#anarchyoutthere

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Never would she have speculated that The Harrowing would be such a horrific ritual. The Fade was all that she had never known and all that she had been taught to fear. It had been rife with spirits and of them one had offered her more aid than others. Caution and fear had made her distrustful, and The Harrowing had seen her proven right for it. She had woken from The Fade as the colors of dawn bled into the room. In her mind had echoed a reminder -- magic was made to serve man -- and on her tongue had lingered the phantom taste of an air that had never known the influences of man. She had felt grass beneath her hands as she raised herself from the ground then the cobbled stone of the tower. In the waking world no warmth had been left but her own.

The hours that came after her harrowing were a blur. Words had been spoken to her, but like water their voices had slipped through her fingers. Veata had spoken herself but her responses were lost to her memories. She had been escorted from the room and brought to another in a wing of the tower denied to her as an apprentice. The templar that had brought her to her private quarters hadn’t cast her a second glance as he’d ushered her inside. She did not remember falling into the bed without undressing, but it was there she laid when she woke as her thoughts filled with the only clear memories of the night. In slumber Veata had dreamt of The Fade -- of its horrors and of its terrible, beautiful world.

She had woken too late for the mid hour lunch. Not that it mattered. The mere thought of food alone left a bland, dry taste in her mouth. She did not think she could eat even if she wanted to. Instead she laid chasing from her head thoughts of The Fade until her mind was as silent as her room. Veata roused herself. The Circle was all she had known, and in childhood she had never known true silence. No space had been her own, and as she looked around her new quarters she thought it was almost too much space for a single person. She stood from the bed. Hers. With silent reverence she touched the walls. Hers. Veata could not remember a time that something had been hers. Even her robes had been communal.

@anarchyoutthere​ | Arranged Marriage Starters

Veata Aydelotte sat in contemplative quiet as she considered her husband. At a glance he wasn’t unkind. Her mother had taught her that in marriage there was happiness to be found in amicable companionship but to seek out love was to ask too much. But her father had loved her. Veata had seen it in the gentle hands he touched her mother with and the smile that he sank against her neck as he held her against him every night. He had taught her that there could be love in marriage. In the end however it was the words of her mother that she had chosen to follow. She considered this man that at a glance was not a bad man and thought to herself that she might make something pleasant yet with him out of their marriage.

If she were careful there would be little he could take from her. She would be cautious but optimistic. Should he treat her with kindness she would offer him her heart, but should he mistreat her as she knew others in her situation had been mistreated she would withhold from him her gentle vulnerability. As was her duty she would be his wife but he would never have her love. After a hesitant moment her hand reached for his. Veata draped it over the fold of his nervous, cleaned fist and for the first time smiled. It was docile and sweet as her mother had taught her. “Perhaps.” She would make him no promises that she could not keep. The squeeze of her hand was gentle before she coaxed his to open to her in order to intertwine their fingers together.

She was no fool. Veata had listened to the whispers that spoke of another before her and picked out from rumor the seeds of truth. It was not unheard of. Even her past reflected affection for a boy she had once known. Under better circumstances in a different life she might have tended to those first inklings of affection until it had blossomed into love, but it was this lot that she had drawn. Not another. Her name was Jess. She would turn twenty-three with the turn of spring. The color of her hair was brown. She was trained in the medical field. Veata brought his hand to her mouth and pressed a gentle kiss against his knuckles. His name wasn’t of any importance. He had turned twenty-five in the heart of winter. The color of his hair was blond. He was lost to fates unknown.

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His hand -- steadied by a lifetime of practice -- drew a sharpening stone down the length of his blade. Each smooth glide scattered sparks into the air and in the way only a swordsman could understand it sang to his blood. Arthur listened to the sound of the camp stirring in even the quiet of the night: the low murmur of voices as soldiers spoke among themselves, the tamed crackle of the camp fires, the grate of steel as men readjusted their armors. His eyes lifted over the fire to his companion. He and Sawyer had known one another since they were little more than children practicing with wooden swords and dreaming of dragons of their own. Tonight his expression was distant and his blue eyes were distracted. He followed his line of sight to a silent young woman.

Arthur interrupted the quiet. “Is that her?” He had heard the rumors. The king had leashed the most fearsome of hounds to the throne. Those whispers had reached across the sea and far from home but even he hadn’t paid them much heed. Except he would soon learn after the completion of his assignment two months later her presence wasn’t a thing of rumors. Arthur had trouble reconciling all the hushed whispers surrounding her with the young woman herself. She was smaller -- more slender, more elegant -- than he had thought she would be. He had expected someone as intimidating and commanding in appearance as she was rumored to be in strength. She however looked more like a woman of the courts than the battlefield.

In the three days since he had landed he had not once seen her with a dragon he did not recognize. No hulking creature as tall as the mountains themselves with obsidian scales impervious to the sharpest blades and wings as long as the tallest tree leered over her shoulder with pearl white teeth bared. Cinders the Demon was nowhere to be found. “What is she like?” Arthur tossed the sharpening stone out and watched with an amused smile as one of the dragons woke from her nap and began to snap at her new plaything. He kept a close eye on her to make sure she didn’t try to swallow the stone as he sheathed his sword. A single-noted whistle drew his attention and he watched with some surprise as the dragon swept past him and approached the woman.

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Cornelius Huntelaar operated with his feet planted on both sides of the fence. His professional career as a novelist covered for his business in the underworld as a smuggler. More than that it gave him a last resort to fall back on should something ever happen to him during his dealings in the latter. If he had wanted he could have foregone official channels to instead become a major influence in crime syndicate but he hadn’t by his own choice. That choice had nothing to do with a conflict of morals. It was about caution. People that immersed themselves in that world were in turn consumed by it. Kees didn’t care to see himself undone by his own making like that. But even juggling between the two lifestyles there were risks. Sometimes those risks were exponential.

His lungs burned with the smoke of his last cigarette as he smothered its ashes on the cargo container he leaned against. Inside were enough stolen artifacts taken from an unnamed temple in Cambodia to have him arrested for multiple life sentences. A client with a heavy cultural interest in the temples had wanted its’ statues added to his extensive collection. Kees had been entrusted by his employers to oversee the shipment’s transfer from East Asia to Northern Canada. After that it was out of his hands. Even in theory it sounded like bullshit. There were a lot of miles to cover between Phnom Penh and Nunvaut. He doubted whoever had been tasked with the second leg of the delivery would have as far to travel.

“Grant.” Kees glanced at the man out of the corner of his eye. "Radio in. I want an ETA on our departure from them.” Their group had been divided into three distinct branches. One had remained in the capital to prepare for the necessities of their flight, the other -- the group that he spearheaded -- had traveled to the temple itself. The third group he had directed to a halfway point to act as a coordinator between the two teams. If something went wrong he wanted their asses covered. But a set-up that elaborate had required more people than was at his disposal. He might have gotten the shit end of the deal but at least it had come with its own budget. With one ear listening in for the familiar static of the radio he fiddled with his dwindling cigarette pack.

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Her toes curled in her shoes and she pointed her feet forward. The month was August. It was two in the morning and her shirt was too thin for the weather. Sawyer lived five miles south of her mother’s home. If she walked it would take her one hour and thirty-three minutes. On days she felt more active it took only one hour. Odette counted these facts in the quiet of her mind as she began to walk one foot in front of the other. No one watched her. At this hour there were very few people awake to. In one of the homes a dog began to bark. Not one she recognized. Charlie however she recognized. He recognized her as well and she leaned over the fence to scratch his chin as he came trotting forward to greet her. She tapped a silent apology on his snout with her fingertips as he looked at her expectantly. No treats today.

Odette walked. Down winding streets and familiar neighborhoods Odette walked without pause until she reached his house. She stood at the bottom of his porch step as the sky behind his towering home began to bleed the colors of dawn. The quiet of the resting night woke with the chirping of birds. These were her favorite hours. No therapist that talked at her rather than to her for an hour and a half every other day. No mother asking to hold her hand with a thousand questions that were only noise to her mind. No world overflowing with too many people and too many voices to drown her. Odette liked these hours when the world felt empty. Sometimes it was the only thing that could make her feel good.

Silently she hurried over the three short steps onto Sawyer’s stoop. She removed the spare key she had taken from him and unlocked the deadbolt. Its click was the loudest noise she had made in the last twenty-four hours. Odette shuffled inside and locked the door twice. It didn’t take more than five steps into the home for her to know last night had been one of his bad nights. The potent stench of alcohol soured the air. Sawyer was broken too. He was broken in ways different from her, but there was a common ground of disconnect between them and the world. She didn’t ask him to be better. He couldn’t make her be better. If her therapist could carve a hole into her skull and climb inside of her mind he would tell her it wasn’t healthy to think like that. She would ignore her.

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The jolted impact of falling to the earth sent an otherwise bone shattering shock throughout his body but he remained unaffected by it. It only went to show how far he had come since his days as a novice. He stretched with a deep arch in his back before standing to his full height and shaking off any lingering impacts of the fall. Tendrils of darkness curled from his form and dissipated into the air. His name was Rithisak Aydelotte. He was a Night and as every Night before him had and every Night after him would he had parted from the Skies to fetch a lost Lumen. Very few fell to the earth on purpose and none knew the way home without the aid of a Night. Not even Mother Moon could part from her ivory palace in the Skies lest the land of mortal man consume her as it almost had millenniums before. 

He closed his mind to the chaos of the mortal realms and breathed deeply. The Lumen that had fallen was a quiet, graceful creature. Unlike a certain individual notorious for driving the Nights mad with her apparent obsession with Earth she was not the sort to disregard warnings about the lands of Man. She would be frightened but she would know to remain where she was so long as it was safe. His nostrils flared and his head turned but even in his bestial form he could not pick out the thread of her scent. Rithisak sat back on his haunches debating his next course of action. Fallen Lumen were difficult to track because the path they fell was one winding and confusing. Not even Mother Moon had mastered the skill to track the patterns of a fall because there were none to. He would have to rely on instinct then. 

Bright lights swept over the dark void of his skin and his head turned. The whites of his eyes -- the only color of his eyes -- vanished as he blinked and the quiet of the countryside broke with loud, mechanical screaming. Scant feet from him a truck had come to a screeching halt. It was barely as tall as he was and in the driver’s seat sat a lone man. Rithisak knew the reactions to come. In this skin he was a frightening, unknown creature to humankind. Unlike them in this form he was not solid. The outline of his form shifted as if not quite certain what skin to take. Wisps of darkness and tendrils of shadows flickered in the air surrounding himself. He was a void but for two brilliant white lights that marked his eyes. To them he must look like a monster, but no one ever listened to the man that ran down the street screaming madness about monsters.