starsmisalign (starsmisalign) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-01-31 02:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | celeste henry, elfleda |
Charon's Obol
Who: Elfleda/Celeste
What: An Offering
Where: Searchlight
When: Present
Ratings/Warnings: It's Elfleda
The desert was beautiful at sundown. Cotton candy pink clouds were painted on the denim-blue sky with a heavy hand, illuminating the peach tones of sand and brush. Celeste had walked past Gas Pipeline Road to a stretch of nothingness. No trailers, no businesses. There was a flattened trail perfect for walking, perhaps formed by people riding dirt bikes or ATVs. Her boots kicked up dust as she walked. The diurnal and nocturnal creatures were trading shifts, the rock squirrels and lizards making way for scorpions, jack rabbits, even the occasional coyote.
The brunette ignored the feeling of curious eyes on her from desert hiding places. She wasn’t there to disturb them. She was one of them. One hand rested easily on her canvas bag, her long hair in a high ponytail that swayed in the slightest of breezes. The temperature had dipped below the 50s, but was still pleasant. Celeste was wearing one of James’s flannel shirts over a plain black T-shirt, and every so often the scent of his favored laundry soap wafted up to her and she smiled.
There was something researchers of the strange and unusual termed the Oz Factor. A curious experience, whereby ambient environmental noise zeroed out and a sense of being somewhere else, somewhere unnatural, started to creep in. That was what started to phase into Celeste's world now. It wasn't just the chirping of insect life which vanished, but even how air could usually be heard softly washing over the ground. The little noises one typically didn't register, but when absent, could feel somehow wrong.
Like a swimmer who had realised they must have swum too far from shore, a growing sense of vulnerability was being signalled, not by what could be seen or heard, but by that which was not.
Something was in the water... Something was in the water and it could bite.
And somewhere, between Celeste and the lights of civilisation, a new shape could be seen. Far off, small, like the stump of a long-dead tree, it seemed to be growing. No... Moving. Both. There was no hurry to the movement; it was sure and deliberate. Something which seemed to be casting a longer and longer shadow. That or... Rising out of one.
It was heading, slowly, but surely, in her direction. There was motion within it, too, like something using a walking stick, except...
A ship. A small, black ship was heading towards her, but it moved not upon land. Instead, as it drew near, it was as if the desert sands were breaking gently before it, like ice upon a sea. In their place could be seen an oily black substance, thick and sticky, like oil. A stench of burnt sugar hung in the air around it and the boat was black with decay.
Two figures could be sighted aboard. One was something unseen, hidden under old, hooded robes. Hands of bone gripped the oar which had been moving the deathly ferry and it halted, allowing the vessel to halt. The other, a young woman of ghostly-pale skin, was in quite different attire, more suited to some gothic ballroom than nautical affairs.
"Every word..." The figure, Elfleda, Fern's 'Lady', turned and stepped across from where black fluid steamed to Nevada's shore. "Every action... One more knock on the door."
As she made contact with the ground, it was as though two realities merged. A hand into a glove. Nothing seen, nothing heard, but there was a weight of history, somehow. Something slipping into place.
"But I had not answered, Celeste Henry, until now. Until the coven."
Celeste was instantly reminded of the game of hide and seek she played with what could have been the ghost of her dead little brother. It was that kind of surrealism, and she froze in place, blue eyes trained on the confusing display before her. She was reminded of the river Styx, the boatman Charon charged with crossing departed souls. The brunette knew who the other figure was. No introduction needed. She watched as the woman’s skirt trailed over the dust and sand, could hear the sound of the fabric swishing in the deathly silence.
“You know my name. Of course, you know my name,” Celeste muttered under her breath. “What about the coven?” she said, louder. She was thinking of James, of all the things he had told her about Elfleda. How close he was, geographically, but in terms of what was happening then and there, how far.
Elfleda’s words were spoken with thoughtful pronouncement. The English accent, cutting through air like a blade of ice. This was a figure of diplomacy for the nether realms, whose ebony lips parted, graced with a momentary smile.
“The third leg of a stool... A triumvirate setting course for uncharted waters. One could be forgiven for thinking your fratricide was a token of sacrifice.”
Elfleda didn’t have eyes of blue, brown or green. There was only an iris of black, completing the zebra-like scheme of monochromatic colours. Even the tongue she spoke of was black. They were eyes which cast down with an expression of displeasure; their owner striking out with a hand to catch ahold of something ghostly by what appeared to be its scalp. It couldn’t be wholly made out, beyond an ape-like crouching posture and flailing protest. The hand yanked back and cast it back into the shadowy murk.
Before Celeste could speak, Elfleda raised a pointed finger. “But I approve,” she spoke, like a mother offering praise. “Your decisions have taken courage. You are not the soul you might have been, without facing your hardships.”
She felt her stomach sink like a stone in a stagnant pond. Her hand even went to the physical spot as she stared at Elfleda. Because Celeste could see and feel the appeal in that approval, and it made her feel a little sick. Instead, she tipped her chin up slightly. “You’re right,” the brunette answered carefully. “I spent half my life believing the world was going to end, and yet, here we are. I kinda take grand gestures with a grain of salt now.”
Celeste watched, fascinated despite herself, as the shadow of some strange form rose out of what seemed like a black river. “Why the ship?”
"It's the belief this world might never end which turns some mad, Celeste. Perhaps it will only change? How terrible that must seem to the stagnant..."
Elfleda's ending tone was one of mockery. She might appear to come from an older time, but her words indicated no favouring of the status quo. Fern's object of worship looked back to the barge from which she had stepped, considering it for a moment, then turned back to the girl.
"This is not my destination, dear girl. There will be others who return with me." Then, inclining head in curiosity, the one who had safely guided James through his own dimensional tour stepped into Celeste's personal space, reaching out a hand to touch her on the shoulder. A strange sensation, full of static and teased hints of whispered secrets, if such things could be encapsulated into a physical feeling. "Perhaps you would care to join us?"
She looked at Elfleda with disbelief etched clearly across her face. At that touch, something seemed to wake inside of her. Celeste could feel the curiosity inside her raise its head and look up hungrily. Then she thought of James, the way he had called her after his metaphysical journey with Elfleda, the sound of his voice. The smell in his trailer, the stain on the carpet.
“You give people a choice, don’t you?” That fascinated her. “You don’t have to. But you do. You know exactly what to say, what to offer.” The brunette didn’t move away from the dark figure, didn’t quail or wince at the physical contact. She could feel a pull, a change, just from being in her presence. The Dark Lady, as Fern called her.
“There should always be choice. For what is choice, if not a mercy? If only most understood what a luxury that is, perhaps there would be less of it stolen from others.”
Quite what Elfleda was meant to be, was still a mystery. Was she hinting at something about her own past with those words? Was she ever human? Had she been born or somehow willed into being? And who or what was she accountable to? What tasked her with these missions? But at least she indulged questions with apparent honesty. Could have simply snatched James away, abandoned him somewhere he could never have survived, but didn’t. Whoever, whatever Elfleda was, she was applying herself to a larger picture.
“But there’s more to offer you than choice, Celeste Henry. Sights for the eyes, symphonies for the hearing… Appetites to be quenched. Your coven is for more than protection. Through it, you become a window, a channel. Part of you,” she added, placing a finger to chest, “responds to that. Remembers it from a time before this flesh of yours was born.”
Slipping around, behind Celeste, a hand moved to cover the girl’s forehead. Elfleda leaning into ear, reducing volume to intimacy.
“I spoke of your contribution to the coven as a third. Because the way you are bound to James, to Fern. You have become a fulcrum, Celeste Henry. The fourth… She’ll face her time soon, but you… Your beginnings were forged under the shadow of promised destruction. A belief of death for this world. Fern’s were of growth… The path of the garden. She has much to teach you, Celeste. You see, it isn’t about the end.”
And she whispered it.
“It’s about rebirth.”
That hand on her forehead reminded her of something, a memory that felt as stark and cold as sinking into ice cold water. Celeste was young, very young, at home and sick as her mother placed a cool hand on her skin to check her temperature. Her mother had insisted she didn’t need a thermometer, she could tell a fever in her sleep. Celeste’s grandparents used to employ strange, bitter-tasting oils slipped under the tongue for sickness, her mother murmured in the dark, cadence as soft and soothing as a lullaby before placing a small white tablet on Celeste’s tongue and coaxing her to wash it down with lukewarm water that left a metallic tang in her mouth.
In the present, the brunette shivered visibly, but she still had questions, endless inquiries. She was quite alarmed to discover that she could speak to Elfleda like this, to peel back a layer of herself and see she didn’t quite want the conversation to end… Yet.. “I know I have more to learn. But from Fern, or by extension, you? I don’t know how wise a choice that is.” There was that word again, which reminded her of something said moments earlier.
“Was choice ever stolen from you?” Celeste asked. “Did someone hurt you? Can you choose to stop, if you wanted, to be something else entirely?”
The first query was answered only with a cryptic, “Yes.” With the next questions being of a more personal nature, where Elfleda’s palm still connected to Celeste’s forehead, something was mentally relayed. Something visceral. It felt, at first, like the turning of a screw; a consciousness bristling at old memories being prodded at.
Then it came.
Lightning across a landscape… A scream. And a feeling like smashing through ice into dark, freezing water.
Elfleda slipped suddenly away from behind, snatching the vision with her, as suddenly as it had arisen. Like a squid jetting away in a cloud of ink, only to be seen stepping back into view from the opposite side Celeste had looked in.
“Stop? Why would I stop, Celeste Henry? Do you fancy me, now, a maiden in need of rescue? Or is it concern for my prospects of promotion, I hear…?”
There was a nastiness bordering on mockery, initially. Then the figure seemed to smile, inverting Celeste’s meaning. The blackness of those lips all the more visible for being set against ghostly white skin. “Why, I am touched,” Elfleda added with humoured laughter and she hadn’t stopped walking. She was circling the girl. In her wake, an invisible trail of corrupting essence was being left, wafting steadily into Celeste’s aura. Steadily, little by little, it would begin to have an effect of its own.
Then she stopped, swivelling on a heel and tilting head.
“Something… Else… Yes, do indulge me, Celeste. What else would you see me do? What do you assume of my duties, as they are?”
The condescension is what brought her back to where she was. This was Celeste’s space, this was her solitude, and Elfleda had corrupted it with her ferry of the damned. Her back straightened, her chin lifted once more. “You’re an intermediary,” she replied. “Middle management. How does that one quote go?”
The brunette tilted her head to the side, eyes drifting skyward. It was the same sky, the same stars. She was in her adopted home. “‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.’” Celeste returned her gaze to Elfleda’s disarmingly delicate features. “I think my curiosity has run its course. Anything else I want to know, I can find out myself.”
Elfleda’s posture was not unlike that of a mean-spirited schoolgirl approaching an injured animal. She even probed a little with a swaying foot before slinking forward. A playful hint of childishness. “No... I don’t reign,” she ventured, inching that little bit closer. “This world’s a garden… I plant the seeds of change. ‘Tis an honoured position.”
Whether or not she had any biological need to breathe, Elfleda could be heard to softly inhale, seeming to look just above Celeste’s head. Whether in admiration or hunger, one could not say. Hands raised out to either side and her fingers extended fully, waving almost excitedly at the knuckle joints. It was like watching someone trying to decide whether or not to surprise someone through a shower curtain, except that the curtain was Celeste’s innermost layer of spiritual aura.
There was a real similarity with a predator savouring the final moments before a kill.
“It would be so much easier to show you… But that would upset things,” the ambassador decided through a smile growing thinner by the second. Fingers sliced through the air, as if catching a handful of insects and Elfleda moved back; a somewhat feral expression showing on her face. The lighting was such that it was difficult to discern whether her hands rested against the stomach of her black dress or sank within it. When next they were seen, Elfleda was reaching out with something held between them.
“I came to read you, Little Book. You deserve a boon.”
It didn’t look special. A simple necklace fashioned out of tiny bones. But there was something about it. Something so very, impossibly tempting. Just bones, yet they might has well have been a million dollars of chocolate-coated diamonds.
“My gift to you is the truth… And this will help you dream it.”
Celeste stared at the necklace, her stomach jumping in vertical swoops and hairpin turns. Her hand reached out despite herself and touched cool air, hovering inches from the offered necklace. If she were talking to any other person… Or being, she would think she were imagining the sound of a thousand barely audible whispers drifting from the object.
“Why do you want me to see the truth?” the brunette asked, forcing her hand back down to her side, fingers balling into a protective fist. “I don’t think you give without taking something in return.”
“Because there should always be choice,” Elfleda countered, allowing the mystical trinket to dangle freely, like some ghastly wind chime. One which, somehow, was calling out to Celeste with an almost hypnotic intensity. Take me...Wear me... Let me whisper in your sleep... “Especially an informed one.”
It would do as she had said. Would show Celeste things. Would try to become, more and more, a part of her. But what it would show… Perceptions, as they say, can be coloured.
And Elfleda’s world was painted black.
“You don’t have to wear it,” she cooed, drawing it closer. Elfleda’s unseen cloud of spiritual filth now encroaching on Celeste from all sides, seeking to work its influence. To sweeten Elfleda’s deal. “All you have to do is take it… The only thing I ask for is your consideration.”
Hold me, Celeste... Let me show you wonders...
Choice. Celeste had one. The one she made now would matter, ripples building outward in a pond in concentric circles, bigger and bigger still. Who would they reach? James was the closest to her, then Fern, then the friends she had made since coming to Searchlight. Toward the end was her family and past, and on the very, very outer ring, the rest of the world.
Elfleda was not her mother standing sentinel over her bed, making sure her fever broke. She was not a benevolent shepherd. She had more in common with her silver-tongued father and, by extension, Caleb. Leaders of a flock too broken down to think for themselves. Too sad, too alone. Next to choice sat persuasion and they were often mistaken for one another, fraternal twins.
“No,” she said, finally. “I won’t give you anything. Not even my consideration.” The brunette pulled her eyes away from the tiny whispering bones. “You can keep it.”
Something in the periphery of Celeste’s vision floated ominously past. A ghostly imposter of shadow, seeming to drip something wet onto the ground as it floated by. No sooner had it caught her attention than Elfleda had already retreated, straightening spine and moving away, simplistically declaring, “You aren’t the first to say that.” From the boat, the more skeletal of the two visitors gave a creak of responding motion, tightening grip upon its oar.
There was only a momentary pause. That scent of burnt sugar had remained in the air and showed no more signs of leaving than the vessel. From Elfleda, black curls of hair framed the outline of her pale face, turning back to regard Celeste, once more.
“Nor will you be the last to regret it.”
The floating platform received Elfleda’s weight as she resumed her place upon it. Not ignoring Celeste, but looking directly at her, as the boat recommenced its voyage, moving through dislodged chunks of sand like a desert-dwelling icebreaker. Past Celeste, to be engulfed by a smoky portal leading off into somewhere of dark purples. Behind it, soil floated back together, as if it had never been broken apart. No sign of the sickly black oil beneath.
And, slowly, the sounds of reality were gradually restored.