he wonders what ghosts are haunting her.

His head tips closer, a quick scan like he can find the source of all that red before his gaze flicks back to her face. “What are you doing to yourself?”

She doesn’t know his name, he’s one of the newer ones. But she remembers his magic, the way he’d worked it to get them both out of dodge. It’s a line to Now, a reminder that she is at the base. That the stream didn’t ferry her one way or the other away and away. 

At his question her eyes drift to her fingers, covered in scarlet. There is a price to be paid for stopping the flow of time. A price she has learned to pay. 

“Time tries to...ferry me forward. But, my totems keep me here. Sometimes anyway.” She drops her hand to the dirt, wiping away the blood. “Methods of control get tricky. But if your totem is on your skin, you can find your way through the when.” She licks her lips, trying to explain. 

How do you explain what you barely have the words for? She isn’t sure. But something has to give somewhere, doesn’t it? She picks at the dirt, trying to find the words. To order her mind away from the chaos it thrives on. 

“I used to get lost. In time. A totem can help you know when you are, but if you lose it...” Her voice trails off and she shakes her head. “So mine is...with me always.” One hand taps at her back, avoiding the fresh cut, blood trying to stick her shirt to her back like glue. “A novel concept that few understand.” 

Shia’s neck throbs, an unpleasant reminder of undead hands trying to choke the life out of her surrounded by dead souls and a screaming chasm. Her back aches, a new scar knitting itelf; sealing skin to skin with a ridge to remind her. 

One hand traces the ridges, reaching over her shoulder to her back. She can count the feathers, the lines inked in blood and pain across her back. They are a reminder, they are a totem, they are how she knows when she is. Without them she is lost to her mind and to the stream. 

The walls are closing around her even though there are no walls outside. The echoes whisper around her, a maelstrom of was, now, and to be capturing her in their web. She whimpers, legs giving out as her vision fills with dark streamers. 

She reaches again, fingers searching for the new wound, still fresh. Not yet healed. Finger nails rip into the crevice of skin destroying the healing her body had attempted. Blood flows warm and wet onto her fingers, and chases away the echoes. 

When she looks up, she realizes she isn’t alone. Fingers wet in crimson, eyes dark and too wide in her face she looks up. “The stream tried to ferry me away, but I have my own tricks you know.”

Shia was used to pain. the casual throb of a closing wound, the sweet surrender of skin parting under a sharpened blade. It was the lingering aches through her neck and shoulders that were acting up. 

She hadn’t wanted to admit it, but having someone poke at it might be a good call. Which meant she’d have to suck it up and let Masha touch her. Really, not her favorite idea, but things had stiffened up. 

She couldn’t really turn her head without moving her shoulders along with it which was...problematic. Last thing she needed was the echoes rearing up and here doing real damage. Which meant letting Masha tell her how to fix it while she was in her right mind enough not to try and bite her for the act. 

Sighing, she pushed open the door to the small clinic and looked around for the blonde nurse. “Masha nurse are you here? I think I may have hurt myself.” 

Understatement sure, but hey at least she’d get a fun look out of it for her troubles. Wasn’t that worth it?