taxonomites | oo3 → my heart heard it and all to pieces fell [ accidental visual / location: castello petrana ]

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oo3 → my heart heard it and all to pieces fell [ accidental visual / location: castello petrana ]

All Hallows Eve doesn't mean much to Petra, hailing as she does from Elenia and Deira and no place that celebrates this holiday; the festivities pass her by and she spends her evening in front of one of the library's fireplaces, not really reading and, by a certain point, almost dozing. The insulation of a sprawling castle's thick stone leaves her mostly unaware of what's going on outside her walls, and thus wholly unprepared for the footsteps that don't belong.

...it is moments later that the tablet is knocked on by her scrambling hands, wineglass shattered and spilled across the floor as she retreats from the fireplace and hits the table behind her with her back. Whatever she's reacting to is obscured by her skirts and the poor angle, but the high, harsh note of fear in her voice is unmistakable.

"-no, I don't understand, he wrote to me-" she flinches and the tablet is jolted again, and her voice is quieter when she continues moments later, lying, "No, I didn't, of course I didn't, why should I?"

What Petrana sees is this:

He is tall - above six foot but perhaps a shade less so than her own husband - and his cloak is folded over his arm. His hair is long and prematurely white, catching the firelight like a blasphemous halo and he smiles at her, with a distance in his eyes (almost black when he is lit from behind) that followed her for years after their parting. In her mind's eye he's still the poised madman of the downfall in his youth, not yet thirty and so cold, and to see him stroll into her library as though he owns it, as though he owns her and is merely returning to see to her health and loyalty, she's too thrown to see the discrepancy with even the time that passed before his death.

He speaks to her quietly, with narrow focus, and it might be puzzling to anyone observing how she could be jerked forward when it becomes clear, as she no longer blocks the view, that there isn't anyone in front of her - and yet the jet locket that she wears is broken and the snap of it has marked her neck. She hears his footsteps fading toward the door, and kneels in her pooled skirts to try, with shaking hands, to collect the beads that fell.

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"I've kept to myself rather a lot since I arrived," she admits, warming her hands around her teacup. "It's very peculiar, and I don't think I've ever been wholly alone like this in all my life. I wish I could offer you some suggestions!"

"I'm rather comfortable on my own, but not content to fill my days with reading and caring for my house. I love those things, but I want them as a joy, not my living." Moon's tits, he needs to do something physical other than just chopping wood for the fireplace.

Petra considers Doul, and considers her tea. And the fact that she is utterly unprepared to protect herself in her own stupid, sprawling home.

"Well-" she begins, slowly, not hesitating but feeling her way through the thought, "-I don't know that I would ask for your allegiance for myself, but a castle such as my own does produce a certain amount of work that needs doing even when there's only one occupant. Particularly then, I should think, with so much going undone...and tonight it has rather come to my attention that stone walls aren't entirely the security one might hope for. That is something to think about, if you should be so inclined."

While they had been talking the storm had begun to wane, but the brief respite is shattered when one of the nearby trees is struck by lightning. As thunder shakes the house, the blue-white flash of light illuminates the shadow of a man against the thin curtains of Doul's living room.

"Lady, I would suggest going u--," but before he can finish, the door swings open and some terrible, shambling thing, tumbles into the room, clinging to the doorframe to keep upright. The creature is roughly man-shaped, but that's where the relation to humanity ends; its chest has been burnt and healed, then burnt and rehealed until the flesh has formed into slick, scarred runnels, pitted more like a melted wax figurine than a man's body.

While its eyes are filmed over and blind, its long, forked tongue seems to give it enough knowledge to unerringly turn toward Doul and spit out a series of curses in a language made for the rough, half-formed throats of the dead the thing fills the room with the stench of rotted flesh.

Doul's breath catches in his throat and there's only a moment's pause before his innate reaction kicks in and he snatches up the repeater pistol from the table and fires twice into the chest of this Nigh-Brucolac.

As soon as the trigger is pulled, he's up on his feet, gun abandoned and knife taken up, kneeling beside the body, whispering something in a guttural, halting tongue.

When the door comes open, the storm is all that Petra sees before them in the moments before she turns from her chair, teacup spilled and abandoned in her utterly unashamed flight toward the stairs. Her back is to them (him), her skirts preventing her from moving fast up the stairs in the small house and leaving her shocked to silence by the sound of the pistol firing, her hands pressed to the wall and her eyes wide at nothing.

It makes it seem almost quiet, afterwards, but the storm-rain and the open door prevent that. Petra tries to decide, in more or less the middle of the stairs, whether to keep going up or go back down and see what's happened.

Should she come down, Doul can be found kneeling in the open doorway focused entirely on the dead man only he can see.

"Lady, I need you to go to the kitchen and fetch me a glass. Bring it to me carefully, he may still rise up and attack." He cannot card his fingers through what remains of the Brucolac's hair: too dangerous to bring his wrist near the other's mouth, his hair would come out in great, bloody clumps, and, perhaps the most important reason, he's never been afforded that luxury before.

After a few moments, exhaling slowly, Petra turns on the stairs and descends, peering uncertainly and nearly losing her nerve when she realizes that there is nothing there. No one. She is, briefly, weak with relief but - not sure of whether or not to say anything, not yet. Is this what happened to her? Is it some madness of his own? The first seems likely, but she knows with a jolt that she hasn't a measure of him to say one way or the other for the second.

God, this place.

"Yes, of course," she says, softly, easily lost in the noise coming in from outside, and resolves to say nothing of it until it's over. Instead, she crosses quickly and quietly to the kitchen for that glass, holding her skirts whiteknuckled in one hand.

Resting his hand on Brucolac's chest, he quietly tells what's left of the vampir where they are and that he will fetch enough blood. He may say a few other things, but they're likely to be inconsequential comments.

"The glass. I--" And then, just as quick as he came, the body is gone.

Petra holds the glass in her hands, standing a foot or so back from Doul and watching his face carefully, cautious and steady. She is, incidentally, quite good in a crisis so long as that crisis isn't her own.

"He's gone, isn't he." Her phrasing is a bit telling; that she has to ask.

"He..." A pause while he hangs his head, "He wouldn't be well enough to disappear like that and even when he could, I could always track him. He's gone."

Leaving the knife on the floor, Doul rocks back on his heels and stands. The Deadman is not gone; rather, he was never here. Still keeping his back to Petrana, he walks over to the open door, reaches out and cups his hands to catch the rainwater. "I believe we have the answer to what you saw, Lady. There are apparitions about."

His head still bowed, Doul looks into the collected rainwater as if he can scry an answer more to his liking. When that fails, his practicality takes over and he splashes his face.

"Apparitions of peculiar strength," she notes to no particular end, her eyes on the open door and not the man standing in it. After a moment she sets the glass down, carefully, feeling uncomfortably like a voyeur of something not meant for witnesses. "I think," she says, and then starts again, firmer, "I think we'd best close the door."

Just as he closes the door to his cottage, Doul takes whatever he feels about this and puts it neatly away. "In that case, we can both find some reassurance that whomever we saw is not really here."

"If you'll excuse me, I'm going to put some soup on the stove and then I really ought to change into some dry clothing." Why yes, he can eat after what just happened.

Having some experience with the iron stomachs of soldiers, Petra doesn't comment on that - any of that, actually. She tips her head in agreement and, after thinking about it, goes to collect a washcloth from the kitchen before kneeling down where her tea spilled.

Ordinarily, there is someone else to do these things; here there's only Doul and Petra herself, and she feels belatedly foolish for imposing on him in the first place now that they're beginning to understand what happened. She'd rather not make him clean up after her, too, and he seems rather absorbed in his own moment.

Once the soup is on, Doul disappears upstairs for about ten minutes. Upon his return, he's as stoic as ever, but aware that human imagination is always ready to think the worst he is prepared to partially explain what he just saw.

"The Brucolac, the man I saw, we worked together and eventually I had to sacrifice him in order to save his city. He survived and will heal in time, but it was ugly."

In ten minutes she's cleaned up what was spilled and righted the cup, taken her seat again and soothed away the trembling in her hands and shoulders. She's still in the way some women are when there's nothing else left for them to be, and when she looks up she almost sees through him before she blinks herself out of it.

"I'm sorry that it came to you here that way," she says, simple and sincere.

"As am I." He ladles the soup into two, plain bowls in order to bring it and a few slices of bread over to the fireplace. "You said you know the way of knight, and while neither of us were true knights, nevertheless we fought together."

Before he starts his meal, Doul places the gun back on the table and confirms that it still has four shots. Once he's confident that the house is as secure as it will get, he pitches his voice low and launches into the secret story of the great fight with the razor golems. Knowing his audience, he leaves out the more unpleasant parts and highlights the exotic location and strange characters.

Practicality wins out over her remaining nerves and Petra accepts the meal with grace, not bothering to pray over it and not feeling especially guilty for the neglect. God will understand if she has other concerns; he probably does, too. While she eats, she listens.

It's a surreal moment in a way she finds almost comforting - the oddities and things wholly foreign in his tale contrasting with the familiarity of sitting by with her meal and listening to the possibly-exaggerated adventures of warriors. She wonders if it's good for him to speak of it, of this absent and sacrificial...friend? She settles on calling this 'Brucolac' Doul's friend in her mind after wavering on it, remembering his manner and listening to his voice.

"I could almost laugh," she says, eventually, her gaze slipping from Doul to the fire and a genuine (if wry) sort of humour in her face, not anything bleak, "I think my intangible knight that we fled would have liked you very much."

It may not be good for him, but he needed to speak of the Brucolac and this is relatively harmless way to do so. Having never told this story before, it forces him to think through just what he can and can't say; not to mention, whatever digressions are necessary for a woman not of Bas-Lag.

"I'll take that as a compliment." Even if he's fairly sure it's not.

"I know how odd it must sound, given the circumstances, but - it was a compliment." As far as Martel goes, Petra knew him best when she loved him best, and even the darker memories are coloured by that. "His...poor judgement-" what a euphemism, Countess, "-aside, his dearest friends were some of the best men I've been privileged to know."

Doul's own story was filled with all sorts of interesting euphemisms and vaguely off-kilter commentary. (Hello, fRemade.)

"Then I thank you, most sincerely. I do not often welcome company but I am selfishly glad that you are here this evening." Because, really, if she hadn't been, he's got a good idea of just how bad this could've gotten.

Petra's imagination is vivid enough to conjure up the troubles they might have led themselves to independently; this would be one of those situations where two heads are much, much, much better than one.

"Oh, I should rather be here than alone myself. Most definitely."

Edited 2009-11-05 15:58 (UTC)

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oo3 → my heart heard it and all to pieces fell [ accidental visual / location: castello petrana ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]

[ location : doul's cottage ]