inbox/horizon.

[brittlest]

In rare instances, an innocuous entryway or door found in Horizon will fail to lead where it's meant to go. Instead, it will deliver the traveler to an unlikely space between spaces. The wandering door opens to a domain of secrets and concealment: a great tiered interior amphitheater whose levels all gaze down toward the lowest and centermost floor where the wandering doorway stands independent of any wall or frame. The occupant of this place is a dark eyed man in a worn black coat, a tarnished death's head pinned at the high collar. He carries a cane whose handle is shaped like a watching dog, and he is never surprised to receive a guest.

Comments

horizon, before eifstide;

[sankt]

Into this unlikely space steps a dark-eyed man in a black coat, the hems bleeding, ink and mist settling light and heavy and disappearing where it lands. His shadow is dense behind him, seems weighted as it drags. He is not surprised to be here.

This isn't the first time he's stepped into this amphitheatre. He's been here more than once, first by accident—he was quite surprised, then—and then to come looking for Ralston, though he's never stayed for very long. Indeed, he doesn't seem to spend much time visiting anyone else in their domains.

But he has been here alone, too. Just once. He came to walk around the tiers, running his hand over the balustrade—just to see. In case he might learn anything new of the man who made it.

"Maejyr Ralston?"

He always calls when he arrives, and always just as calmly.

[brittlest]

Once, there had been no answer save for the soft sounds of the cloistered air stirring gently in answer to Kirigan's presence. That secret, quiet place of observation had taken on it's rarest form: a thing observed, with its accordion tiers of dark oiled railings and cut post dividers staring back without blinking or flinching. The curve of its ceiling rises away from the interloper, and there at the centermost point of the dome overhead is set a two dimensional plaster of three hands joined over the hilt of a broken sword. In some over ornamental crook of the paneling lurks a perched bird with a watching eye. Carved into the base of one of the end row posts is the inanimate figure of a spider.

The room had lain dormant then, but had expressed no supple sign of bending. In a world designed by its occupants, this secret corner was bizarrely fixed. Inflexible.

Today, what bends in reply to the Kirigan is—

Maejyr Ralston, forward across the rail of one of the amphitheater's upper tiers.

He is dressed in a black coat. From a distance, it looks less drab than it will up close. Hooked too across the rail is the glinting, silvered handle of the man's imagined cane. The canine animal depicted there is all bared teeth and wolfish pinned ears.

So: as per usual.

"General."

Ralston has never seemed surprised to see him there.

[sankt]

He looks up, observes Ralston passively, then turns his head toward where he knows the stairs ought to be, as if to make sure they're still there before he goes to them.

"Do you know why I'm here?"

He could've found him in the castle, easily; they're practically living on top of one another, the Summoned.

[brittlest]

The stairs are indeed still fixed where they ought to be. Does that at all serve to legitimize his claim when he answers—

"I haven't the slightest idea."

It's drawled in that perennially bored cadence of his, somehow all at once dismissive and impatient as he straightens back from across the rail. No, he doesn't know. But like a dark spot in his vision, the lack of awareness is active and pressing. Irritating.

It must be rooted in some fact beyond the edge of Horizon. Or, simply, Kirigan's purpose lies too closely to himself to be observed. It would be cheating to see myself, he'd said a long time ago to someone else in a very different place. You'll simply have to accept that I come by my charms naturally.

[sankt]

To the stairs, then. The edge of his shadow billows low, gently cascades down the steps after him, lingering in particulates like kicked-up silt until entropy scatters it at last. His hand alights on the polished rail and slides along it. The heavy talon ring gleams briefly on his finger.

"There's a girl," he says. "Small, dark hair. An accent like mine." She would hate to be described as small before nearly anything else. "Something of a temper. She fled Thorne when the portals opened. Did you ever meet her before she left?" Eventually, after a nonchalant detour to whatever embellishments present themselves most conveniently—there's that bird, and he doesn't need to look to know the plasterwork hands are there—his gaze lands on Ralston directly. "In person, I mean."

[brittlest]

A man with any sense of foreboding or instinct for caution would, at this moment, consider meandering idly in some gentle direction away from the stairs and the man ascending them. It would be a relatively simple thing to hold this conversation at a comfortable and most pointed distance. Maejyr Ralston in his faintly worn black coat waits where he is, idle as a school boy in some great lecture hall where he has habitually performed perfectly well.

"I can't say that I did. She went to the Free Cities, I think." The faint observational tip of his head angles now in the opposite direction—a hunting dog cocking first one ear and then the other.

"A friend of yours?"

[sankt]

"Something like that."

He's reached Ralston's tier. He's turning to approach, his hand leaving one rail to alight on the next. If this were someone else, he might make himself imposing—fill this theatre like a basin, let the darkness swallow it from below—but knows it would be a wasted effort, even here. Perhaps especially here.

"You're a perceptive person, Maejyr. Shrewd, I would say." He passes across the first and furthest line of polite distance without seeming to consider it. "I'm wondering if you might help me understand something."

[brittlest]

Here at last that silver headed cane comes away from where it has been idly hooked at the railing. It's a reflex more than it is purposeful—a natural preparation in light of narrowing space. Maejyr Ralston is so very particular about who (or what) he allows within arm's length of him, and the habit is evidently so ingrained that it lingers here in this place where the bodily harm which might be done to him is entirely a figment.

(There is no need for him to be easily broken here; yet the reservation is as persistent and reliable as his suspicion for any unanticipated compliment. Does a blind dog better scent a change in the wind?)

His smile is all teeth.

"Should I hold out for more flattery first?"

[sankt]

The path of that stick momentarily draws his eye; it's only a coincidence this happens just as he slows to stand, scarcely more than a cane's length away, but mustn't seem like it. (And there may be something to it, regardless. He's already warned Ralston once.)

"It isn't flattery, Maejyr; these are the reasons I accepted your offer in the first place. So you can imagine how confused I was when this," ugh, awkward phrase, "friend of mine mentioned she'd received a visit from a Mister Ralston on my behalf." His head tilts. "What I'd like to understand is, given what you've observed so far, what exactly made you think this was a good idea?"

[brittlest]

If the indictment comes as a surprise, it doesn't show on Ralston's face. Standing there at the edge of some light's pool, his smile becomes only fractionally more fixed and there is no spark of alarm at all his blackly dark eyes.

He is unamused, maybe. Mister Ralston. He'd been considerate enough to give her his title, and for what?

The stick is fetched up and tucked under his arm. As he does it, Ralston forces himself to acknowledge that he needn't lean on it here. If he fixes that point in his mind, it will become as true as anything else on the Horizon.

"Your Aleksandra has even worse manners than I'd guessed at."

[sankt]

The Darkling's momentum stumbles. Seconds pass while he makes the swift—not swift enough, and regrettably undisguised—progression from confusion to something like comprehension. Anger follows, bleeding in along all the lines of his face, sparking his stare unpleasantly bright. Like liquid his shadow spreads, spills from this tier to the one below, crawls up the balustrade to the one above, begins to consume the empty floor between himself and Ralston. He needn't fix that in his mind to make it so.

"Her name," a quick clenching and relaxing of restraint definitely occurs here, "is Alina."

It's probably a mistake. Ralston remembered it wrong. But amid his loathing for this circumstance and all the little unmanageable pieces of it twists the thought that she might wear his name on purpose; it pinches differently, and he hates that, too.