#!sov

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"spangled is the earth with her crowns"

Mae's had a pet theory about Celica for a while now: that she sometimes does mysterious-looking things just to look, well, mysterious.  Is there some kind of code of conduct for being a secret princess?  One where you've got to stare wistfully across the horizon at least once a week, or make a cryptic remark in every conversation that leaves the other person wondering what you're really talking about?

Celica's mysterious act for today seems to be peering into a series of waist-high jugs in the foyer of this desert stronghold.  She goes down the line, lifting the lids to peek at the contents of each, considering whatever she finds with a pensive sort of expression.  Curious, Mae saunters on over to join Celica in her inspection.

"Find anything worth yoinkin'?" she asks.

"What?  I--no," Celica starts, hurriedly jamming the lid of her current jug shut.  "At least, I'm not planning on pilfering anything for myself, even if I could somehow carry one of these off."

Mae wonders aloud, "Would that even be stealing?  Like, if we're taking back stuff that was taken to begin with, does the whole double-theft thing cancel out?  What's the word on that from Mila?"

Celica braces her hands against the jug like a general at a war table, looking way too solemn and poised for the situation.  Mae knows she's genuinely chewing on this choice piece of theological jerky, so the answer's likely to be good, at least.

"The Mother has no set stipulations for such a situation," Celica admits, "Though nor would I say it's in her nature to leave us with no room to make our own judgments.  No one divine mandate can fit every little human circumstance, after all."  

Every little circumstance, sure, but the big ones--those are the ones Mae knows Celica prays for guidance about until her legs fall asleep.

"Then we're good, right?  We can just, uh, 're-appropriate' the stuff we need in order to keep on meting out some sweet holy justice," Mae declares, framing the word "re-appropriate" with a conspiratory wiggle of her fingers.  A smile tweaks at Celica's lips, and sweet Mila's scaly tail is she pretty when it reaches her eyes.

"Honestly, my motive here was pretty selfish--I was wondering if I could sneak a moment to wash my hair with some of the water in one of these jugs.  I don't want to seem fussy about something so trivial in front of the others, but..."  Celica gives some of her curls a dismayed little push to illustrate her point.  Ah, Mae thinks.  Not so mysterious a motive after all (for once).  If she looks closely, she does have to admit that Celica's always-immaculate hair is maybe a smidge less immaculate than usual.  Only a smidge, though.

"Go for it," Mae offers.  "It's not selfish to want to look good!  I mean, you always look good, but, like, gooder than usual.  More good.  Besides," she hurries to add, "If any of Grieth's bozos come back here after we're gone, you can leave some nice sand in their drinking water for 'em."  Not that Mae wouldn't have laughed at the thought anyhow, but Celica laughing with her makes it that much better.  At least, assuming Celica's laughing at the sand in the water thing, rather than the painfully obvious crush thing.  Mae's really banking on the former, here.

Even if Celica's picked up on Mae's interest in her good looks that goes a bit beyond the realm of maidenly friendship, all she asks is, "Would you mind keeping an eye out for any of the men--well, anyone else in general, really?  I'm sure it'd look more than a little weird if someone walked in to see a priestess dunking her head in a jug of water."

"Sure thing!" Mae chirps.  

She savors the giddiness at Celica's trust--what's more intimate than admitting you can do weird things around someone?  The foyer itself isn't exactly intimate, coated with sand as arid walls of wind occasionally blast in from the wide-open entryway.

"Some 'stronghold' this is," Mae remarks a little too loudly.  She whips around to stare real intently at said entryway the second Celica begins to remove neckpiece.  Celica's bare neck and shoulders, Mae thinks, could end wars.

"Hmm?  Oh, the doorway?  There should be a way to close it if need be.  ...At least, I hope so, if we end up having to defend this place ourselves."

Mae stands arms akimbo, shifting her weight from one tapping foot to the other, trying not to listen too closely to the soft chime of Celica's earrings as she (presumably) unhooks them and lays them on the ground beside her neckpiece and headband.  There's a rather unceremonious splash, and Mae realizes that Celica really has gone and just dunked her whole head into the jug.  She peeks over her shoulder just in time to see Celica reemerge, now-wet hair hanging over her face in a rather ghoulish curtain.  

Yet, there's something beautiful about it, even with Celica stooped over and looking like a swamp monster.  Mae's long since stopped even trying to pretend that her feelings towards Celica are envy, rather than attraction, so she indulges in the sight of Celica wringing out her hair.  The water spills at first in staccato lashes across the sandy floor, before slowing to trickles of droplets that spangle the area around where Celica stands.  

Celica catches her gawking (not that Mae's ever been good at hiding it), and the fingers in her hair curl with self-consciousness.

"Mae," she begins.  Her voice is so warm that the desert suddenly feels frigid in comparison.  "Do you...want a go?  Washing your hair, I mean."  In an impressive feat of athleticism Mae hadn't realized any part of herself was capable of, her heart's taken a running leap right up her throat.  Is she kidding herself, thinking that maybe Celica was going to ask her something else for a moment there?  "Uh, not in the jug I just swilled my dirty hair around in, that is."

Mae considers her own hair, flyaway and full of tufts like the fairy floss an indulgent merchant once let her and Boey sample at the greatport.  She'd brought some back for Celica, who'd eaten her portion with evident delight, despite how sticky and shapeless the stuff had become in the summer heat.  Though she knows she hasn't been such a fool for Celica forever, it sure feels like it, sometimes.

"I'm good," Mae says instead.  "D'you want me to go get Boey so he can dry your hair with his wimpy fire magic?  It'd make him feel useful for once, I bet."

---

act i

Faye begins to disappear on occasion. Sometimes only for a few hours, and once--only once--for days at a time. The woods around Ram Village are empty and quiescent once more, after so much turmoil came crashing through them. Things are (almost) as they should be. There are only subtle reminders that Faye cannot quite ignore, things missing or things now present, that tell her time has indeed passed on without her.

It's this notion that gives her the idea, wild and uninformed. She'd told herself she'd eschew all the magic she'd learned, only for it to build up and fill her like water threatening to burst from a dam. So she puts it to use, making excuses to visit Kliff with his ever-growing library of tomes and treatises that she struggles to even read. Deep in the woods, she picks out the threads of knowledge hastily gleaned from those books and tries, with unsteady hands, to weave a shroud of sorts.

No, she rescinds, a shroud sounds so morbid. A shroud is for the dead, and her intention is not to die--that is too much stagnation, even for her. She only wants to sleep, for a time.

-

Kliff leaves one day, without any real warning or goodbye. His parents fret over the succinct letter he left upon their table, showing it to Faye in their distress. She can't help but find it funny that Kliff can still be so grandiloquent in so few words. His absence is another gaping hole in the patchwork image of Ram Village that Faye clings to, but a part of her is almost glad that he's set off for parts unknown. He most likely knew what she was up to--at the very least, he could have made an educated guess.

Though she hates to stray much further from the village than the shrine where she weaves her magic, Faye does start spending more time with Gray and Tobin in the wake of Kliff's departure. She feels the ravine of years between herself and them, and wonders how she never noticed it growing. There is a twinge of guilt, whenever she forgets herself enough to be happy with them for just a moment. If she pushes forward for once in her life, there will soon be a distance too far to jump, a river too vast to ford.

The spell requires memories, frozen like the molasses she and the boys used to throw out into the snow and eat as candy. So she weaves them into the shroud: Kliff's intent, unwavering gaze, Gray's bombastic witticisms and his quiet empathy, Tobin's earnest, brotherly warmth. Gray stops her at the village gates one time, out of Tobin's earshot, and asks her in that easy way of his if she has a mind to pay Alm a visit anytime soon. She hears herself telling him, no. He believes her no more than she believes herself, but Gray is a good friend when it comes to knowing when to push and when to leave things be. Has he always been so good about that? Faye can't seem to remember, though Gray has been as constant in the white noise of her life as all her other friends. He tells her, I'll let Alm know you say hello, and ruffles her hair.

(Months later, near the end, Faye realizes that both Gray and Tobin think she wants to avoid Celica, when in fact, she finds herself missing that quiet girl with the yellow ribbon who taught her to weave crowns from flowers.)

-

Alm is the centerpiece of it all, the focal point of the magic she only half-understands. Though she still thinks of him as her prince, Faye cannot picture him as a king. To do so would be to throw herself forward into an uncertain future, when she must root herself to the past to make this spell work. She weaves her shroud like a tapestry, a still scene in a village that will never change. Here, ripe oranges that will never fall. There, her parents and her grandmother, who will never teeter over the edge of her old age. At the forefront, Gray, Tobin, Kliff, and Alm, all before the village gates without ever passing through them.

The magic is exhausting, unfamiliar words blistering her lips and tearing through the cool moss and stone of the shrine where she works with heat that edges on unbearable. At one point, she has to stop entirely, the shape of the magic completely lost to her as the ground itself seems to buck and seize before throwing her with a harsh crack into total darkness. When she awakens, Faye feels dried blood at her temple, and forces herself, trembling, not to think about how close she's come to death. Faye notices with a twinge of guilt the way her parents seem to collectively hold their breath whenever she returns, gaunt and drained, only to finally exhale once a healthy flush has returned to her cheeks.

Her parents trot men before her with an increasing lack of subtlety. Faye smiles weakly before each of them, dropping hints about a certain someone who still has her heart, if only to stop the roiling twist in her gut she feels every time a suitor gets too close. She tells herself she only feels such revulsion with a force that takes her by surprise because she can't help but compare them to Alm, always perfect in that he will always be unattainable.

-

When she leaves, she does nothing special. Doing so would be acknowledging that anything in her life is really changing, moving forward--with or without her.

"I'm off," she tells her mother, one morning in spring. The words scratch the insides of her throat and clatter against the backs of her teeth when they leave her mouth, like falling rocks. Her mother blinks in surprise, and it's only then that Faye begins to wonder how long it's been since she last spoke aloud, with all of her friends long since gone from the village.

"Safe journey, dearest," her mother says. Does she know, like Kliff might have? Faye quashes the doubt neatly, folds with perfect creases in a practiced fashion engendered by a lifetime of self-denial. She'll lose what time she's saved, if she starts to explore any of the things she's begun to realize about the people around her, the people she spent so long relegating to the periphery of her awareness.

-

The shrine is quiet as always, and with the thieves long since gone, Faye isn't entirely sure what it ought to be named now. Even the mold has given way to some flowers, especially closest to Mila's old idol. This is where Faye has woven her shroud, at the idol's foot where sunlight dapples the ground. How long had it taken? She struggles to recall months, weeks, days, anything more concrete than a jumble of half-formed memories that don't even feel like they belong to her. It occurs to Faye only briefly that she might die, if she's woven the spell wrong. If nothing else, she has always been a good seamstress.

Faye lies down on the ground, sits back up to adjust her skirt, then stirs yet again to rearrange her hair over her shoulders. Funny, she thinks, how she can't bring herself to do something as easy as sleeping, when she's been so tired. That thought, of straining for something for so long, only to feel nothing upon reaching it, seizes Faye with a thrumming edge of discomfort. Once more (for the last time? she can only hope) Faye tamps it down.

Squinting against the faint sunlight streaming into her eyes, Faye begins casting the spell to draw the shroud over herself.

intermission

Restless, her mother would have called her. A pilgrimage requires a purpose--otherwise, you are simply taking a jaunt. Not for the first time, Silque wonders what her mother would have made of this world without gods. Her mother, who fled first Duma, then the man who sired her child, to end up in Mila's embrace--could she move on a third time? Silque struggles to do so just this once, catching herself still referencing Mila's teachings as if talking about an old lover. The inaction eats at her, when she had wanted so desperately to feel relieved, now returned to the fold at Novis.

"I must go," she tells Nomah before one of the priory's many altars. It looks so empty and alien without Mila's visage. When she speaks her intent aloud, at least it sounds better, more justifiable. "While I doubt the people need me in particular, they do need someone, so by your leave, I mean to go forth and be that someone."

Nomah runs a hand over the ruff of his beard, as he often does in an attempt to look properly sagely and unreadable.

"Far be it from me to stop you," he muses, as if he is asking her a question: does she want to be stopped?

Silque folds her hands over each other and gives a shallow bow. The act is part obeisance, part simple gratitude.

"You have my thanks for your...understanding," Silque says, for lack of a better word. This elicits a chortle from Nomah that he attempts to muffle, though the merry gleam of humor in his eyes always gives him away.

"And you have my blessings--as well as my turnwheel, I presume?"

The device rests in a pack against Silque's hip, the soft thrum both like and utterly unlike the constancy of clockwork. She marvels that the turnwheel has found its way back to her again, when far greater hands have spun it before hers. In the absence of Mila's will, is it, like her, now mere flotsam in the current of time?

"I shall keep it safe," Silque assures him.

"You'd do better to keep yourself safe," Nomah returns, clapping her on the shoulder in a way she supposes is meant to be fatherly. She is always uncertain when it comes to men, though at least Nomah's fondness is something she knows she can trust. "Always the ascetic, eh?" he adds, though not unkindly.

A smile tugs at the corner of Silque's lips.

"Rest assured, this truly is what brings me fulfillment." Fulfillment, yes, but happiness--she is never quite sure.

-

Travel is less hazardous than it has been in the past, a happy set of circumstances that Silque never thinks to attribute to the way her saint's robes make those around her think twice about how to treat her. Fewer hazards do not make for more ease, though, so Silque busies herself at every turn with any manner of healing she can offer. She tells herself the ultimate destination of her pilgrimage is the north, a land of sorrow and mistrust in equal measure. If nothing else, she can scratch the itch that's been tickling her conscience, that she has only embarked on this travel out of selfish wanderlust. To see in peacetime the place her mother once called home--surely that must be her true motive.

And yet, she veers south, bypassing the capitol entirely for thick woodlands where she can go days without seeing another person. What does she even hope to find, she chides herself, when there is nothing, no one left waiting here? At Silque's hip, Mila's Turnwheel ticks on.

act ii

She still visits shrines when she can find them, though this one is so given over to nature that she nearly passes it by. Brambles hug the cave's entrance, their roses just slightly past peak bloom. Inside, there is only the slow drip of water and lush growths of fragrant moss. When she emerges into the shrine's inner chamber, dappled sunlight filling her eyes in a soft welcome, she almost doesn't notice. Silque moves to kneel at the foot of Mila's long-empty idol, only to stop short with the realization that her place is already taken.

A young woman lies on the ground, eyes closed, hands folded over her chest. Edging closer, Silque smells only the flowers and the earth, no sweeter, sicklier odor of decay. Indeed, the young woman appears for all intents and purposes to simply be napping in a particularly odd place. The thrumming sheen of magic over her body, made ever so slightly visible by the rippling sunlight, is the only sign of anything unnatural. Then again, it is also a reasonable guarantee that the woman is indeed alive.

She's lovely in her repose, tawny, flyaway hair tucked into twin braids whose lengths are just slightly uneven. The lightest freckles dust her rosy cheeks, and the curve of her mouth is soft, even if its set, in conjunction with her slightly-furrowed brow, suggests an edge of frustration. Embarrassed by the immediacy of her attraction, Silque diverts her scrutiny from the swell of the woman's chest beneath those dainty, interlaced fingers and examines the spell instead.

It is a magic unlike anything she's ever seen before, though it carries with it the faintest hint of nostalgia that she cannot place. Almost like a blanket or a shroud, it hangs over the sleeping woman. There is even a perceptible perimeter to it, where the grass and flowers abruptly cease to grow around the outline of the woman's body. Almost unconsciously, Silque kneels to examine the scene closer, as Mila's empty idol looms over them both, unseeing. She cannot put a purpose to such a spell, or a reason to why anyone would do such a thing to someone else. It is neither cruel nor kind--the woman is simply there, asleep and untouched.

Silque hesitates, catching herself considering ways to undo what's been done here. She remembers her mother's tales, which she knows to be more than fantasies concocted to keep women in line: witches in the hinterlands, masked women with all the blood drained from their still-moving bodies, vestals who commit themselves to the flames in search of power denied to them by all other means. Could this magic belong to some witch, thought? She searches the woman's face again for some blemish, some hint of the unnatural. Again, she finds nothing but a twinge of fond sadness whose source in her memories she cannot locate. Beseechingly, she turns her gaze to the idol for guidance she does not truly expect to find.

At her hip, Mila's Turnwheel begins to tick more audibly, its tempo accelerating with insistence. Startled by the reentry of sound into the silent chamber, Silque fumbles with the worn leather straps of the turnwheel's pack. Retrieved, it glows gently, but no vision springs forth at her touch. She frowns. She'd hoped against hope for some sign from a goddess long since gone, which makes it all the more foolish of her to feel let down. Still, the next step seems self-evident. Silque gives the wheel a turn, then another, then another, letting it guide her fingers until it is satisfied.

Mila's Turnwheel offers only glimpses of the time being unwound. So much of it is nothing more than the slow growing and dying of plants in reverse. How much time has it been, as the world changes around this unchanging woman? The retrospective is intercut with the faintest impressions of other memories: a man's back, clad in dark blue-green armor. A village square where all the people stand still. Two women's voices, one of which Silque could swear is her own.

The turnwheel locks, unable to go back any further.

Unaware that she has been holding her breath, Silque lets it go in a rush, releasing the turnwheel to strip back the veneer of time. She hopes, plaintively, that she is not making a mistake.

The sleeping woman stirs. Her eyes open with a start, only to flutter closed, before settling into a bleary, half-awake state. She tries to speak, but the words seem to stick to her lips.

"Take your time," Silque says softly, aware of how silly that sounds, given the circumstances.

"Alm," the woman croaks at last. Confused, Silque glances over her packs, then back at the woman.

"I...do indeed have some food and coin to share," she ventures.

"No, not alms, Alm. He's a person."

"Not a person I'm acquainted with, I'm afraid."

Oddly, the woman's sigh sounds relieved. When she struggles to sit up, Silque aids her, awkwardly mindful of where she places her hands. Awake and animated, the woman has a sort of doelike quality to her, looking around with soft brown eyes that carry in them a questioning edge.

"You've been asleep," Silque tells her. She speaks slowly, so as not to shock. The woman nods absently, still searching for something Silque cannot see. At last, she says,

"Funny that you of all people should find me." There is a tentative fondness in her voice.

"Beg pardon? I don't believe we've ever met." And yet, there is a familiarity Silque cannot quite shake. For the first time, the woman seems to have all her wits about her, frowning with confusion.

"No? But, you're--what's your name?"

"I am Silque," she says.

"I'm Faye," the woman replies, her inflection suggesting that this is information Silque should already know.

act iii

Again, the silence yawns between them. Faye struggles to think of something to say, wits addled by magic and sleep. Anything to bridge this one gap, to prove to herself that she can do it right this time. Silque's gaze is patient as ever, with that slight hint of concern that she'll never voice. Faye wonders if she's gone and done all this for naught, and wouldn't that be embarrassing, to explain why she's been here for perhaps a few months at best?

"Who reigns?" Faye asks suddenly, recalling now the first thing she'd said upon awakening.

Silque tells her.

The name means nothing to Faye--this is what you wanted, she tells herself. Fear and triumph wage war in her chest, so riotously that she swears she can feel her ribcage rattle.

"And...this may seem even odder, but what year is it?"

Silque tells her.

Is it more than she'd expected, or less? She wonders what became of the villages, woven into the vestiges of her shroud, along with every person who no longer lives there. It makes Silque's presence all the more a surprise, albeit a pleasant one. Faye's never believed all too ardently in Mila, but perhaps she ought to give thanks now to that long-gone goddess.

"I've been asleep for a long time," she admits.

"Evidently," is Silque's even response.

Faye leans forward, her limbs slowly remembering the fundamental feeling of motion. For the first time, she notices the way Silque's cheeks flush at her proximity. She's noticing all manner of new things, now.