Rhiannon Lee (rhiannon_lee) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-08-06 18:34:00 |
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Entry tags: | elfleda, rhiannon lee |
Turning a Key
Who: Elfleda & Rhiannon
What: First Encounter
When: Night
Where: Outskirts of Searchlight
Ratings Spooky
Night had embraced the town like a mother's arms. Heat could still be felt, quietly baking amidst what should be a chorus of insects, though they were beginning to fall oddly silent on this particular stretch of road. One which was occupied by the late night walk of a hunter named Rhiannon Lee.
It wasn't that none existed. Indeed, a number of them seemed to be flying and crawling away from an area up ahead; their tiny exoskeletal plating and wings catching in the illumination from streetlights. The inner bulbs flickered a little, as if power was being siphoned or momentarily interrupted, though only briefly so.
A figure, though... Difficult to make out. It needed one's focus, just to discern it was no optical illusion caused by the natural formation of shadows at night. It was there, moving, yet producing no sound. Twirling, caught in a sort of... Slow, rhythmic ballet, devoid of so much as an audible flap of material. Something which demanded investigation. Something which, if pursued, would seem to no longer be in sight. Had either somehow melted away or shifted a further distance away.
Luring her away from the light above.
To pursue or withdraw, to step into dark from light.
So much of Rhiannon’s life came down to a choice between the two.
Rhiannon’s feet, which had been guided into the legs of well-worn jeans and laced tight into boots, and which carried the hunter with sure steps from the porch of her trailer and down familiar roads, as though it were an ordinary night, now paused on the precipice of something which seemed…
Greater.
With a cigarette loose in her fingers, Rhiannon took in the sheer oddity before her and tried to name it. The rising and parting of insects was like a curtain drawing back, granting a view into another world, a blacker one beyond the superficial canvas of a desert town. And in that world lived an unusual shape, one that hinted at arms and legs, but could have just as easily been wings. No matter what Rhiannon did with her eyes, it wouldn’t materialize. Just as if this were a dream.
She had a sense, as her foot began to lift, of being on the fulcrum of a lever. Dipping down.
Rhiannon chose to pursue.
The next few steps ushered her into darkness.
It was further away from those streetlamps than she had realised when the sound of something like breathing was heard behind her. Not like that from a human, either. It was like an elephant hissing through clenched teeth. Something large and-
But the inevitable whirl to face the audible danger would bring nothing. The figure in the dark had already gone, but from where the sound had come… Nothing. Not close by, at least. But somewhere between Rhiannon and the safety of artificial lighting, something like that dancing figure in the dark seemed to be coalescing, like some form of ghostly mirage. As though it had been standing there, all this time, but was only now coming into focus.
No longer moving, though similar in shape, it had changed in colour, too. Where, before, it had seemed only a mass of dark fabrics, like some black, multi-finned angelfish from the deep, there were now distinctive ivory white limbs and something above, nestled into a frame of sharpened collar. Arms and a head. The surrounding black dress seemed far too large, too warm, for the seasonal weather of Nevada and, as that figure began to move, closing the distance with slow, deliberate steps of what had to be feet, the material shined in a subtle, if eye-catching, manner. Like eels gliding through some watery murk.
“Hhhhhhhhhhhunter...”
It wasn’t spoken like a human being would. It was like a whisper formed out of a passing breeze, rising in strength before the remainder of the word could be said. There was crystal clarity to its formation; a discernible English accent. Not common, but educated in its pronouncement. The word didn’t even seem to have come from her lips, but was projected ahead of her.
Black lips, it could be seen, as she closed in. The white skin of a porcelain doll. Eyes, too, black. Not just the pupil, but in the surrounding iris, too, if one even still existed. The figure’s entire colour scheme seemed to be one of vivid monochromes. No sliding scales of grey, but distinct and ordered blacks and whites.
“A sobriquet, not by choice, but birthright. By blood.”
The visitor didn’t speak like an average person would, any more than her style of dress would have mixed in even the theatrical melting pot of Las Vegas. Those eyes did not blink and there came, somehow, the feeling of nails scratching down a blackboard, even without a single noise being heard. It was a sensation. A wafting, too, of something like the aroma of burnt sugar. Sweetness and decay, all in one. Each word was spoken carefully, with a strict verbal rigidity, yet announced with poetic clarity. Now, though, they seemed more physical, as though she had needed time before vocal cords could be put into practice.
“So much destruction, Rhiannon Lee… Had you known the simple fumbling of a skull would ignite such fury, I wonder, would you truly have resisted?”
Rhiannon’s mouth opened to draw breath, to respond, but the words fluttered in her throat and died. A curious feeling came over the hunter, as though a needle had been slipped into her arm, injecting droplets of a foreign substance that flowed through the tributaries of her arteries and veins. The invasive warmth and sway of a drug.
But this was not the same. The woman had not infected Rhiannon, but seemed to be speaking to the blood in her veins, or that was Rhiannon’s perception of it when that strange voice came across the air. A rising from within.
And what a peculiar sensation it was, to feel her insides dance on a string. The closest experience that came to mind was the physiological reaction to a lover’s voice in one’s ear, but that was more conscious than this, and far more pleasant. Rhiannon held still on that patch of scorched earth, having learned long ago that some predators were not to be attacked.
“I do prefer to break by choice,” Rhiannon said.
As she watched the woman approach, to seem -- impossibly -- to occupy all points of her perimeter, the hunter lifted her cigarette and took a drag.
Rhiannon’s instincts weren’t wrong. Those who were placed a little closer to beyond the ordinary, were potentially that much closer to this one’s interests. That measure of enchantment, of an older magic, reacted to the presence of one such as she. It was as much to that, as Rhiannon, herself, which the stranger was addressing.
“Break… Bash... Slice and cut... They wind your key and have you play fetch...”
The young huntress was now in the presence of Lady Elfleda, Emissary of the Black Light. Someone who had her own reasons for taking an interest in this place and, especially, what the girl had lately been responsible, at least in part, for causing. The figure continued her walk, veering slightly to one side; ever deliberate, ever slow. An alpha predator of the etheric world sizing up one of the physical.
What a curious thing… So small to cause such carnage. And so eager to escape its blame. Yet, this was no girl who shied away from her beginnings, her potential. The tickling amusement of it all was causing a feather-light smile to radiate across those jet black lips. Lips which parted to exhale a wisp of dark smoke in an echo of what passed through Rhiannon’s own, though none was stolen from her.
And Elfleda did so admire the meaning of one’s potential.
“My girl, such a contradiction,” addressed the figure in black, dancing that cobra’s gaze over the slayer’s frame. “Champion of light, befriending the undead. The warrior for order, who finds stability in the arms of one who changes. Not one to fear the pushing of boundaries, are you? I think I shall enjoy watching your dance, Rhiannon, however long your candle lasts before its snuffing.”
And she came to a steady halt. Something invisible, unheard, billowing out in the ether. Drifting, tasting, starting to surround.
“I wasn’t aware that hell had psychiatrists.” Rhiannon, unknowing of the corruptive danger that cradled her, made no move to flee from the woman’s presence.
The human brunette tipped her head and began her own walking perusal, taking in every detail that her human mind could process: The waif-like thinness of the other woman, the skin paler than moonlight, a sickly-sweet scent that reminded her not of sugar, but of melting wires. She was overcome with a need to know, precisely because she had been known, had been seen, in a way that only happened in the company of malevolent creatures, their single-minded pursuits (of infamy, fear, blood, chaos) sharpening them to a chisel point that cut right through the self-righteous bullshit of a white hat.
Was there anything more addictive than that?
Rhiannon reached an open, upturned hand into the air that surrounded the woman. Fingers twitched as if touched. “I envy them both,” she admitted. Katherine was death, Cian was life. The former, an agent of mayhem, acting on her terms, without any strings. The latter, capable of weaving two distinct natures into a seamless one.
The hunter remembered herself and snatched her arm back. “Who are you?”
It had been a wise choice. There was always a danger in reaching under the surface of dark waters.
Rhiannon’s answer seemed to trigger the most curious noise. Not a hum, nor even a purr, but something which best sounded like a growling cat being stretched. It didn’t even arise from the being’s throat, but sounded like it was emanating from around her. The entity, though, still did not blink.
Not at first. But then came a soft one and a return of a smile either wicked, considerate or both. When they opened, those eyes had moved down, looking at the ground by Rhiannon’s own feet.
“Emissary,” she finally answered and walked slowly to one side, meeting the hunter’s eyes, again. “Seeker… Guide.”
And a spiritual chill wafted up. A sensation not unlike that resulting from nails scratching down a chalkboard, yet none was heard. The result of a billowing, unseen cloud suddenly washing over Rhiannon’s aura, testing it, swishing around it, before gently receding. It was seeking entry. Searching for anything within the girl which responded best to darkness and the morally forbidden, to connect with and strengthen.
“I may be called Elfleda.” This time, it was the pale visitor’s turn to extend a hand, reaching out to the young woman’s cheek. “And you need not envy what could be yours, should you desire it. I know something of birthrights, Rhiannon Lee… Your own is something few could hope to attain.”
That aural inspection, and its accompanying touch, was a bucket of frigid water over the hunter’s head. It slithered into the hollow of her neck and down her backbone. A shudder of revulsion. Rhiannon didn’t know what had been attempted or learned, but she recognized an unwelcome intrusion into the field of energy that surrounded her body. She turned her face from Elfleda’s fingers. Eyes shut as she counted time, falling backwards through the years, to the last time a woman cupped her face with a soft touch. Twenty-two years.
“I don’t know what I want,” Rhiannon said, “And neither could you.”
But it was there in the denial -- An answer for what kept Rhiannon up at night, the thing she ached for most: Clarity. To be certain. To cut cleanly through the world, as sure as the blade of a knife. To become the knife.
“I could certainly try…”
There was something of a playful lilt behind the way this Elfleda said it, though not of a healthy variety. More like how a cat might promise to give a mouse a head start across a room, if that renewed, if subtle, curving of mouth was anything to go by. It parted a little, too, to reveal a black tongue catching behind those white teeth.
A cosmic game was afoot, just like in those films where the gods placed mortals like pieces on a board.
“What we want is not always what we need,” the figure added with a smooth scything of finger on a hand which retreated, mantis-like, up to chest. The other gesticulating before Elfleda in a way a teacher might before her class. “But you are curious, are you not? Here I come before you, we present ourselves and begin our duel… I, the villain… You, the valiant defender of truths and justice… But this is not my purpose, Rhiannon. I arrived in curiosity, but I remain for the gathering storm. The testing which you - and those like you - will soon endure.”
There was a quick inhalation and Elfleda seemed to straighten spine. That earlier sense of playfulness was somehow more radiant now. The implication of a crescendo yet to come, as the proverbial orchestra swelled.
She could be as much an angel to the damned as demon to the divine. Today, she spoke to a mortal and conveyed a truth.
“And, some day, it will be in my power to save you. Whatever may pass between us, remember this.”
The hair on the back of Rhiannon’s neck rose.
Two warnings had been delivered in one: A test for all to come, and a day when she might need assistance and be desperate enough to look for it here, in Elfleda. Or that was the image that the Emissary had seemed to portray: One of indebtedness, of a potential for mercy.
But ‘saving’ was a fickle concept. In a rushing current, what first appeared as a rescuing branch might reveal itself to be a hand, dragging her underwater.
“What I’ll remember is that whomever you serve sent a scout,” Rhiannon said, taking in the measure of the entity before her, a woman who stood no taller than the hunter, but seemed to tower, a function of the forces that flowed towards and through her. She had a vivid daydream of what it might be like to shove her fist into the center of all that black.
The cigarette fell to the ground to be covered by Rhiannon’s boot. “But I’ve had enough fingers winding the key in my back, don’t you think?”
Elfleda didn’t reply, but there was amusement taken from that accusation, not offence. It was all in those eyes and they watched on, as if Rhiannon was an unknowing performer in her personal royal court.
“Then we’ll have to find some way to shake it loose, won’t we? Remove that collar and take off the leash. Let slip the dogs of war…”
An almost imperceptible upwards tilt of head was made and Elfleda renewed her walk around the huntress. “Or cat, as the case may be,” she added and a melodic giggle rippled through the air. That invisible cloud which surrounded Rhiannon, made one more pulse; bolstering the roots of whatever darkness might already exist within her and the skirt of Elfleda’s dress swished into a ballerina’s twirl. Smoky darkness billowed out in front of her and something like tar seeped through the sand.
“One dance ends as another begins...”
Down, into the further reaches of wherever it led, the gothic visitor slipped. Ghostly pale arm outstretched, descending into the sticky murk. The woman’s final exhalation drifting, dispersing, into the night air.
The tar seemed to belch and flow from the spot, black fingers licking and laving the earth, an eruption of obsidian in the Lady’s wake. Rhiannon stumbled back from its reach, lungs heaving, feet covering the short distance from shadows to the safety of light.
Once there, she knelt on the asphalt to catch her breath. Around her, the sound of insects wings filled the night.