Summary:Lucent and Varanim share stories of painful pasts.
XP:L1, V1
Tags:< The Heart of Night | Sol Invictus Logs | The Root of Beginnings >
Lucent Varanim opens her eyes... in a place of stark whites and blacks and not much else, where Lucent clad in light smiled at her. "Good... well, I think we are at evening again now. You sleep too much."
Varanim "What the hell is this about? Are you sneaking into my room, now?"
Lucent "No, no. I asked the Sisters to give me this. I am on the Gardens!"
Varanim "And you're poking into my sleep... why? Decided I haven't been cranky enough lately?"
Lucent "I was thinking of a way to communicate with you at a distance... you know. Since I might disappear soon, with the First and Forsaken Lion, and... I just did not want to lose too much time away from you." He frowns. "A way to be close even if we are far away, since people keep deliberating on recasting the Unity..."
Varanim "So naturally, you picked the place where I least like to be disturbed. Clever." She frowns at him. "You're really worried about this Lion thing, huh?"
Lucent "Just that I will miss you during it. IF we do it. We are still waiting on them to make a move on Innocence, after all." He shakes his head. "Nothing ever goes like we expect. But I just do not want to miss any time I could have with you."
Varanim "Big deal. You're immortal, remember? Don't be so sentimental." Still, she looks around. "How does this place work?"
Lucent "Like a dreamscape, except we can change it. Shape it." He nods, snapping his fingers and making them stand atop the cascade. "You could leave if you wished, if you find my company that much of a bother."
Varanim frowns over at him, then looks pensively out at the dream-landscape. "I didn't say that."
Lucent That brings Lucent a Lucent-smile, and he begun to step up... on a stairway of light, towards the clouds! "There are some things that I wanted to tell you... and that would be better if illustrated. Do..." He pauses, considering. "... hmmm. You probably see me as someone who is not human at all, right? Not... like you."
Varanim pauses at the first light-step, looking up to raise a sardonic eyebrow at him. "Not like me," she agrees.
Lucent "What do you see of me, then?" He asks, "You always describe it so well!"
Varanim "You're the greatest living priest-king of the sun. Self-absorbed and not that bright, but I have a lingering suspicion your heart's in the right place. Could you be a little more specific? Asking me to say everything I'm thinking always takes a while."
Lucent "Well, just that... you were talking about your losses, your family, and it seems to me as if you feel I never had them." He steps out, amidst clouds, the sky darkening about them. So it is night. "What do you see of me and tragedy? Many old poets wrote that tragedy defines a person, and humanity, in general."
Varanim Around them the currents of the night wind become visible, a faint luminescence streaming past and tearing at the edges of the clouds. "I think you collect tragedies, but if you ever had something so normal as a family, you haven't mentioned it. Was there ever time for one?" The breeze whips a nearby cloud into a succession of characters--priest, lover, fool, hero--all of them archaic and...
Varanim ...formal in connotation.
Lucent "There..." The clouds swirled changing into the face of a young girl. She had eyes of fire and the shape of her face remembered... Lucent. "No. Sometimes, I did not. Maia... I had time when she was younger." Images of them playing on a huge court, the great king 'defeated' by the little girl with a mock-daiklave. "But then, life just... got in the way."
Lucent "You said I am immortal, well, sometimes I was all-too-aware. I would get letters from her, asking to see me again. And again. And again. I just had to finish a few projects to see my little girl again, I had a room full of plushies and trinkets for her." He gulped, "Thirty years passed. She died on childbirth. She was never wed. She was waiting for me to attend to it."
Lucent "I tried to not let immortality influence my mind since..."
Varanim steps up behind him, wrapping an arm around him and tilting her head to rest lightly against his. "You gave up living for the future to focus on the present and past?"
Lucent He touched her hand, "Live on the now. Do not let years pass by."
Lucent "Even for a mortal, it is easy to see your life go, day in, day out, in work, or a drunken stupor, and ten years being lost. For us... we have been saving the world, constantly, for the past year. It could be forever, and we would realise, that mortal men and women around us... fall."
Varanim "You're going to lecture me about timing?" He can hear the smirk in her voice, quiet by his ear. "I'm preoccupied by the future, and you're stuck in the past--it's sheer luck we intersect in the present as often as we do." She snorts. "Besides, I've been avoiding attachments to people for much longer than I've been an ageless magical sun-pixie."
Varanim Then she kisses his neck, lightly. "Do you ever...?" and abruptly she's quiet.
Lucent "Think of them?" He shivers. "I had two marriages and many affairs in my seven-hundred and seventy-seven years of life, Varanim. Those yielded me sixty-three children. They are all dead, and I saw them die. All but six which, I am sure, are not alive today." He leans his face on hers' as she kisses. "I pray for them every day, as I wake up, and before I sleep."
Varanim Varanim, who was about to ask something very different, nods and wordlessly laces her other arm around him. "Sixty-three is a lot of children to bury," she says after a minute. "I'm sorry."
Lucent slides an arm around her. "I should have had less affairs... wild times, like when you were away, and then... villanesses holding my children. Like Aliela." A face appears in the clouds, like Lucent's but with little shining obsidian horns. "I took her from Malfeas, from her mother... I cared for her, even when many scoffed at it."
Lucent "An... old enemy, made her lose control. Rise to Demonhood, go insane. Someone had to... put her down. I did not get there in time. I would be the only one to see her as a GIRL, not... not just a monster. To change her back." Tears run down his face. "There were normal ones, too. Dead of mortal causes before they could be healed by immortals..."
Varanim brushes her fingers across his face, wiping away the tears. "Why keep at it?" she asks quietly.
Lucent "Why stop?"
Varanim She smirks. "The same reason some people only need to stick their hands in a fire once."
Lucent In the clouds, there is a imae of Aliela bringing a crown she had made and placing on her father's head, giggling proud! Of Maia being proud with a fake Daiklave over her father! Of a boy, beautiful as his father, clad in golden arms, "I will save the world!" and meaning it. He looked at her, "Fire gives you endless joy and promise, for long as it lasts?"
Varanim Varanim's eyes are distant on the clouds, then she brings them back to his face and recovers a trace of her smirk. "And yet, the cooking can be done from a distance. Still, I suppose you've always been a silly boy." Her tone is a strange blend of fond and sardonic, and she kisses his forehead gently.
Lucent laughs, kissing her neck, "I should know better than to duel YOU with metaphors."
Varanim "You should, but I'm not holding my breath for you to learn." She runs her fingers through his hair and presses his face against her neck, then gets a slightly speculative look. "How realistic is this dream visit business, anyway?"
Lucent begins trailing kisses up her neck... "Well... let us find out!"
< The Heart of Night | Sol Invictus Logs | The Root of Beginnings >