Lady Elfleda (lady_elfleda) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-11-06 17:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | elfleda, rhiannon lee |
Pieces On The Chess Board
Who: Elfleda/Rhiannon.
Where: Las Vegas gymnasium.
What: Elfleda makes Rhiannon an offer she may or may not refuse.
Gymnasiums were as much a place of work, for the body, as any office block. This one, the haunt of one Rhiannon Lee, possessed walls where the bright sunlight of Nevada would typically stream through from windows mounted high up, near the ceiling.
That same daylight was starting to turn sour. Toning down, as if obscured by overhead clouds. Weather which was, by no means, common for Las Vegas.
Blackening... Thick, ebony oil was swirling, churning up against the glass. Pressure building, building, until cracks began to splinter and spiderweb, spreading over a couple of the panes to provide an entrance. The viscous, tar-like ooze squeezed through, trickling down the concrete walls to pool at the base.
Steam hissed where it touched the floor and, as if having a life of its own, the fluid ran quickly together. The collective haze seeming to create a heat hazing effect, distorting the air behind it. One might have asked why its owner hadn't simply opened the pre-existing door, but this was the creation of a doorway: One huge, shimmering gateway stretching almost the entire wall's height.
Any music would have long since been thrown into electrical disarray, providing only static.
Through that rising steam could be seen a figure gliding through. A youthful woman of monochromatic hues in blacks and whites. Porcelain-like features, yet the way she looked around her was as commanding as it was graceful. There was an unspoken weight behind it. A being who had brought with her a sense of presence, as surely as a dragon stepping out from its cavern of guarded treasure.
"There was a time when such devices," observed Elfleda, running pale fingers down the metal of nearest exercise machine, "would have qualified this room as a torture chamber."
Rhiannon had heard and seen the weather changing. She stopped her solo workout at a punching bag to pick up her phone and scroll for an app to explain what kind of squall was kicking up outside. It had come on with a midwest quickness, like the storms she'd encountered on those trips she'd taken when she lived in Chicago. There, it was wind she worried about; here, flash flooding. But there was nothing on her phone to explain the change in light.
She cut the music when it screeched and scratched at her ears.
Coming out from behind the synthetic barrier that hung from the ceiling, Rhiannon watched the strangeness leak into her gym. She left drops of perspiration on the mats and concrete floor as she inched closer, her expression changing from one of confusion to recognition as the oil pooled and Elfleda came through. It had been months since the last time and very dark in the desert, but this was an unmistakable face.
She saw the Emissary run a finger down the disinfected equipment. She'd have to clean the living hell out of that one. "Ask the right person and it still does."
Rhiannon's wrist mopped at her forehead. A few pieces of brown hair had come out of her ponytail and stuck to her temples. She looked behind herself, doing a paranoid check of the gym's empty status even though she knew she was alone for a little while longer, having come in early to exhaust some of her pent-up energy before any customers showed up for the day. "What are you doing here?"
"Visiting," Elfleda cryptically supplied. Her gaze flashed up, meeting the hunter's, but the entity's face remained bowed, where she had looked down to where fingertips connected with metal. It raised slowly, as Elfleda began to slowly walk forward.
"Proposing..."
The word slithered under the pause which was hanging in the air between them. Running underneath the proverbial carpet until suddenly rising like a hooded cobra, threatening to administer either a stabbing bite or its own protection.
"An instrument, left unplayed, will gather dust. Just as the unused blade will dull and fall to rust. And here you are... Desire to join the symphony, yet left to rot."
There was no sarcastic tone to be found in Elfleda's words, though it might have been easy to inject one into such words. The ghostly visitor's usual lilt was one of verbal clarity, slowed down for the sake of pronunciation. Each syllable having its place, needing to be voiced, just so. But this was no conversation with a fellow resident of even Earth, let alone Las Vegas. There was something tangible, deathly, about this being's presence. Her head tilted a little to one side and eyes swept down the hunter's form, somehow appraising her. Perhaps gauging something about Rhiannon's very aura.
"You are a weapon harnessed, but not unleashed," spoke the Black Light's Emissary. "I can offer what others will not... Prey for the taking. Prey you would not find disagreeable."
"Wow." Rhiannon laughed. "Left to rot. Like the loneliest girl at the dance. You don't beat around the bush, do you?"
The hunter wiped at a trickle of perspiration that burned her left eye. The tape on her knuckles came away black from her eye makeup: dark colours painted on to achieve a look not dissimilar from the Emissary's. She picked at the edge of the tape and began to unravel it from her hands, the movements swift and practised, but irritated. The adhesive strips formed an ever-expanding ball in her free hand. It was tossed on the floor and she flexed her fingers. The skin was pink from having hit the bag, over and over again, never quite spending all that she had to give.
Rhiannon had just gotten back from California, too quick for this conversation to be a coincidence. Already an enemy was ready to rub her uncle's victory - his piecemeal theft of her heritage - in her face. "I would love to know where you get your intel," she said, going to a duffel bag on the floor. Rhiannon found a black, scoop-neck t-shirt and pulled it onto her arms, then overhead. It settled over her sports bra and she tugged it down to meet the waistband of her shorts. She cruised past Elfleda, more bold than she felt and picked up a bottle of water. "Are you following me around? Reading my journal?" The water uncapped, she drank a few swallows from it.
"A corpse still reeks, no matter the flowers decorating its grave. To see your birthright, your power, squandered with such disregard, should be seen as blasphemy."
Elfleda curled the fingers of one raised hand inward as she said it, like the upturned claws of a vulture, symbolically enclosing the essence of that power in her palm. Her slow, deliberate walk was taking her past devices and machines, all far beyond her time, though Rhiannon could not know it. Had no way to even conclude she had once been human, though certainly once was. Physically, she could be gauged to look the younger, though was speaking more like an experienced matriarch, not daughter.
"I could show you, Rhiannon Lee... Though I daren't think you'd like it," the zebra-like figure answered with a spreading, ghoulish smile. "But come, speak," she challenged, having rounded to face her would-be foe. "Does the hunt not call? Does the blood not quicken, to know I could ignite the chase? Grant you purpose?"
If an insult-a-thon was supposed to be persuasive, Rhiannon thought, Elfleda had a lot to learn about hunters. "I have a purpose," she said stonily, setting down the bottle, the stainless steel loud on the polished concrete floor. "It didn't come from him. It's not his to take."
In the gloom of the gymnasium's fluorescent lights and whatever pall the Emissary cast over the windows, the hunter watched the woman's dress trailing past the equipment. She thought of her mother, Ciara, of her ashes in her father's sagging house in Detroit. It wasn't all that was left of Ciara as her daughter was walking around, carrying her blood. Rhiannon didn't know much about the time before her mother died, but she knew she'd been at loggerheads with Sean because she'd read about it in her journals. If Ciara had been alive to see him exert this kind of control over her daughter, she would have had plenty to say about it.
"I can find my way around him," Rhiannon said, knowing that Sean, Rob and all their connections and money couldn't stop her from hunting. There would always be little fires. The problem was that she wanted more and she'd never get there if he was running ahead of her, extinguishing infernos. "Besides," she said, ducking under a squat rack, on a dismissive path to where she'd left her belongings. "I haven't forgotten what you said the last time you were here. About me having a key in my back? Why would I let you wind it?"
"I don't seek to control you," Elfleda replied, matter-of-factly. "This world is a garden. I want to see you bloom. Your kind are what keep it from filling with weeds. The disrespectful. Those who serve no cause but their own, plotting childish schemes of fiefdoms and blood."
The blackness at the windows began to thin as it drained fully through those cracked panes of glass and down to the floor. Part of it flowing across the ground to join with its mistress, while most remained to keep the acrid steam of the portal open. Elfleda slowly cast her gaze around the room in which she now found herself, even as sunlight was allowed to brighten its confines. Still, though, the daylight seemed, somehow, to veer away from her. Or at least, get absorbed by the figure's polluting aura. Either something was trying to shield and protect her or she was generating her own elemental form of a darkness.
"Rhiannon," she began anew, transitioning to a more diplomatic poise. Hands clasping in front. Smiling as warmly as could be expected. "You are an... Olympian. A would-be inferno, contented with lighting candles. A dragon chasing lamb, whose wings should soar. I ask only for consideration. To grant you the fight for which you were born."
A pause.
"And the tools with which to win it."
Contented. Hardly. Rhiannon remembered her disgust with herself at the Cove, the night she realized she'd walked to the marina and left all of her weapons in her car, like an ordinary person. The shock of that was worse than the smell coming off the animals loping towards them. If she'd been in Illinois and been spotted like that, her family would have had her jumped for the hell of it. Later that night in the shower, she spun a ring on her finger, closed her eyes and thought to herself, 'This is not who I am.'
"Why?" Rhiannon knelt on the ground and tossed a roll of tape and her phone in the duffel bag, zipping it sharply. "Why would you want to give me anything? I've been doing this for eighteen years. I'm sure I've hit you where it hurt at least once." Unless... She cut herself off and looked over her shoulder at the Emissary, the damp end of her ponytail stinging her neck as she turned.
"Unless you're telling me I've been 'lighting candles' this whole time," Rhiannon deadpanned, her eyes on the pale fingers of Elfleda's hands. She straightened her legs. The distance between the two women wasn't large, but she crossed it, a curious set to her head and shoulders. "But that can't be right."
"Humanity's affairs are as a grain of sand to the desert," came the reply. "It won't always be that way."
Whether rightly or not, Rhiannon's attitude was being perceived by Elfleda as mildly flippant and the ghastly representative did not care for it. Mostly, of course, because she simply was not used to it.
From the core of Elfleda's being, something ethereal pulsed through, not the air, but the ether within it. Something dark, neither seen, smelled nor heard, but it was there. A billowing cloud of spiritual toxicity was invisibly spilling out and reaching towards the hunter; lapping at Rhiannon's aura, tasting it, trying to awaken hidden impulses within her.
Elfleda rarely depended upon words, alone. She didn't do things the way mortals did.
"I want no slave, Rhiannon Lee," she instructed, this time more ordered, definitive. More intense. "What I want is an executioner. And your prey would be those who would threaten your home and mine. Is that not a challenge worthy of you, hunter? Or is friendship with the undead and dalliances with jungle cats how you prefer to pass your time?"
Rhiannon's anger was quick and eager. That intangible wave of Elfleda's power was met with the hunter's own, white-hot tendrils of it curling out from her as she came closer. No-one on Earth had said from which pool a hunter's abilities came, but hers was behaving like an old friend and it was a toss-up whether Elfleda's energy or words had provoked it.
"That's twice you've brought that up," she said. "Hell ought to make up its mind whether that makes me weak or interesting."
If she'd been younger she would have hit her, Rhiannon thought, standing within arm's length of that pale flesh. Or it might have been the lack of any real weapon that prevented her from trying it. Brown eyes lingered on Elfleda's throat, on skin that looked fragile and pliant. Her fingers jumped at her sides, as if the way she preferred to pass her time wasn't with vampires and cats, at all, but with strangling.
She took a breath through her nose. Why was she twitching like a live wire? Was it because it was true? Because, like it or not, under her uncle's roof, she'd been a cold, sharp, single-purposed weapon and now all her lines were blurred? She wasn't like Tasha, or Cian. Before coming here, she'd only ever wanted one thing: To live up to the reason she was alive, because Ciara hadn't had a daughter over any desire to nest. She was a hunter, period. Whether God-given or not.
Everything else was decoration.
Rhiannon closed her eyes and thought of Cian. She heard herself tell him, 'I've never wanted anything the way I want you.' She knew it was a lie, because there was one thing she wanted every bit as much as him.
"How would it feel?" She asked.
Years ago, something known as the 'Oz Factor' had been coined, denoting a common thread amongst witnesses of supernatural events. It referred to the odd sensation of isolation or feeling somehow transported to a different realm. With Elfleda radiating her aura of corruption in such an enclosed space, it must have felt like it was in full flow now. Ambient sound had subtly zeroed out to nothingness and the air felt oddly, not cold, but chilled.
"You don't need me to tell you that."
The figure in black knew fully well how she was physically endangering herself. Rhiannon was a stick of dynamite and she had just thrown it a lit match. But this was a being who had only recently volunteered her own flesh for a siren to consume at leisure. Necessities were not feared. That Rhiannon was even giving voice to this question meant Elfleda knew she had hooked her fish. Hunters needed conflict, like vampires needed blood. For some, like it was the very air they breathed.
"The easy kill insults you," Elfleda reasoned, slowly glancing down Rhiannon's physique, but perceiving more than mere physicality. "The victory you feel has been earned... Those are the ones you remember. What keeps you returning. Hardship, Rhiannon. What you'll feel is bitter-won hardship, but it would feel won, nonetheless."
It was true. It wasn't just trauma that Rhiannon remembered. It was the hardest ones to find, the ones that made her sweat and bleed and cuss. The ones who had done the most damage, coming to a bad end.
"I bet it's the same for you," Rhiannon said with a cynical smile.
She reached into the back of her hair, fingers pulling at the elastic band that held her hair in place, meeting resistance and snapping a few strands of hair in the quest to free the length of it. She took a step back from the Emissary and turned away. She thought of her faith, her Catholic upbringing. Further back in her family tree, they believed that hunting was a divine gift, citing evidence that their faith was what blessed their weapons, ignoring that theirs wasn't the only religion that operated that way. Rhiannon didn't know what to believe about her origins, but she did believe in God and it was hard to square with this.
But it was also hard to square wasting her strength. Was she somehow more devout if she hunted in her spare time, like a freaking hobbyist, or got back in line and did what paid the most and haggled over the price?
Rhiannon shook her head, shoes coming to slow stop. "What happens if I don't do what you tell me to do? Are you going to shut me down if I ask questions?"
What was it like for a being such as Elfleda? Did this qualify as employment? She seemed to have a purpose, a plan by which she was operating, but was it carried out begrudgingly or with gladness in her heart? Did she even have a heart? Had she ever...? Rhiannon was right to query whether similar feelings might be at play with her interdimensional visitor, as for herself when she vanquished an opponent.
"Then our business would be concluded," Elfleda succinctly declared. She half-turned, though not conclusively. A hand was raised to the console of a treadmill, sliding fingertips over the solidity of its contours. Buttons heralded their discrete beeps and the machine suddenly whirled to life like a chainsaw, before grinding smoothly to a halt. Elfleda's gaze moving back to greet the hunter's.
"But I would never forbid simple curiosity. However may I be of service to your own?"
Reluctantly pulling her eyes away from the treadmill, Rhiannon posed the first of what would likely be many future questions, if she chose to take hunting assignments from Elfleda. "Why don't you do this yourself?" She put up a hand in pause. "I'm not- I'm not looking for a riddle, I'm looking for a reason. I know you've got an interest in convincing a hunter to do this for you, so maybe that's it. Maybe it's two birds, one stone. But if you really want to eliminate a threat - by the way, I can't imagine what that would be - then why trust me? Can't you do it yourself?"
Rhiannon ran a look over Elfleda. It wasn't a challenging one, but one of curiosity, of wishing to understand the components of an entity who slipped between realms with ease, but seemed to carry no weapons. Was she more than some kind of spiritual pollution? Could she break bones, make people bleed?
The figure in black dress looked slowly down, seeming to cast her mind back to a different time. It was only their second meeting and not yet clear whether Elfleda had even once been human or was an entirely different type of entity. Truthfully, however, she was thinking back, sifting through memories and remembering her status. Rhiannon's question went to the heart of the matter. Of what Elfleda, herself, had ultimately become.
"Because that is not my place," she finally answered, following where fingers still contacted against the exercise machine and following them off into the air. "My battleground is that of possibilities. It is not for me to fight, not unless... Things get in the way," Elfleda simplified after pausing. There was a small, perfunctory smile which accompanied the sentiment. "And if things have reached that far, we're well past ambassadorial politics."
Something took Elfleda's attention back to either the portal or something whispering unheard words. Her delicately posed head had swiftly turned and she tilted in understanding.
"Trust and loyalty can be in short supply for hell's children, Rhiannon. And few can survive in your realm for long. Securing the agreement of mortals is not our only choice, but it would be preferable. Human life can... Persist in ways many of the brethren cannot," Elfleda added, somewhat introspectively regarding her own pale hand for a moment. Perhaps a hint of how and why she, herself, had come to be.
Rhiannon watched her carefully. "And if I kill something you didn't want me to, then what happens?" She ran the elastic onto her wrist, its slight, stinging tug a reminder of where she was. A gym, in the real world, in her body, no matter how strange the air and light felt. "When something’s hurting people, or screwing with the balance on our end, I take it out."
Even her unexpected relationship with Katherine had a balance to it. Rhiannon knew -- and hated -- that Katherine fed on people all the time, but they had accomplished some things together that put them in the plus column, at least for now.
"So if I end up in your way," Rhiannon hedged, "What are you going to do, execute the Executioner? Or is there a re-education camp somewhere that I need to know about?"
"If I didn't know better, I might perceive that as a threat." There was a distant rumbling noise from beyond the smoke, like thunder had sounded a few interdimensional miles away, beyond the non-Euclidean mists. "But," Elfleda interjected with a point of finger, "I was not granted this position for my volatility. You wish to query the possibility of... Conflicting interests."
The figure who had shown such recent intrigue with the hunter moved forth and there was a sound like a crocodile breathing through clenched fangs as she came close, though not from Elfleda, herself. She didn't taunt Rhiannon by playing with her hair or try to scratch her eyes out. Elfleda was a creature of stoicism. Power. There was no need to lower herself to petty contradictions. If something was not worth her time, she would ignore it. Instead, she was slowly walking around the mortal, cruising through her own darkly clouding essence.
Rhiannon had her attention and was kept in view, all the while.
"Dear Rhiannon, my realm is fuelled by many things... Conflict, itself, being one. You are more than welcome to contribute, should you think yourself able. But should you place yourself in the path of what I serve wills? Then you will be warned. And should you persist, removed, like any other obstacle."
Elfleda halted, turned more fully.
"No more weapons, no more toys, no more prey... Are you thinking this likely? Should I find another to nominate in your place?"
A much louder, inhuman noise was heard from the portal and Elfleda snapped her attention to it. Not a word was spoken, but the inference was clear: Wait.
Rhiannon's eyes went to the open portal and saw nothing in its depths. She searched the air around them for the source of those predatory sounds as she held perfectly still. There was nothing to see. Nothing to hit. In reality, her question hadn't been intended as a threat. She wanted to know how things would go. She wasn't planning to give Elfleda exclusive rights to her fists, or to clear every kill before making it. Sooner or later, they'd end up with different perspectives on a monster.
But how was that different than today?
"You'd do the same to me now, even if I turned you down... Warn me, or hurt me if I got in the way," Rhiannon guessed. She turned away, gathering dark hair into her hands and walking a short distance. Her teeth bit into her cheek. Something Elfleda said at the beginning churned in her head: 'The tools with which to win.' As desperately as she wanted to know what those tools could be, Rhiannon knew they might make the offer irresistible and it was better to make a decision without hearing of any other perks than these: a purpose and plenty of targets.
"I need to think," she said, turning back around. "It's like you said. You want trust and loyalty. I won't give you my word until I know I can keep it." The hunter went to her duffel bag and scooped it up. She needed to get out of that dark, confusing space so she could think clearly, away from the Emissary's presence and whatever kept growling at her. If it meant abandoning the gym and locking the door for a while, so be it.
The noise from beyond had likely emanated from something expressing impatience. Something probably below Elfleda in the hierarchy, however, given her immediate response to it. The figure, herself, seemed more inclined to wait, either out of protocol or just from inherent awareness for certain things to take effect. Elfleda seemed very much like a being who existed out of time, willing to play the long game. If she had ever been part of humanity, then she was now referring to it as a third party.
But in all her time and dimensional negotiations, even she was capable of being surprised, from time to time. Something which Rhiannon's final declaration had gifted her with: Surprise. It was subtle; a slight rearing back of head, raising of brow, but it was there.
The hunter wouldn't give her their word until knowing she could keep it... To a creature of diplomacy, who revolved around deals of some sort or the other, it was a statement which echoed loud and clear. For a moment, Elfleda actually seemed a little speechless; mouth parting, though without giving voice to any words.
Instead, silently, the young woman in black actually bowed her head in deference and understanding. Regardless of the outcome to Rhiannon's thought process, what had just been said had evoked a measure of apparent respect to be registered.
So, backing away, sliding into the portal's embrace, the blackness which had seemed to so impossibly soak into the very pores of the building's structure, removed itself into nothingness. Rhiannon may not have succeeded in landing a physical blow against the realm of darkness, but she had landed a diplomatic one.