toku matsudaira, geezermancer (giri) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-03-17 13:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !log, toku matsudaira, wilham wolfe |
Who: Toku Matsudaira & Wilham Wolfe
What: Assessing the damage done.
Where: By the hole that appeared in the Nobles' District.
When: 2/26 (backdated)
Rating: PG
Status: Complete!
Mind the gap. The words were still buzzing on his lips when the geomancer turned from the strange little mage and left her lingering behind him, having spotted another – far more familiar – figure on the other side of the gaping hole. Toku Matsudaira had been standing there the whole time, really; Wolfe had noted the imposing shape of the councilman in the background, roaming the edges of the hole, but had simply filed the observation aside for until he could approach his mentor for a proper conversation. Which he did now, carefully stepping around the ravaged edges of the pit (minding the gap) until he’d finally made his way to Toku’s side. This close, Wolfe could feel the emptiness beneath them and then some. It was like a torn injury in the earth itself, the ground split open, wounded. “Morning,” he said, once he’d taken up position beside the councilman, like a loyal assistant. (And after all their decades together, wasn’t that close enough to the truth?) The greeting turned Toku’s attention from the rip in the earth. He identified the voice at once as it broke through the thoughts circling around in his head, and he offered a slight bow to the other Geomancer. “Good morning, Wilham.” There was no need to ask what had drawn him there; any Geomancer, no matter the extent of their experience in the class, could feel a disturbance in the earth such as this, even if the cause of such remained elusive. Both men stood side by side examining the gaping maw that had opened in the ground, ready to swallow any foolish enough to approach, devour them and deliver them to depths from which there was no possible return. Had the new arrival been anybody else, Toku would have turned away from the hole to attend to formalities. In Wolfe’s case, however, such were unnecessary when they both knew they were there for the same reason. Their gazes were fixed on the same thing, the same object of curiosity, brows furrowed against this professional mystery. “What are your thoughts?” “It’s unusual, to start with. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of something like this happening before.” Wolfe’s boot strayed out over the lip of the edge, feeling the yawning nothingness beneath them. He’d said he wasn’t afraid of it—and that still largely held true—but now standing closer to it, a skittishness had started to seep into his skin, radiating outward from the soles of his feet, this awareness of the thing beneath them. Whatever it was. “It wasn’t another geomancer, was it?” Wolfe asked, still peering over the edge and down into the darkness, where it swallowed up the rest of the light. It went deep. The answer was resolute and immediate. “No.” To call forth such violence and sunder the earth―no Geomancer Toku had encountered would have been capable of such. Ruling out humes left him with a much more unpleasant alternative. “There is something amiss with the earth here. When you call on it to attack, or use Quake, you draw from the energy it holds, do you not?” “I do. The elements each have their own energy signatures, and I’ve always been better with—” Wilham Wolfe had always been best with earth, the sturdy and unmoving, a strange counterpart to his breezy personality; he was a man who built mountains, who sought to anchor himself to stone and rock. He closed his eyes, sending out his questing senses, reaching for what he could feel of the scene around them. But with his four years in the class, Wolfe’s grasp on the elements fumbled, like a wire slipping out of his reach. The man’s eyes snapped open. Assuming it had something to do with his inexperience, he turned his head to look at the older mage. “Am I doing something wrong? I can’t reach it.” Attuned to the earth and the younger Geomancer’s magical signature, Toku sensed Wilham’s magic grasping at air, finding no purchase in the terrain below them. He had not tried commanding the earth around here himself, out of a fear of disturbing it further and deepening the chasm, but Wilham’s failure seemed to confirm his suspicions. “I do not believe that you are. But that is exactly what I was getting at.” A crease appeared between his brows as he worried at the idea. “It feels as though the earth has no spirit here. The soil seems rich in minerals and nutrients, from what I can tell, but I cannot find the energy that should be coursing through it.” He paused, pondering how to phrase this unfamiliar feeling. “As though the earth itself were dead.” “But that’s not possible.” There are more things on heaven and earth— a small voice whispered. It had been a small attempt, a drop in the well when it came to the power of geomancy, trembling pebbles as opposed to ripping open landslides, but Wolfe still hadn’t been able to reach for any of it. A chilling sensation was seeping in, clenching its fist tight around Wolfe’s spine. What he’d said to d’Albis didn’t work, then: if he fell in, perhaps he wouldn’t be able to pull out the earth to dampen his fall and rise back to the surface. “Have you ever encountered anything like this?” He could guess the answer, but asked it anyway, now dropping to his haunches to touch the earth at the edges of the pit, digging his fingers into the dirt. It felt the same, it felt normal, it felt ordinary. “Never.” Even standing near the hole was different from standing anywhere else in the city, in the world. Where usually Toku felt the pounding of life beneath his feet, a steady beat always in the background, here there was nothing. The earth’s pulse around him had become so familiar he had started taking it for granted, and now that it was gone he felt like a man robbed of his senses, disoriented and stumbling in the dark. The wound in the earth was a severance of bonds, a crippling analogy. “Since returning to Emillion, however, it seems encountering strange and unexplainable phenomena has turned to habit,” he said, voice lower now to keep their conversation private from the ears of civilians loitering near the chasm. “I fear this may be one of many, not because of what it is but because of what it implies.” “Agreed.” Wolfe’s mouth had curled downwards as he felt the earth (dead, quiet, inert) packed between his palms. “It was the plague that brought me back, as you well know. I’ve been doing some reading since. After going abroad and picking up geomancy and learning how it all fits together, I find I’m now paying more attention to when it… doesn’t.” Was there any better way of describing what this city had been undergoing? Unusual snowstorms, disturbed elementals, monsters heaving themselves at the palings like a nest of restless ants. “This may not be unlike the plague in nature.” If we are lucky, he almost added. If it was similar to the plague, they could expect some sort of beast to show up sooner rather than later―but how far had the situation deteriorated, that luck could be included in the same thought as an attack on the city by a giant monster? “I fear our only option at this time is to wait and watch for any similar events. And hope that we are not a step too late to stop whatever is causing them.” “You mean you don’t want to send an investigatory squad of mages down there?” Wolfe asked, rising back to his feet and dusting off his hands against his threadbare trousers. And there it was, the glimmer of Wolfe’s moribund humour lurching back to the fore with a wry smile. Toku glanced at Wilham out of the corner of his eye and let out a chuckle. “Are you volunteering to lead them, Mister Wolfe? I shall see to it you receive proper hiking gear in your quarters before evening, if so.” “If you order it, sir, I would obey, though I wouldn’t be very pleased about it.” They stood side-by-side, Toku a bit taller than the other, as they both continued to survey the scar in the earth before them. The dry humour dispelled some of their uneasiness—but their nerves still hung there, scraped raw between them, palpable in the air the same way that the life in the earth wasn’t. |