i want fangs (open)

[valeas]

WHO: Emilia di Carlo + whoever would like to join her.
WHEN: Throughout the month of March.
WHERE: The village of Ke-Waihu.
WHAT: Arrival, settling in, wolves, and horrors.
WARNINGS: Will update this as needed. As a note: My starters are in prose but I love prose and brackets equally. Go with your preference if you have one, and I will gladly match.


Emilia di Carlo does not arrive to the village of Ke-Waihu quietly.

For a near two decades — the only two decades an ancient curse allows her to remember — she was the dutiful and responsible daughter. The one who obeyed her family's rules and erred on the side of abundant caution. She stayed to the light and did all things a good witch must. She hid herself and contained her magic. When the hateful brothers roamed the streets in search of those with devilry in their souls to burn them at their pyres, she bit her tongue and swallowed the resentment. Closed her windows and kept her twin close at the bosom. Served food at the monastery the next day, for who would be suspicious of the one who nurtures?

It did not keep them safe.

Now she cares little to make herself palatable, to do as she is told even as a deep sense of responsibility lingers. Tension lines her jaw as she is stripped of her bearings, furious in her dignity. Suspicion crowds the sharp of her gaze when presented with a brew, one her Nonna Maria would tell her under no circumstances to drink. Won't you, she is asked, and she decides that she will not. No one can make her, not even the merchant's liaison Taksui, he with the vicious eyes. She is vicious, too, and has learned to bide her time.

A villager woman, her eyes kind but distant, fails to understand Emilia's unwillingness. Shows Emilia the marks of her own curses, as though they are gifts upon the skin. She is willing, even, to take a fourth curse upon herself should Emilia deny them. Whispers to her of the other villages, including one where all curses can be broken. Emilia, already cursed, doesn't readily believe. Neither does she ignore.

Theirs is a precarious situation. Under no circumstances are they to blow their cover, she knows. But there are certain concessions she is unwilling to make, and certain answers that will not be withheld from her. To demand this of her without question is not reasonable, no matter how desperate she is. She knows this, too.

And so they are given days. Days to think it over, days to speak with the villagers, days to decide. The more she learns, the less she is assured, but so is she reminded of her dwindling options, too. One curse atop another. One mission that blinds her to all else.

She drinks the brew.

The frustration, the wrongness of it — the anger — sits in the space between her ribs, and grows. ➥

Comments

I hope this is okay..................

[downswing]

Whispers like sand thrown at idle feet, he hears the villagers trade their penniless secrets. Dark silt, the waters of their pails thickened. Rush of stray nothings poured between his searching fingertips and no signs of the long, arduous birthing of sorcery or curse or madness, no scent of decay on first-sight search. He leaves the river banks.

Midday is slate and penury, the rush of nearly bare feet, of young girls swaying young siblings in slow drag to the markets, for they cannot find them care, and the wares that burden their slim-branched arms won't keep. He finds Emilia, a fresh face among their swarthy pallor, invigorated by the lack of common, menial work, her gaze sharpened on the well's keep — and Lan Wangji might well hasten his step, to join her, stranded at the rim of the wet mouth, to stare into waters so distant and deep, they've clouded.

"Do not fall in," he murmurs down, caution like stale cobwebs — less condescension than mere habit. Nothing to see here, carry on, but in the white tinny roundness of boisterous voices, he hears what they will not speak: Nothing to see here, for we cover our dead.

"They claim waters dark." Silence, sprawling. "And droughts, resurging."

perfect

[valeas]

The sharpness of her gaze meets Lan Wangji's, and with the lifting of her hand, Grace Three falls back. Soon, the wolf will leave in search of something to sink her teeth into, for lack of wanting here. Emilia wonders if it will truly satisfy the hunger.

If anything here does.

"They claim the dark waters, too, are a return."

Emilia heard it said by a farmer whose attempt to mask his fear proved futile. But good, she thinks. They've heard the same rumblings, if nothing else. "You remember our first meeting? The temple and the tomb."

[downswing]

"...tar on our fingertips," he murmurs after her, eye slanted sharp, for all his voice withers, reedy into something beastly. Predatory.

There is an edge to this part, as seldom as he is yet allowed to assume it: the cultivating investigator must ever be a ferocious creature, removed from the pool of sympathies. A weapon of reason alone. He moves himself, clumsily, to examine every instance of ill-gained learning they have secured throughout their travels, to recall — wet. Lake water of Sa-Hareth. Drenched things. The drip of the Stairs of Sighs. The seas of Ellethia.

Ever, they appear to drown. He anticipates her point before it is served to him, fresh flesh before the huntsman:

"Waters and wasteland." A pause, then cautiously, "You suspect connection to the dead."

And is she to blame in this? Wherever they set step, corpses claw their way up from brittle earth and seek out their ankles, to drag them down and in and tarnish them with the hardships of this world. They are pursued by wicked, bestial things that have long laid root where they now only visit — and their stalks grow, and the branches sing their evil, riotous.

[valeas]

A nod.

Tar on Lan Wangji's fingertips, hers.

Bonnaccorso sacrificed both his neighbors and his people to protect Taravast from that which threatened its gates. And still, the city was not spared. That same tar dripped from the icy walls of the Bessis tower during their fete.

"One of the villagers mentioned the liquid left at the bottom of the dried well — it looked like tar."

Emilia doubts she is the only one entertaining the suspicion. It does remain a suspicion, no matter how obvious a connection may seem to her at first glance. She's learned, learned brutally at that, the consequence of jumping to conclusions.

[downswing]

"In the corridors of stone, tar bound life," he murmurs it like river water, fighting, fleeing, shallow. Soft. There was a sickly, cloying coagulation to the creatures, a constant transience from one sodden state to the next. Left to their own devices, the winged things could not stand alone. "It brokered their form."

Yet here, their gaze cautious over the well's rim, they see only the natural impurities of water unfiltered, of greyed sediment and white debris. No serpentine, wispy trace of weighted dark. No wet converted.

Shame of your flesh, to not attempt study. Lan Wangji, why do you yet own hands? They feel out the mouth of the well, deepen their hold. Then, with a tired sweep of motion, he makes for the pail, calling it close on its string, until he brokers purchase of the chain, trying it for security. For what weight — his weight — it might yet carry.

"You need not come." This, as he starts to bridge the distance, leg ungainly when he swings it over the stone collar, seeking a step on the thrashing bucket. It may well be that he exceeds the limit of what the well can accept as its pail's burden. "Only keep the watch."

[valeas]

Last they collaborated, Lan Wangji was the one who kept watch. He served as her eyes and ears as she courted the Huntress away from the vulnerable, kept her moving lest the earth sunder. And it worked. For a time they did work.

She thinks that's what stings the most, in retrospect.

"No caution for you?"

It isn't the first time she notices that he is very much about others doing what he says, and not as he would do himself. She's no great desire to be the pail's burden in Lan Wangji's stead, mind.

She's only curious what changed his mind, if it even was changed.

[downswing]

A simple conclusion, ginseng on tongue. He releases it unspitting. "One must suffer."

Let it be him, by right, by training. Inconvenience suits the exorcist, the cultivator trained, and he is no different in this than his lesser in rank or his forefathers. Arrogance dresses the monster.

Humility banishes him into slick, crawling depths. Delight swells in him, anticipation. He chokes both down.

Tattered, the pail grunts and creaks on a chain heaving with weight inconceivable. He tips it, each way, until he has positioned one foot in the pail, the other coiled around the steel fetters, hands adrift then striking purchase. A trickled negotiation, teasing. He waits, until he is a speck of dust on metal hoops, a pale coagulation of tender obstacles in light's path — incorporated in landscape, ill breathing.

Wet waits like a hungered belly below. He scents it. Then carefully behind him, "Cast me down."

One must control the chain, and broker the watch and offer rescue should safety atrophy into danger. "Should ill strike, I shall call."

[valeas]

Emilia was not taught much in the way of magic, a fact she's now learned was deliberate. Orchestrated by family. All this time, she's thought of their methods as a way to keep the devil at bay. It never occurred to her, not once, that the person they wanted to keep leashed was her. Her twin. She's been playing catch up ever since, but this she knows to be true:

As above, so below. Balance.

For every silencing spell, there is an amplifying one. She doesn't know that she can fully trust Lan Wangji to call upon her, but she can trust her own ears if need be. And so she nods, and begins to cast him down.

Thinks to herself how even now, the maddening man does not quite lose his grace.

[downswing]

A rickety, drowning silence. Wet encompasses him, lines his lungs and burdens his tongue, and there's a weight to anticipation, the slow-crawled descent into the belly of the well. Now and then, he teases the cat's rigid back of a rope line that propels him down, until it curls, and the rivulets of tension he sends up can signal to Emilia that he is alert still, that the downing continues.

He hits the heart of the stone later than he had expected, height misjudged and a sulphurous, pit quality to his surroundings. No moss to the well, fingers tickled and grazed when they peel back from beastly stone. The rims of his silks weighed by coagulated filth, part dirt and part water, cloying tar. Not yet the wax-like substance they had peered in the corridors of Sighs, yet the movement of his descending foot slows like a knife cutting through bound honey. When he shifts, the wet curdle.

"This is no water," he calls out, so that Emilia might know, might keep the notes of their observation. His fingers tickle air with the electric nibbles of a talisman that lands on the liquid's stretch without dispersing curses. No malice, then, not as ghosts know it. "No cause for exorcism. A thickened... liquid."

And the first thought that comes to him is, "Black blood, as if it were a gutting."

[valeas]

It is instinct, to reach for an amulet that is no longer resting on her breastbone, to wrap her fingers around the horned shape of it. To feel its buzzing energy, the feeling itself familiar and warm, not unlike a hug from her grandmother. But her hand meets only skin, fingers sliding up the column of her throat and swallowing back a swelling frustration.

This, too, familiar.

Her hand drops, thinking of a lesser spell, then. A different sort of energy ripples forward, over the inner surface of the well and further down still, until her whisper reaches Lan Wangji as though she might have followed him.

"Does it ... smell?" is the question. What else can he perceive?

[downswing]

He feels more the hound of hunt than the infiltrator, curiously foolish in the face of brazen investigation. The unknown has not favoured them so far, spared them no kindness. Now, Lan Wangji's fingers dance the gelid emanation of the dark waters, settled like slime, and he nearly descends them, nearly, nearly, but satisfies himself with a gentle sketch of 等 in the cloying air — Wait.

"No scent," he murmurs, once, and hard, staggered echo drowns him in three voices. Then, louder, for Emilia's sake, "No scent, no energies."

...almost as if these are waters honest, tedious and true, darkened by filth. But no gravel floats in them. No bubbling kindles or bursts. When Lan Wangji collects a pebble from the well's wall, only to cast it in, it falls inside, and he does not hear it land.

It chills him to hiss above, "...its depths are deceptive. Yielding no reflection. Untrustworthy for fish."

In case, perhaps, Emilia rushed to shelter a pet salmon.