Post by Caedan on Mar 9, 2010 22:39:20 GMT -5
Caedan was sitting in a field, a distance away from a stoic, stony fortress. There was a cool breeze, containing none of the usual humidity from the neighboring swamps, and it was rustling her hair and causing her sweater to flap around as it swept the empty plains. Her eyes rested on the facade of the black structure presiding over the south. When they fluttered close, paused, and then reopened, the building was much closer, and much more scary. Jagged steeples tilted at precarious angles; the rock-hewn structure was without a solid form, and aside from the jutting, limb-like extensions of the thing, it appeared to be composed of only shadows. She closed her eyes again. The breeze had turned into a wind, angry and vengeful. When she opened them this time, the building was reaching for her, spidery and wispy arms -- solid and frozen as if caught in time -- trying to swallow her into a single opening -- a gaping, yawning chasm of a mouth which groaned as if in pain.
It had always known her. In the space beyond space, where everything looped back on itself and started over again, he'd always, always known her. Different names, faces, places. Always the same scent of her though, blowing on the cosmic wind. He scented her now, down through ages and in seconds, the boy who walked from out of the shadows, leaving behind him a nightmare visage only she could see, with its arms and maw rushing down to swallow them both. Without turning around, Lucien of the Pool halted. He raised a wan-fleshed hand, and everything... stopped.
Lucien said, "Thankyou"
And then onward he walked across the broken earth, the resurrected plain, leaving prints of black smoke where his feet fell as he stepped over the edge of the world he belonged to and into Caedan's.
At Lucien's command, the wind stopped too. After the grass had settled around her, Caedan stood and took a single step forward to greet the physical manifestation the pool offered her. "Things have changed," she said, simply, her words muted and muffled, as if smothered by the blackness looming over them, snake-like, prepared to strike, but held at bay by the boy's whim. "This has all changed. The others are nearby. They will come here soon -- very soon." The building shuddered behind him, and transposed itself into something less threatening -- something more reminiscient of the Pool that used to be, jaggedy spires recoiling and flattening out, smooth polished stone forming, an arc emblazoned with the symbol of the Cabal. The temperature began to drop until she could see her breath against the inky backdrop of her conversation.
He nodded, strands of white falling into eyes where black shifted on black, like agitated oil. "Changed." His echo of her seemed to muse on it. Then his gaze fell on a small flower, struggling to bloom on that fateful border. He bent to pluck it up, snapped its stem. By the time he stood and offered it to the psychic, it was shrivelled to a wisp of brown matter that fell into dark dust in his palm. He closed his hand into a fist around it. "You must know who I am." It seemed a ridiculous statement, but the words carried a weight that made him the caryatid of a truth existing far, far beyond their obvious meaning. In the distance, which would seem to recede now, the fortress writhed and cracked. The youth said nothing more for a time, simply staring into Caedan's slate eyes as though she was a window to some other realm and he was watching it, through her. At length, he added, "And what I am. The time for your choice is nigh. Like all times, it will come again, but not for millennia." A long breath was drawn, exhaled. "Only one may come out, Lola. Which will it be?"
Caedan watched the progression of flower, from ground to dust. A hand emerged from the too-long sleeve of her sweater and closed over the pool-spawn's fist. When she pulled it back, she tugged at his fingers too, and a tiny white butterfly was carried off by an unseen breeze. She pulled her hand back and pursed her lips. The building was shifting again and while Lucien stared at her, through her, she watched the building over his shoulder. His question sucked the breath from her lungs, so she stood there, speechless and impassive for some time. When she exhaled the breath she'd been holding, she found it easier to breathe, despite the smothering entity looming before her, and she answered accusingly, "Why is it my decision? Why must I choose?" To condemn any version of the boy to an eternity in the pool seemed too much.
Lucien shuddered perceptibly at her touch and though she'd feel his urge to retract his hand from it, he did not. His gaze would follow the skyward ascent of the butterfly until it vanished, and his chin tilted down again so he could fix her with his uncanny stare. "Because you always have." Melancholy echoed thorugh the statement, like a stone thrown down a well. "That is the one thing that never changes." The pale youth turned then, a step taken in the direction of the fortress. He did not turn around when he said, "Walk with me. It's time, also, that you remembered."
Caedan hesitated until she couldn't any longer, until her feet forced her to move forward and fall into step beside the boy; she cursed them silently. "Wait." Spoken perhaps to both Lucien and her feet, she managed to stop, and tug at her sweater, until a section of material came loose. It was carefully placed under a small rock, that might have belonged to the building, but the only thing around to weigh it down, to inform the others as to her whereabouts, or so they weren't waiting for her; maybe they'd take it as a warning and stay away. It didn't take a psychic to know they wouldn't. She fell into stride again and ducked her head as she entered the cavernous, solitary fortress. The field was swallowed into blackness behind her, and then transformed into obsidian bricks. No exit. She didn't want to continue and she didn't want to remember, and she couldn't find a way to avoid doing either.
Lucien walked on, without break of stride, through the tunnels growing up around them. Nor, out of some abiding instinct, did he look behind to discover whether she'd followed, but his tone carried a certain confidence that she had. "I have always thought I was the one to blame, for all of this." Stone heaved. Cyclopean blocks jarred and threw off dust and they crashed together behind the pair, stacking one atop the other, a demolition in reverse. "My weakness and my greed, the cause. But Lola, I have learned things. The one who walks with you, he has shown me..." They were approaching an expansion in the structure, where a cavernous space opened from the narrow, twisting passage. At its lip, the youth halted, his toes groundless at the edge of an abyssal gulf which fell away into unfathomable darkness below. ".. the error of my belief." He peered down into the chasm, pausing as if somewhere in its depths lay the words he grasped for. "I never asked for this, nor earned it. All my sins and transgressions, the blasphemies I committed, all lain together are not a drop in this ocean." If she stood close enough, he'd look to her then, untold lifetimes worth of grief in his obsidian gaze. "They turned on me, in the end, Lola. The men I trusted for our kinship, our singular purpose, our blood-pact. I was the least of them, and the first they tore apart to feed their insanity when we finally reached the Void, and it..." His eyelids half-closed, fleetingly. "...I never wanted to leave you. It was expected of me."
Caedan did look behind her, each peal and clash of stone against stone causing her head to swivel 'round to see. She hated it here. His words were of little distraction, though she listened to them -- a figurative captive audience, so to say. Each time he spoke her name, she winced, as if truly pained by the utterance, but she couldn't bring herself to correct him. He didn't need correcting. She did. There was no use trying to run away. He would be able to find her anywhere in this place. He was this place. When they arrived in the main hall, she stopped walking, and let him continue on without her to that ominous drop, but even at a distance she could see the pain in his eyes. If she could have seen into his mind, the amount of grief there might have driven her mad -- madder than she already was. "I'm sorry," she eventually parted with, reluctantly, eyes fixing on a spot just over his shoulder so she wouldn't have to look in those eyes, or discover she had been unconsciously walking closer to him. "I never wanted this choice. I am not her. Any of them."
His features stilled, grew rigid as she spoke, and sorrow faded from inky eyes that may as well have turned to stone, and which again were fixed upon the abyssal gap before them. The youth's voice took a deeper tone, almost a baritone, and perhaps his shadow changed shape momentarily to that of a much broader man, taller, and the dim and sourceless light cast a sudden shadow that shifted the planes of his face, so that they aged and took a chiselled edge. "There. That wasn't so hard now, was it." There was no inflection in the final word that would suggest it was a question. "So here it ends, love, and here it all begins anew." His words fell dully into the chasm, and were eaten by silence.
Caedan kind of wanted to kill him. That would be the most immediate solution to her problems, though she knew ineffectual. Plus, there were the consequences to think of; consequences -- a relationship between cause and effect learned not unrecently. Jolie would excommunicate her from the family, and so would Cap'n likely. The Pool wouldn't be so careful around her. Maybe it would just take her in place of what she had taken from it. She probably couldn't do it anyway. She'd wind up killing one of them just to have another sprout up from the pool and engage in the same conversation and the same talk of choices and lives past. "I am not your love, and I am not your Lola." Her words were as dull and lifeless as his, as if she couldn't bring herself to add the emotions she wasn't allowing herself to feel. "It can't begin here anew. I'm in the middle." She inhaled sharply. It couldn't be the end either, could it?
Somewhere, a few days ago, a boy lay dreaming, wrapped in a blanket his mother had draped across the hammock he swayed in. Where he'd been and why he was so gaunt, she had not been able to bully from him. In the end, the inexplicable pall of misery that cloaked her son had warded her off to the upper deck, where she'd spend a night staring out to sea. In a month's time, in a bed, in another room somewhere else, an elderly man slipped from his marriage-bed and went to don his armor, for the last time, he silently promised to his wife, to himself. Somewhere, here, now, a distorted and ancient being wearing a stolen form turned its face away from the woman who could not love him. "Take care of him. He is an innocent." And then he was Lucien, young and pale, tall and broad of shoulder, thin of frame. He raised his hand and would, if she allowed it, lay it against her cheek.
Caedan accepted the touch, let her lashes flutter shut, then re-open once more as she took a single step back, out of reach of the long-limbed boy. "It chose for me." She was unnerved by the gesture. Having always been at odds with Pool, it was unnatural for it to do something for her, to give her ... to give her the choice she had chosen as soon as she realized she had to make one.
The mindless thing his body had become continued lashing its broken shell together, the cacophonous clash of blocks being joisted into place almost deafening to anyone outside the cavern where they stood, a bubble in time and space. The rest of him, gifted a small pocket of existence via Lucien, the scrap of stolen flesh of whose mind he'd borrowed a corner and thus offered him a chance to escape the horror of oblivion, stood on the precipice of existence. Her choice was made-- was there ever any other?-- so there was only one choice left to him. The once-man turned his back on the abyss and bowed his head, as if in honor of the girl he'd loved and been forgotten by, through all of eternity. His arms opened, spread wide as if to complete the formal bow before straightening his spine. In this cruciform stance, he hesitated, just long enough to speak a few words. "I will always love you, Lola." Then he was toppling backward like some athlete making his championship dive off the high board. Only, he was the Pool, diving into himself, and his Darkness had no end.
Caedan ducked as a trail of dust and pebbles fell from the building sewing itself together above her. It never came close to her, never touched her; it just, melted away, dividing to each side and dissolving into the polished floor. When her attention refocused on Lucien, or rather, the body he formerly occupied, he was poised very close to the edge of the abyss, and she knew what he intended to do, psychic powers or no. A memory, long forgotten and purposefully buried, churned its way to the forefront of her consciousness: her mother, in exactly the same position, mouthing the exact same words before she let herself go. It happened very quickly. She grew pale, paler than usual. A shout was flung from her lips, and it took her less than a full second to cross the distance and grab at the boy's shirt, clutching at anything before he was too far gone to save. She ground her heels into the dirt and pulled with all her might. The building shuddered to a complete and utter stillness, as if it was holding its breath.
There was that moment of suspension, in which everything was frozen: time, fate, the fortress, the girl hauling back, the apparent youth poised over the abyss. All was hanging in the balance, and all the once-man could think was that here, at the moment he should be returning to the Void and the nothingness from which everything began, to begin the never-ending cycle all over again, she had finally done something different. Her heels skidded across debris on the rock below, and he sank another inch toward his demise. But she was strong, stronger than her frail frame gave her credit for, and he was, after all, more than half an illusion, a wraith given his substance by virtue of what his corrupt former flesh was absorbing from her kinsfolk outside. Then he was yanked out of the brink, tumbling over her, disoriented, unbelieving. In whatever state they stopped rolling, he'd resemble a training dummy on the losing end of a trainee's stave, a crumpled frame, a blank look. She'd made her choice. How was he still here? The world, it is said, started with a thought in the mind of a god. His world had just now started again, and anew, with a thought-- albeit a cryptic one, a mystery lodged in the mind of a strange and broken girl. Why? Inky eyes settled on her. It was too much to hope she'd remembered how it was, and should have been, had he not tampered with Fate and the forces of Chaos, been betrayed and peeled from his living body. Too much to hope she remembered what they once were in long eons past, when he was a young and intemperate illusionist, and she the goddess in a white dress who'd married him, against all better sense.
Caedan was a flash of her original self, the very first, and not the centuries reincarnated version tumbling head over heel in a darkened hall. It was gone in a flash, however, and all that was left was little more than a child in a heap, trying to untangle herself from a boy that was ... not Lucien. And his skin burned where it touched bare flesh. And he wasn't entirely there. Most of him was there; he wasn't missing parts or anything, but something was missing. It took only a minute longer to pull herself into a stand and take a few stumbling steps against the wall that had closed behind her. The building didn't know what to do with itself. It couldn't open since she hadn't made the "correct" choice. It was shifting and writhing as if it were a bug at the mercy of a cruel child. She pointed at the figure on the floor, and said only, "Who are you?" But she already knew.
He couldn't take his eyes off her. In them she would see a shine, like light rolling over black glass. "My name." He parrotted her once more, mind reeling. This was another thing she'd never done, asked his name, and the question shuddered through him as he realised he didn't know. All this time, and his name was the one memory locked away from him, forever. There was power in a name' all mages of any status knew that. The necromancer who'd torn him in pieces and thrown him to the Void had known; his name had been the last utterance in the spell that had unmade him and bound his already magic-spoilt flesh to service. Those darker-than-dark eyes flinched. "I don't remember." And then, with the subtlest hint of defiance against the suspicious mien of a once-more stranger, "You tell me."
Caedan shook her head. "No I won't." She felt the wall bend beneath the hand she pressed flush to the surface, and then spring back, as if made of obsidian sponge. Lips pursed and a different track was taken. She wandered toward the chasm, inching closer to peer over the lip and stare at the utter and complete nothingness below. Her foot nudged a pebble over the edge, and it fell a ways before floating upward and returning to its original location. Lips thinned. She was getting frustrated. Caedan wandered toward another wall, which shifted and spat out an immensely comfortable-looking chair, made for two, complete with a smoky blanket of sorts. She admonished wall and man with an accusatory, "Let me go," and paced toward the spongy wall again, in which she plunged her entire arm and fished around until it started to burn and she withdrew it with a breathless hiss. Eyes glittering with irritation turned on the man then, and she leveled the full extent of her masked anger upon him. "It was Kurgan."
And just like that, he knew. One palm planted to the stone, the ivory-haired youth pushed himself up to stand, a slow grin spreading over his borrowed face. Almost swaggering, he walked to the convenient chair and spun on his heel, sank down into its soft and unnatural cushionery. One elbow leaned to its arm, and he shifted his body to leave room for Lola. Caedan. His .. Lola. Patting the blankety patch of dark scrunched up on that side, on the seat, he said, "Kind of ... imposing, isn't it?" Of course, he was toying with her. She obviously wasn't going anywhere and he.. well, he wouldn't force his former flesh to part like a monochrome sea for her any time soon. It had been very long time, for both of them, and they had a lot of catching up to do.
Caedan felt compelled to go toward him -- he looked so much like Lucien. So she did, reluctantly, and only within a few feet of him, but close enough to really look at him. His eyes weren't the blank black of Lucien's but the sentient eyes of the Pool, as if they could be any other color and still carry the same expression. There was something fluid in the way he sat, as if centuries of inhabiting a pool had defined his movement as well. Her eyes narrowed, and the corner of her mouth twitched upward; words came from her mouth as if she were reading a script, or had said them many a time before, and they were out before she could even think to stop them. "Not as imposing as others, but it is not without its charm." Her feet brought her closer, and she sat -- until she realized who she was and stood again, uneasily, but unwilling to show it to this new creature flaunting itself on a seat made of itself. "Maybe it was more imposing when you had power to back it up." Her chin lifted minutely, and nostrils flared.
More centuries than a man -- or anything like a man-- should be able to remember, and she could still knock the wind out of his sails with a lungful of words. The grin crumpled, and he spread himself out now on the chair, as though he didn't want her there anyway. "You never could stand it, could you?" His tone was casual, while he lifted a hand, long fingers bending toward him so he might study his nails. "The burden of power. No-- the burden of being -married- to power." His turn to be cruel. But was this how things were, then? Lucien... Kurgan... knit his brow, trying to remember. They must have argued, despite the image he'd carried with him, the vision of perfection he'd spent millennia chasing, and finding, and never keeping. He blew out a breath, to dismiss his own spite. "Come, sit with me, Lola. Just.. sit, by me here. For a little while. We'll talk, then I'll find you a way out." The re-melding fortress, as if to expose his unwitting lie, forged itself to a grim three-sided box made of colossal and oddly-angled blocks of black stone which then shifted inward, as if the cavern was inhaling. Ignoring this, Kurgan gave the girl a hopefully beguiling smirk, and since he was still sprawled across the chair, leaving her no room, he patted his lap.
Caedan said, ""My name isn't Lola. And I have no idea what you're talking about." And she didn't, not really. Maybe there was a tickling in the back of her brain, certain words and patterns of speech that were familiar, but familiar without reason. She paced in front of him, and watched the building cave in around her, effectively cutting the room into a third of what it used to be. It took a bit of hemming and hawing before she positioned herself on the very edge of the seat, and stared off toward where the abyss had been, and was now covered by a fire-less fireplace. This place really gave her the creeps, sometimes. "Okay," she ceded. "I'll talk. But I'm not her. I don't know how many of you I have to tell. But I'm not her."
Caedan made room by nudging his leg aside, obviously.
Outside, the building had ceased feeding. While it was never truly full, it also never took more than it needed to accomplish any given task. And now that the fortress had re-knit its broken walls, some of them admittedly and markedly odd in both angle and design, it could focus on what was happening in its midst. Its entire purpose was to seduce mind and heart with lovely promises and tempting turns in Fate, while draining power and will. It needed neither, and could have taken none from that un-cosy couple awkwardly posed on the chair if it had wanted to. But it could still discern and offer wants, albeit motivated only to small ones. Kurgan glanced around to the shrunken room's barriers, his confidence faltering. He'd not asked the Pool to do that. It had no will of its own, so how...? Caedan spoke, interrupting his concern with talk he didn't want to hear. "How is it, then, you knew my name?" Too easy. She should put up a better fight than that. Unless she wanted him to win.
Caedan saw that brief break in his facade, the look thrown about the room, and was instantly skeptical. She couldn't read its mind, but human gestures were familiar to her; they often spoke volumes where words would not. She turned to face him, tucking one leg under her as she did so. If the Pool took what you need, and gave what you desired, she mused, maybe that could explain her presence here. But what did he need? She pointedly ignored his question, and issued her own test. "Show me the others. Show me who else is here. Then I'll tell you how I know you."
Easy. Kurgan gave the girl a look that expressed as much. "There's a..." Blank. He stared at her, glaze-eyed. "A... " Where images were so easily conjured from the senses of his inky remnant, or the eyes and dreams of the boy he'd used as a hideout, there was now nothing. The once-man pushed himself up in haste, crossed the small space in a few strides, palms extended to press against the tenebrous walls. Under his touch the stone was cold, unyielding and still. He flexed his will to the Pool, piercing intent narrowed on gleaning its knowledge; he got none. Barking an order didn't work either, nor pummelling the wall with fists that were less solid than the substance they struck. Finally, he would spin about to face Caedan, his eyes two black moons. "I don't know. I can't see." There was a definite edge of panic in his tone. "It's not responding."
Caedan pinched the bridge of her nose with index finger and thumb. Naturally. The rest of Cabal was venturing into the thing, and now it couldn't be controlled. She pulled herself into a stand and crossed the distance to stand next to the former chaos lord. The wall was prodded and poked, to no avail. With an exaggerated groan, she leaned back against the cool polished stone, which reached out with tenebrous arms and wrapped her in an affectionate embrace. Her face lost a bit of color, and it took a total of three seconds for her to shrug out of it, spare Kurgan a scathing stare, and retreat to the couch, which bounced when she sat on it. "Okay." A muscle along her jaw twitched. "Okay. Fine." The blanket was tugged closer, and it easily wrapped itself over her with a sound that closely resembled a purr. "I'm going to dream me out of this." Not us. She stared down the man in a boy's disguise. It was clearly a warning. Innately, she knew he wouldn't harm her, but it was the Pool and he was chaos. She closed her eyes.
It had always known her. In the space beyond space, where everything looped back on itself and started over again, he'd always, always known her. Different names, faces, places. Always the same scent of her though, blowing on the cosmic wind. He scented her now, down through ages and in seconds, the boy who walked from out of the shadows, leaving behind him a nightmare visage only she could see, with its arms and maw rushing down to swallow them both. Without turning around, Lucien of the Pool halted. He raised a wan-fleshed hand, and everything... stopped.
Lucien said, "Thankyou"
And then onward he walked across the broken earth, the resurrected plain, leaving prints of black smoke where his feet fell as he stepped over the edge of the world he belonged to and into Caedan's.
At Lucien's command, the wind stopped too. After the grass had settled around her, Caedan stood and took a single step forward to greet the physical manifestation the pool offered her. "Things have changed," she said, simply, her words muted and muffled, as if smothered by the blackness looming over them, snake-like, prepared to strike, but held at bay by the boy's whim. "This has all changed. The others are nearby. They will come here soon -- very soon." The building shuddered behind him, and transposed itself into something less threatening -- something more reminiscient of the Pool that used to be, jaggedy spires recoiling and flattening out, smooth polished stone forming, an arc emblazoned with the symbol of the Cabal. The temperature began to drop until she could see her breath against the inky backdrop of her conversation.
He nodded, strands of white falling into eyes where black shifted on black, like agitated oil. "Changed." His echo of her seemed to muse on it. Then his gaze fell on a small flower, struggling to bloom on that fateful border. He bent to pluck it up, snapped its stem. By the time he stood and offered it to the psychic, it was shrivelled to a wisp of brown matter that fell into dark dust in his palm. He closed his hand into a fist around it. "You must know who I am." It seemed a ridiculous statement, but the words carried a weight that made him the caryatid of a truth existing far, far beyond their obvious meaning. In the distance, which would seem to recede now, the fortress writhed and cracked. The youth said nothing more for a time, simply staring into Caedan's slate eyes as though she was a window to some other realm and he was watching it, through her. At length, he added, "And what I am. The time for your choice is nigh. Like all times, it will come again, but not for millennia." A long breath was drawn, exhaled. "Only one may come out, Lola. Which will it be?"
Caedan watched the progression of flower, from ground to dust. A hand emerged from the too-long sleeve of her sweater and closed over the pool-spawn's fist. When she pulled it back, she tugged at his fingers too, and a tiny white butterfly was carried off by an unseen breeze. She pulled her hand back and pursed her lips. The building was shifting again and while Lucien stared at her, through her, she watched the building over his shoulder. His question sucked the breath from her lungs, so she stood there, speechless and impassive for some time. When she exhaled the breath she'd been holding, she found it easier to breathe, despite the smothering entity looming before her, and she answered accusingly, "Why is it my decision? Why must I choose?" To condemn any version of the boy to an eternity in the pool seemed too much.
Lucien shuddered perceptibly at her touch and though she'd feel his urge to retract his hand from it, he did not. His gaze would follow the skyward ascent of the butterfly until it vanished, and his chin tilted down again so he could fix her with his uncanny stare. "Because you always have." Melancholy echoed thorugh the statement, like a stone thrown down a well. "That is the one thing that never changes." The pale youth turned then, a step taken in the direction of the fortress. He did not turn around when he said, "Walk with me. It's time, also, that you remembered."
Caedan hesitated until she couldn't any longer, until her feet forced her to move forward and fall into step beside the boy; she cursed them silently. "Wait." Spoken perhaps to both Lucien and her feet, she managed to stop, and tug at her sweater, until a section of material came loose. It was carefully placed under a small rock, that might have belonged to the building, but the only thing around to weigh it down, to inform the others as to her whereabouts, or so they weren't waiting for her; maybe they'd take it as a warning and stay away. It didn't take a psychic to know they wouldn't. She fell into stride again and ducked her head as she entered the cavernous, solitary fortress. The field was swallowed into blackness behind her, and then transformed into obsidian bricks. No exit. She didn't want to continue and she didn't want to remember, and she couldn't find a way to avoid doing either.
Lucien walked on, without break of stride, through the tunnels growing up around them. Nor, out of some abiding instinct, did he look behind to discover whether she'd followed, but his tone carried a certain confidence that she had. "I have always thought I was the one to blame, for all of this." Stone heaved. Cyclopean blocks jarred and threw off dust and they crashed together behind the pair, stacking one atop the other, a demolition in reverse. "My weakness and my greed, the cause. But Lola, I have learned things. The one who walks with you, he has shown me..." They were approaching an expansion in the structure, where a cavernous space opened from the narrow, twisting passage. At its lip, the youth halted, his toes groundless at the edge of an abyssal gulf which fell away into unfathomable darkness below. ".. the error of my belief." He peered down into the chasm, pausing as if somewhere in its depths lay the words he grasped for. "I never asked for this, nor earned it. All my sins and transgressions, the blasphemies I committed, all lain together are not a drop in this ocean." If she stood close enough, he'd look to her then, untold lifetimes worth of grief in his obsidian gaze. "They turned on me, in the end, Lola. The men I trusted for our kinship, our singular purpose, our blood-pact. I was the least of them, and the first they tore apart to feed their insanity when we finally reached the Void, and it..." His eyelids half-closed, fleetingly. "...I never wanted to leave you. It was expected of me."
Caedan did look behind her, each peal and clash of stone against stone causing her head to swivel 'round to see. She hated it here. His words were of little distraction, though she listened to them -- a figurative captive audience, so to say. Each time he spoke her name, she winced, as if truly pained by the utterance, but she couldn't bring herself to correct him. He didn't need correcting. She did. There was no use trying to run away. He would be able to find her anywhere in this place. He was this place. When they arrived in the main hall, she stopped walking, and let him continue on without her to that ominous drop, but even at a distance she could see the pain in his eyes. If she could have seen into his mind, the amount of grief there might have driven her mad -- madder than she already was. "I'm sorry," she eventually parted with, reluctantly, eyes fixing on a spot just over his shoulder so she wouldn't have to look in those eyes, or discover she had been unconsciously walking closer to him. "I never wanted this choice. I am not her. Any of them."
His features stilled, grew rigid as she spoke, and sorrow faded from inky eyes that may as well have turned to stone, and which again were fixed upon the abyssal gap before them. The youth's voice took a deeper tone, almost a baritone, and perhaps his shadow changed shape momentarily to that of a much broader man, taller, and the dim and sourceless light cast a sudden shadow that shifted the planes of his face, so that they aged and took a chiselled edge. "There. That wasn't so hard now, was it." There was no inflection in the final word that would suggest it was a question. "So here it ends, love, and here it all begins anew." His words fell dully into the chasm, and were eaten by silence.
Caedan kind of wanted to kill him. That would be the most immediate solution to her problems, though she knew ineffectual. Plus, there were the consequences to think of; consequences -- a relationship between cause and effect learned not unrecently. Jolie would excommunicate her from the family, and so would Cap'n likely. The Pool wouldn't be so careful around her. Maybe it would just take her in place of what she had taken from it. She probably couldn't do it anyway. She'd wind up killing one of them just to have another sprout up from the pool and engage in the same conversation and the same talk of choices and lives past. "I am not your love, and I am not your Lola." Her words were as dull and lifeless as his, as if she couldn't bring herself to add the emotions she wasn't allowing herself to feel. "It can't begin here anew. I'm in the middle." She inhaled sharply. It couldn't be the end either, could it?
Somewhere, a few days ago, a boy lay dreaming, wrapped in a blanket his mother had draped across the hammock he swayed in. Where he'd been and why he was so gaunt, she had not been able to bully from him. In the end, the inexplicable pall of misery that cloaked her son had warded her off to the upper deck, where she'd spend a night staring out to sea. In a month's time, in a bed, in another room somewhere else, an elderly man slipped from his marriage-bed and went to don his armor, for the last time, he silently promised to his wife, to himself. Somewhere, here, now, a distorted and ancient being wearing a stolen form turned its face away from the woman who could not love him. "Take care of him. He is an innocent." And then he was Lucien, young and pale, tall and broad of shoulder, thin of frame. He raised his hand and would, if she allowed it, lay it against her cheek.
Caedan accepted the touch, let her lashes flutter shut, then re-open once more as she took a single step back, out of reach of the long-limbed boy. "It chose for me." She was unnerved by the gesture. Having always been at odds with Pool, it was unnatural for it to do something for her, to give her ... to give her the choice she had chosen as soon as she realized she had to make one.
The mindless thing his body had become continued lashing its broken shell together, the cacophonous clash of blocks being joisted into place almost deafening to anyone outside the cavern where they stood, a bubble in time and space. The rest of him, gifted a small pocket of existence via Lucien, the scrap of stolen flesh of whose mind he'd borrowed a corner and thus offered him a chance to escape the horror of oblivion, stood on the precipice of existence. Her choice was made-- was there ever any other?-- so there was only one choice left to him. The once-man turned his back on the abyss and bowed his head, as if in honor of the girl he'd loved and been forgotten by, through all of eternity. His arms opened, spread wide as if to complete the formal bow before straightening his spine. In this cruciform stance, he hesitated, just long enough to speak a few words. "I will always love you, Lola." Then he was toppling backward like some athlete making his championship dive off the high board. Only, he was the Pool, diving into himself, and his Darkness had no end.
Caedan ducked as a trail of dust and pebbles fell from the building sewing itself together above her. It never came close to her, never touched her; it just, melted away, dividing to each side and dissolving into the polished floor. When her attention refocused on Lucien, or rather, the body he formerly occupied, he was poised very close to the edge of the abyss, and she knew what he intended to do, psychic powers or no. A memory, long forgotten and purposefully buried, churned its way to the forefront of her consciousness: her mother, in exactly the same position, mouthing the exact same words before she let herself go. It happened very quickly. She grew pale, paler than usual. A shout was flung from her lips, and it took her less than a full second to cross the distance and grab at the boy's shirt, clutching at anything before he was too far gone to save. She ground her heels into the dirt and pulled with all her might. The building shuddered to a complete and utter stillness, as if it was holding its breath.
There was that moment of suspension, in which everything was frozen: time, fate, the fortress, the girl hauling back, the apparent youth poised over the abyss. All was hanging in the balance, and all the once-man could think was that here, at the moment he should be returning to the Void and the nothingness from which everything began, to begin the never-ending cycle all over again, she had finally done something different. Her heels skidded across debris on the rock below, and he sank another inch toward his demise. But she was strong, stronger than her frail frame gave her credit for, and he was, after all, more than half an illusion, a wraith given his substance by virtue of what his corrupt former flesh was absorbing from her kinsfolk outside. Then he was yanked out of the brink, tumbling over her, disoriented, unbelieving. In whatever state they stopped rolling, he'd resemble a training dummy on the losing end of a trainee's stave, a crumpled frame, a blank look. She'd made her choice. How was he still here? The world, it is said, started with a thought in the mind of a god. His world had just now started again, and anew, with a thought-- albeit a cryptic one, a mystery lodged in the mind of a strange and broken girl. Why? Inky eyes settled on her. It was too much to hope she'd remembered how it was, and should have been, had he not tampered with Fate and the forces of Chaos, been betrayed and peeled from his living body. Too much to hope she remembered what they once were in long eons past, when he was a young and intemperate illusionist, and she the goddess in a white dress who'd married him, against all better sense.
Caedan was a flash of her original self, the very first, and not the centuries reincarnated version tumbling head over heel in a darkened hall. It was gone in a flash, however, and all that was left was little more than a child in a heap, trying to untangle herself from a boy that was ... not Lucien. And his skin burned where it touched bare flesh. And he wasn't entirely there. Most of him was there; he wasn't missing parts or anything, but something was missing. It took only a minute longer to pull herself into a stand and take a few stumbling steps against the wall that had closed behind her. The building didn't know what to do with itself. It couldn't open since she hadn't made the "correct" choice. It was shifting and writhing as if it were a bug at the mercy of a cruel child. She pointed at the figure on the floor, and said only, "Who are you?" But she already knew.
He couldn't take his eyes off her. In them she would see a shine, like light rolling over black glass. "My name." He parrotted her once more, mind reeling. This was another thing she'd never done, asked his name, and the question shuddered through him as he realised he didn't know. All this time, and his name was the one memory locked away from him, forever. There was power in a name' all mages of any status knew that. The necromancer who'd torn him in pieces and thrown him to the Void had known; his name had been the last utterance in the spell that had unmade him and bound his already magic-spoilt flesh to service. Those darker-than-dark eyes flinched. "I don't remember." And then, with the subtlest hint of defiance against the suspicious mien of a once-more stranger, "You tell me."
Caedan shook her head. "No I won't." She felt the wall bend beneath the hand she pressed flush to the surface, and then spring back, as if made of obsidian sponge. Lips pursed and a different track was taken. She wandered toward the chasm, inching closer to peer over the lip and stare at the utter and complete nothingness below. Her foot nudged a pebble over the edge, and it fell a ways before floating upward and returning to its original location. Lips thinned. She was getting frustrated. Caedan wandered toward another wall, which shifted and spat out an immensely comfortable-looking chair, made for two, complete with a smoky blanket of sorts. She admonished wall and man with an accusatory, "Let me go," and paced toward the spongy wall again, in which she plunged her entire arm and fished around until it started to burn and she withdrew it with a breathless hiss. Eyes glittering with irritation turned on the man then, and she leveled the full extent of her masked anger upon him. "It was Kurgan."
And just like that, he knew. One palm planted to the stone, the ivory-haired youth pushed himself up to stand, a slow grin spreading over his borrowed face. Almost swaggering, he walked to the convenient chair and spun on his heel, sank down into its soft and unnatural cushionery. One elbow leaned to its arm, and he shifted his body to leave room for Lola. Caedan. His .. Lola. Patting the blankety patch of dark scrunched up on that side, on the seat, he said, "Kind of ... imposing, isn't it?" Of course, he was toying with her. She obviously wasn't going anywhere and he.. well, he wouldn't force his former flesh to part like a monochrome sea for her any time soon. It had been very long time, for both of them, and they had a lot of catching up to do.
Caedan felt compelled to go toward him -- he looked so much like Lucien. So she did, reluctantly, and only within a few feet of him, but close enough to really look at him. His eyes weren't the blank black of Lucien's but the sentient eyes of the Pool, as if they could be any other color and still carry the same expression. There was something fluid in the way he sat, as if centuries of inhabiting a pool had defined his movement as well. Her eyes narrowed, and the corner of her mouth twitched upward; words came from her mouth as if she were reading a script, or had said them many a time before, and they were out before she could even think to stop them. "Not as imposing as others, but it is not without its charm." Her feet brought her closer, and she sat -- until she realized who she was and stood again, uneasily, but unwilling to show it to this new creature flaunting itself on a seat made of itself. "Maybe it was more imposing when you had power to back it up." Her chin lifted minutely, and nostrils flared.
More centuries than a man -- or anything like a man-- should be able to remember, and she could still knock the wind out of his sails with a lungful of words. The grin crumpled, and he spread himself out now on the chair, as though he didn't want her there anyway. "You never could stand it, could you?" His tone was casual, while he lifted a hand, long fingers bending toward him so he might study his nails. "The burden of power. No-- the burden of being -married- to power." His turn to be cruel. But was this how things were, then? Lucien... Kurgan... knit his brow, trying to remember. They must have argued, despite the image he'd carried with him, the vision of perfection he'd spent millennia chasing, and finding, and never keeping. He blew out a breath, to dismiss his own spite. "Come, sit with me, Lola. Just.. sit, by me here. For a little while. We'll talk, then I'll find you a way out." The re-melding fortress, as if to expose his unwitting lie, forged itself to a grim three-sided box made of colossal and oddly-angled blocks of black stone which then shifted inward, as if the cavern was inhaling. Ignoring this, Kurgan gave the girl a hopefully beguiling smirk, and since he was still sprawled across the chair, leaving her no room, he patted his lap.
Caedan said, ""My name isn't Lola. And I have no idea what you're talking about." And she didn't, not really. Maybe there was a tickling in the back of her brain, certain words and patterns of speech that were familiar, but familiar without reason. She paced in front of him, and watched the building cave in around her, effectively cutting the room into a third of what it used to be. It took a bit of hemming and hawing before she positioned herself on the very edge of the seat, and stared off toward where the abyss had been, and was now covered by a fire-less fireplace. This place really gave her the creeps, sometimes. "Okay," she ceded. "I'll talk. But I'm not her. I don't know how many of you I have to tell. But I'm not her."
Caedan made room by nudging his leg aside, obviously.
Outside, the building had ceased feeding. While it was never truly full, it also never took more than it needed to accomplish any given task. And now that the fortress had re-knit its broken walls, some of them admittedly and markedly odd in both angle and design, it could focus on what was happening in its midst. Its entire purpose was to seduce mind and heart with lovely promises and tempting turns in Fate, while draining power and will. It needed neither, and could have taken none from that un-cosy couple awkwardly posed on the chair if it had wanted to. But it could still discern and offer wants, albeit motivated only to small ones. Kurgan glanced around to the shrunken room's barriers, his confidence faltering. He'd not asked the Pool to do that. It had no will of its own, so how...? Caedan spoke, interrupting his concern with talk he didn't want to hear. "How is it, then, you knew my name?" Too easy. She should put up a better fight than that. Unless she wanted him to win.
Caedan saw that brief break in his facade, the look thrown about the room, and was instantly skeptical. She couldn't read its mind, but human gestures were familiar to her; they often spoke volumes where words would not. She turned to face him, tucking one leg under her as she did so. If the Pool took what you need, and gave what you desired, she mused, maybe that could explain her presence here. But what did he need? She pointedly ignored his question, and issued her own test. "Show me the others. Show me who else is here. Then I'll tell you how I know you."
Easy. Kurgan gave the girl a look that expressed as much. "There's a..." Blank. He stared at her, glaze-eyed. "A... " Where images were so easily conjured from the senses of his inky remnant, or the eyes and dreams of the boy he'd used as a hideout, there was now nothing. The once-man pushed himself up in haste, crossed the small space in a few strides, palms extended to press against the tenebrous walls. Under his touch the stone was cold, unyielding and still. He flexed his will to the Pool, piercing intent narrowed on gleaning its knowledge; he got none. Barking an order didn't work either, nor pummelling the wall with fists that were less solid than the substance they struck. Finally, he would spin about to face Caedan, his eyes two black moons. "I don't know. I can't see." There was a definite edge of panic in his tone. "It's not responding."
Caedan pinched the bridge of her nose with index finger and thumb. Naturally. The rest of Cabal was venturing into the thing, and now it couldn't be controlled. She pulled herself into a stand and crossed the distance to stand next to the former chaos lord. The wall was prodded and poked, to no avail. With an exaggerated groan, she leaned back against the cool polished stone, which reached out with tenebrous arms and wrapped her in an affectionate embrace. Her face lost a bit of color, and it took a total of three seconds for her to shrug out of it, spare Kurgan a scathing stare, and retreat to the couch, which bounced when she sat on it. "Okay." A muscle along her jaw twitched. "Okay. Fine." The blanket was tugged closer, and it easily wrapped itself over her with a sound that closely resembled a purr. "I'm going to dream me out of this." Not us. She stared down the man in a boy's disguise. It was clearly a warning. Innately, she knew he wouldn't harm her, but it was the Pool and he was chaos. She closed her eyes.