dreamsinday (dreamsinday) wrote in at_the_gates, @ 2012-03-03 23:47:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !plot: london burning, jocelyn makepeace |
BACKDATED: London's burning plot
Who: Jocelyn Makepeace (mentions of Arazia Santoro)
What: Narrative: why magic ceased to play games and tricks
Where: The Circus grounds/Morden's tent.
The tent’s lights belled and blew, like fireflies dancing, like dying stars, like the blooming of strange new place beyond Dreaming and between worlds. Her eyes were liquid-unfocused, were wide-staring at this different sky; magic streamed like living poetry, like fire gone tormented and twisted and forced through veins until her body was tuning fork struck and humming to discordant beauty. It could have been but it wasn’t, it couldn’t, no thank you and bread and butter plate passed down the table with no cake to follow -- there were the faint pressure of the other-girl’s fingers against her palm (other girl, all ink-black hair and joyous face, like prayers and hymns and butterflies) and the not-quite melody of magic purring like overly-familiar cat about her shoulders -- and Joss insensible and senseless to magic wreaking happy destruction, unleashed and loosed upon London town.
It was streaming flow, ocean cheerfully flowing into (overpouring) cracked tea-cup until the party was quite spoilt (although they didn’t seem to know, or notice, those dancers the lot of them, on gold-bright feet and wreathing hands and dreams that danced alongside them). For minutes -- moments, moments when sanity streamed in like broken ribbons behind the magic, caught up to Joss and sent sharp-pain-heat scarleting through puppet body wavering along with magic’s flow -- she was caught, butterfly on backboard and admiring a world where no one’s shadows made sense, where the spiderweb enveloped all and silky-spanning dreams stretched out, thoughts like dew drops shaking down through her head.
There were familiarities, the dreams drawn out of sleeping heads made real, nice to meet you and how do you do, and mother says I mayn’t dance but I can watch and the strange crawling things that crept from dark places and made themselves real enough to bite and catch and snatch. There were friends, dreams caressed with cold white fingers, stroked fondly into stronger strength (reality slipped, reality refracted like light on water, reality sighed itself out a-stretching) until magic soared itself inviolate inside woman-girl, slid through skin and left her burned-out husk of self.
Joss’s head sank onto chest as magic rose to screaming heights beyond, Joss’s hand went slack within Arazia’s as magic was tempest, was malestrom of all the imaginings of tortured people, Joss’s fingers slid past those of neatly manicured neighbour and Joss folded up onto the grass, neatly-strings-snipped puppet-girl, a collapse of white linen and pale limbs and too-bright smile gone to place beyond even Dreaming as magic shrieked for loss of channel and all that was beyond found itself sourceless, found itself starved of life as the partiers, the naughty planners, let loose of one another and lost themselves within their own chaos and its aftermath.