Arc 15 Post 56: The Orphan Verse
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The Orphan Verse
Elsewhere, Time Indeterminate
"I'm pretty sure the people who are comparing me to a Yama King aren't entirely wrong," you blurt out at Lydia. "We all swim in tainted waters, but hey, I think that's all mankind too, no need for dread arcane power, so you can just think of those as a bonus."
"A bonus?" the word rises together with an uneven smile, more of relief than amusement at your choice of words.
"You know I can't see your soul like this..." you reach and twist, another more of Essence burned. "Mostly I can see vampires, winter fey, those passage pigeons, demons, those berserkers who worked with Gorfel, so for what it might be worth you're more like Gard than..." your eyes trail back to the false child, part of your brain wondering if it is offended while another speaking mostly in Usum's voice answers that it can no more feel the sting of offense than the caress of kindness. It's just playing pretend. And maybe that's the worst of all.
Looking into those black eyes is hard, in some ways it's harder than looking at the shoreless waters below, boundless nothing in human form bounded. Some might call it abomination, an affront to God, but God from what you have found of late is much harder to offend than most people suppose or would like others to suppose thereby granting them power to stand in judgement. So resolved to make your own judgement not with the coiling of revulsion in the pit of your stomach, but with what understanding can be wrung from ancient faded memories and what empathy you can summon:
"Do you not wish to live in truth, a guest invited always not just grudgingly, by temptation or by force?"
"Why should life be the truth while I am the lie?" it matches question for a question. "They hunger then they sublimate their appetites into others. Should I have counted the ways times when crosses fell from limp hands drained of blood because it was not faith at all that moved them but a hunger for validation or power we would still be here counting when the next century passes. Men lie and I speak truth."
There's something uncanny about the way that word fell, more so than the moment and the speaker, more so than the utter silence before and behind it.
"Why is truth important, why is it good?" The question gets you quizzical looks from Lydia and Tiffany both, but now's not the time to meet their eyes.
"Because it's the truth, because I am the..." he looks down at the sea with a most un-childlike frown. "Because only truths are eternal, lies are fleeting mortal things."
"And why is it good to be eternal?" you press.
"Because it is good to be."
You fall now into a rhythm, almost a kind of poetry, though one whose final rhyme you cannot guess: "It does not want you to be."
"The sea?" the voice rises in intonation, though only in courtesy.
"What if you could be apart from it?"
"I am a part of it."
"If."
In human discourse, and fey and even beings as strange and eldritch as the Red Court such as you have conversed with talks sparawl outwards into complexity understanding is achieved, here is spirals down into a single point so sharp it bleeds.
"Truth?"
"Truth."
"I wish to be apart from the Sea."
As you reach out to grant the gift, giddy with success, an unease steals over your mind recaling what the being before you had said in greeting: 'A part of me is always here, the pressure of my gaze upon the ocean. Older things than I are stirring in the depths'
"What of the older ones below?" you ask and in that same rhyming cadence it gives what might be the most fightening answer of all.
"I do not know."
Wat do you do?
[] The agreement reached here is fragile as a snowflake and will potentially do a world of good, sometimes you have to take a leap of faith
[] Try to back off on what offer until you can figure out what the consequences would be
-[] Write in stunt
[] Write in
OOC: Getting across fundamentally non-human inteligences is tricky, that is what I was struggling with yesterday hope this works.
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