Possibly the rainiest place on Evelon, Baian stretches for miles along the southern coasts. Thanks to the moist soil rich in minerals, wildlife here have developed unique adaptations. To travel through this thick, muddy area, most either take specially designed boats. (+2 Offense)

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Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/21/2016 9:10 PM

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It was dark, so dark Arabella could barely see two feet in front of her, and she wasn't sure if night had finally fallen or if it was just the weather closing in. Her fur was the only spot of color in this accursed swamp, and she was certain that if anyone else had been around she'd have stood out to them like a beacon. But there was no one. She had come here alone.

"A quest," she said under her breath. That was what she'd told her brother, that she was here on a quest, and it wasn't exactly untrue, but neither did it capture the matter properly. "Quest" made it sound big, important, and most of all impersonal. Something she was doing for the good of the world, rather than the good of herself. Not that she even knew if it would do her any good. It was all a mess.

She'd been carefully steering the boat through the swamp for...however long she'd been here, tail curled in on itself just in case there was something in the rainwater, absolutely no sense of time when she couldn't see the sun. The boat had run up on some bank or sandbar or something under the water—what did she know about boats, or swamps?—and she'd gotten out to push it back in and found herself just standing there in the muck, staring down at her feet, thinking, wondering what the point of it all was. Chances were she wouldn't find what she was looking for, with her luck lately.
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/21/2016 10:41 PM

"You'll never get anywhere if you carry on like that."

The voice was deep and clipped and slightly muffled, with a strange resonance as if it had bounced around the inside of a cup a few times before making it to her ears. She turned around, but she already knew who had spoken.
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"Silas," she said, although that too seemed somewhat pointless. The Malphas inclined his head. Water poured out of the brim of his hat and trickled down his beak, though he did not appear to notice. "What are you doing out here?" she added, when he didn't seem about to say anything else.

"The same thing as you, I suspect." He shuffled his wings in apparent discomfort. "I was sorry to hear of your mother's passing. She was a remarkable woman, though you are likely tired of hearing it."

She laughed despite herself. "You might say that."

"I assure you, I was as surprised to be given the news as you are to see me here. I was not even aware your family knew where I was."

"I believe you." She looked back over at the boat, still jammed firmly into the mud. "Well, while you're here, I don't suppose you know anything about boats?"

Silas made the hoarse coughing sound that was as close as she'd ever heard him get to laughter. "Let me see what I can do."
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/21/2016 11:19 PM

It turned out that while Silas, as she'd expected, did not have any particular knowledge of boats, he did have a strong and flexible tail which proved quite helpful in dislodging the boat. He perched silently on the back of it as she climbed in, dangling his tail into the muddy water, and Arabella said nothing to dissuade him.

They continued down her original course in silence for some time, or at least it felt like that. Silas didn't seem to be watching her more than anything else, looking in one direction for a while, then slowly swiveling his head and looking another way for the same length of time. She wondered if he could see much, with those dark lenses and no sun. She didn't ask.

Eventually she tired of the constant patter of rain, and said, "I have to admit, I'm still a little confused by your presence. This doesn't seem like your kind of place."

He coughed again, but otherwise didn't reply.

"I just don't really..." She trailed off. It was hard to know what to say to him, even now, especially now. How could things be otherwise when he had disappeared so soon after...after things had changed? There had been no opportunity for the awkwardness to recede, and now perhaps it was too late. "Did you come to stop me, or to help me, or just to find it before I do?"

"Truth be told," Silas said, "I had not expected to find you here. My understanding was that only one person would be sent after Catriona's legacy, and as the clues were delivered to me..."

"I see." She thought of her own copy of the clues, rolled up in a leather bag that she'd been told was more or less watertight but which she'd stashed under one of the seats just for good measure. Look for the bent tree, they had concluded. There was no indication of how far it would be.
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/21/2016 11:34 PM

"You do not seem uncomfortable with my presence," Silas said, and it was almost a question. That surprised her. She didn't think she remembered ever hearing uncertainty from him before.

"Should I?"

"Arabella."

"I know," she said. Nothing was ever that easy. "It's...I don't know. Part of me is, but you're just the same as you've always been. Just Silas. And you've always been made of the same things, we just didn't know about it before. Nothing's really changed."

"Does your brother feel the same?"

"Maybe not. I don't know if he remembers you." She had never asked Erskine about his opinion of Silas, and he had never offered it.

The silence stretched again. Occasionally she heard Silas's tail feathers swishing in the water, trying to increase the speed of the boat. Though he would never express impatience aloud, she thought. It was strange, this knowing and not-knowing, truths she remembered from years ago that might have stopped being truths in the meantime. She wanted to speak but didn't know what to say. Tell him about what she'd been doing since he left? He might already know. He had always seemed, to her, to be all-knowing. And even if he didn't know, he might not care.

"I think we're meant to get out and walk here," he said abruptly. "Or fly, as the case may be. I did not actually bring the clues, but I believe I remember them."

"I don't remember anything about that."
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/21/2016 11:50 PM

Arabella frowned, and reached under her seat, bending over the clues as she took them out to shield them from the rain. They were three neatly rolled pages covered in her mother's large, elegant handwriting, some of the steps numbered and others lettered, and some denoted only by a little dash that might almost have been a mistake. The last page said nothing about getting out of the boat once she was in it, until reaching the bent tree itself. She showed this page to Silas, who held his wing over it obligingly.

"Curious," he said finally. It appeared to have taken him some time to decipher the writing, between his darkened lenses and the generally poor light. "My version is more or less the same, but it contained an additional instruction after boarding the boat. I wonder which we are meant to follow."

"Maybe we're each supposed to do our own," she said. "That would explain why both of us received clues."

"Would she leave something for each of us?" He sounded doubtful.

"What other explanation is there?"

Silence, again, always, as neither of them voiced the possibility they both knew was there.

"It does seem unlikely," Silas said. "But it also is unlikely that she would want my involvement at all, and here I am nevertheless."

"She didn't believe in grudges," Arabella said. "Sometimes she did anyway, but she didn't like it. Maybe this is her way of releasing it, is trying to get us to..." To reconcile, she supposed. Though the fight had never been theirs, and though Silas had left of his own volition. She remembered it, still, and the days of discomfort and delicacy before it. It was not one of her favorite memories.

She rolled up the clues and tucked them carefully away in her bag again. When Silas said he remembered something, she believed him. "We might as well follow your set and see if it leads us to the right place. If it doesn't we can always come back to the boat."
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/22/2016 1:36 PM

It was a few moments' work to wedge the boat in the mud again, and Arabella stepped out, the ground squelching uncomfortably underfoot. Silas led the way, since he was the one who knew it, flying low over the ground at his usual stately pace. She didn't question how he could tell where they were going, but she had to wonder a bit; the swamp all looked the same to her.

"How did you get here?" she said.

"How do you think?"

"It seems awfully far to fly the whole way." The clues had implied a journey of at least a day just in the swamp itself, and then there was the time spent getting here.

"I suppose you might think that," Silas said evenly, and did not elaborate. It didn't seem important enough to pursue, even in the course of avoiding uncomfortable silences.

"What do you think it is?" she tried.

Silas coughed. "I cannot say. Even before we started having difficulties, you must know that Catriona and I were never particularly close. I know she possessed many objects with unusual properties, and I had assumed it would be one of those, but truly I know very little of the matter. I would be far more interested to hear your speculation. I'd expect it to be more reliable."
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/22/2016 1:47 PM

Objects with unusual properties, yes. That was certainly one way of describing them. Arabella remembered her mother's work room, shelves packed with strange and unsettling devices and artifacts and at least one desiccated animal—the last being something she'd brought up, when the trouble with Silas occurred, and she had been assured that was different somehow.

She and Erskine weren't supposed to touch the weird things their mother had collected, for their own safety. Once she'd disobeyed this rule, taking down a clear globe made of some material she couldn't identify, with a long ribbon of something swirling inside it; she wasn't normally in the habit of breaking the rules, but that globe was a new addition to the collection and had been carried through the living room in full view of both of them, and Erskine had said something about wanting to get a better look because it was pretty.

So she'd taken it. The thing inside had swirled around mesmerizingly for hours, but then mother had come home and Erskine had been startled by the door opening and dropped it, and even though it landed on soft carpet it shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces, and the ribbon inside became...something else. Some kind of spirit, or beast, or something. Mother hadn't explained it very well, or maybe they were just too young to understand. Whatever it was it had taken quite a while to fight off.

"I hope it's not one of those," Arabella said. When Silas swiveled his head in a way she read as quizzical she added, "They're not exactly safe, and I'm not trained the way she was. I don't think she'd leave me something that could kill me. I hope not." There had been bits of training here and there. Nothing like as intensive as her mother had, but maybe she thought Arabella was ready, anyway. It was a somewhat unsettling thought.

"What, then?"

"It's probably her sword," Arabella said. "It wasn't in storage with the rest of the things, and it's very impressive. I think it was made for some distant relative. The perfect kind of thing to be a legacy, even if I'll never actually use it."

It was quite a pretty sword, it hardly looked like a weapon at all. Maybe she'd offer it to Erskine.
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/23/2016 7:33 PM

"A sword," Silas said. His tone betrayed nothing, but she was still surprised by his choice of words, as if he hadn't known the sword existed. Or thought there were more than one. "It is something of a classic object. Your mother would appreciate that. I find myself wondering, if you think it is the sword, and you know you won't use it, why come out here looking for it?"

"What? Why wouldn't I?" She glared at the back of his head. "It doesn't matter if I'd use it, that's not what...I mean, I guess that is what it's for, but it's not the point. It's something of hers that I can touch without worrying about it killing me, and it's something she wanted me to have. Isn't that enough?"

"I...yes." Still unreadable. She had used to pride herself on being able to read Silas when no one else could, but things had changed. "My apologies."

They went on in silence for a while. Eventually—she had begun to curse herself for never getting around to buying a watch—a huge tree reared out of the gloom, bent over almost at a right angle in the middle, surrounded by a small muddy island in a wide river of brown-green water. Arabella stopped at the edge and looked down. It was cloudy and strange things swirled in it when she prodded it with her toe.

"Ah," she said.

Silas stopped next to her, perched on his carefully coiled tail. "I would offer to fly you across," he said, "but I fear you are much larger than when I was last able to carry you." He couldn't really be said to smile, given his face situation, but she got the feeling of it anyway.

"How deep do you think it is?" she said, as if he would have any idea.

He cocked his head. "Surely it must be shallow enough to ford. I don't recall your mother ever demonstrating the power of flight, or anything to take her across. She cannot have expected us to drag the boat all this way..." He trailed off, perhaps considering that she might well have expected exactly that. The fact that other people didn't always do what she did had occasionally been lost on Arabella's mother.
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/23/2016 7:46 PM

She stepped forward hesitantly and nearly tumbled into the river for her trouble; a combination of Silas's beak and her own legs digging in out of surprise pulled her back. She shook the dirty water off with an expression of mild disgust, though it was marginally less unpleasant than walking through mud, she supposed. "If only she had invested in swimming lessons instead of the other training," she muttered.

Silas hummed. "Perhaps I can be of service after all, if you will allow it."

Arabella nodded.

Silas took off in a rather confusing flurry of motion, and in the next moment he had wrapped his tail around her, lifting her off the ground. It was something of an inelegant solution, she thought, smiling. Her mother would have approved.

The river was not quite as wide as it had appeared, or perhaps Silas had a greater sense of urgency now that his main rudder was being put to a different use, but either way they arrived at the tree rather more quickly than Arabella had expected. She grimaced as the mud, even worse here than in the area they'd been walking through, oozed between her toes and chilled the pads of her paws. Silas watched her, though what he felt she had no idea.

"You are going to have to dig, I think," he said. "That is something I definitely cannot do for you." He spread his wings. She thought he might have been able to do a fair bit of digging with those claws, if he angled them right, but it certainly wouldn't be as effective as her.

She attacked the mud at the base of the tree with a ferocity that startled even her. She had a grudge against this wet earth. After an inordinately long time—wasn't there bedrock down there somewhere? Not that she knew anything about geology, or whatever—she hit a box. When removed from its hole, it was long, dark green, and wrapped in a ribbon whose original color had been lost to time.

The ribbon practically fell off as soon as she touched it, and she carefully opened the box. It was empty.
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Re: Absence [Self]

Postby Indigo » 03/23/2016 7:59 PM

They both stared down into the box. It was another silence, but different from the ones that had come before; it was a silence of confusion and disbelief, and they were united in it, for whatever that was worth. Not much, Arabella thought.

"I don't understand," Silas said.

"Neither do I." Some kind of metaphor? A hidden compartment? She tapped the bottom of the box, but it was exactly where it appeared to be. "It's supposed to mean something, clearly, that hardly surprises me at all now that I think about it, but I don't...could she not have left a note or something? Why does this have to be so complicated? I don't think legacies are supposed to be this oblique." She gave the box a half-hearted kick. It squelched.

After a few seconds she closed it and picked it up, tying it to her back with the ribbon. It might be important. She had no way of knowing. Maybe its secrets wouldn't be revealed until she got it back.

"Well, one thing has happened," Silas said, and Arabella turned around to see that the river around the tree had receded significantly. She could probably walk across it now, if she wanted.

"We don't know that's related."

"True," Silas said, and tilted his head. He seemed to be waiting for something.

"I don't know where you live now—" Arabella began.

"Lamenolai."

"Really? So do we." She paused, shook her head, and continued. "Like I said, I don't know how Erskine feels about you, and...I have a lot of feelings of my own to sort out...but maybe in a few weeks I'll come and find you in the city. If you like."

"That would be...if you want to." Silas tilted his head the other way. "I do not think I will be going back with you, however. Boat travel is frustratingly slow."

She nodded. "Then one more thing, before we part ways. Do you, uh...do you happen to remember how to get back to the boat from here?"

Silas coughed. "Of course. I will show you."
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