A Rune for Arvalyn [Arvalyn]

[Aurin]

"Well, fuck her," he said, immediately rising to Arry's defense. He didn't know if the mysterious Hytori woman could hear him, but he didn't care. If Aurin had critiques of Arry, he didn't look kindly on anyone else expressing them. This was why he was rarely in the rehearsal room when it was time for notes, at least on a production Arry was in. Elric did enjoy the 'virgin eyes' and sometimes threatening actors with the impresario's disapproval.

He took a sip of his tea, already cool enough not to burn his tongue.

"It was too fast to really learn much, but I think... I think I might recognize her... ah, aetheric signature...? I mean, if I ran into her at market or something. It was like hers was overlaying yours for a moment. But I don't know enough about magic to say how she might be speaking to you in your dreams. I thought... Dreamsailing was lost?" Perhaps not to everyone. But Torin and Talon worked magic into objects; perhaps she had some scrying stone or magic mirror for communicating with her errant son.

"Maybe when the snows thaw, Darus of Haqs will return to Antiris. As far as we know, that's where she and your father had their fling... Might be someone who remembers him, her... knows something to point me in the right direction. If you want me to go, I will. I'll just have to have you rack your brain for any details that might help me."

They hadn't spoken too much of those things, Arry's memories being tender, but Aurin did want to know him inside and out and he would have a legitimate excuse to ask.

"How do you feel otherwise?"

[Arvælyn]

Arry arched an eyebrow at the expletive Aurin directed at his mum. The slight scowl faded quickly, but there was an instinctive reflex to defend her before he remembered the invective was probably warranted.

"That could be useful..." He didn't know how to get close enough for that to be effective, but it might be just the thing at some point down the line. He shrugged at the mention of 'Dreamsailing'. He'd never heard of that, nor had he any clues as to what sorts of powers his mum had at her disposal.

"No..." Arry shook his head, wrinkling his nose. "If my father's stories from when I was growing up have any merit, he was a court tinkerer in some royal palace. Supposedly we were sent away for my safety and his, but I don't ken how all of that stacks up. Obviously a child's mind is full of fancy, and so I decided that meant she was some sort of princess or summat, but more like it was just a place what just wasn't keen on mixed bloods and Elven-Human miscegenation." He frowned, and glanced to the window.

"Or maybe the whole thing was just bunk." He tilted his head as his line of thought was disrupted by motion outside the window. At first it looked like raindrops and rivulets of water sliding down the glass, but as he squinted to get a better view it looked more like...

"Locusts?" The rain might have been real, but he'd never seen a locust swarm descend upon the middle of a city before. "I'll... take that as as sign it's begun, unless you tell me otherwise." He grimaced at the sight of the ravenous insects hurling themselves against the glass. The sound was, perhaps, more disturbing than the sight.

"I'm seeing a locust swarm out yon window!" He raised his voice reflexively, even though he consciously understood that Aurin couldn't hear the violent hum of the swarm of the clicking of exoskeletons slamming into glass at high speeds. "Are these sorts of visions meant to hold any meaning?" He called out, louder still as the volume of the humming grew withal.

[Aurin]

"Well, it's settled: come Glade, I'll run up to Antiris and see what I can find. It's possible your father confided in someone. I just don't like the idea that she can swan into your life whenever the spirit moves her and you don't have any power in the relationship. Fucking unfair."

Aurin tended to favor games where the odds were in his favor, but he didn't like the cards stacked against his ward. Didn't matter that Arry was grown, was all moved in with his beau; he would be Aurin's ward until one or both of them died. He didn't know if the elves of Sol'Valen looked down on miscegination, but there were surely Hytori alcoves elsewhere in the wide world. The redhead had done his fair amount of traveling, but he hadn't seen the entire world.

"Locusts?" he asked, knowing it was likely just the trick playing tricks. His own threshold sickness had sometimes involved illusions that only he could sense; sometimes Ava had seen them and smacked him upside the head.

Focusing, he could sense Arry's aether reaching out and then he began to get glimmers of the vision like some sort of desert mirage.

"Let me just..." He reached out awkwardly and put his hand on Arry's forehead. It was easier and gentler when he made some sort of physical contact. With greater power and practice, he tried to push his sense of reality into Arry's mind: the clear sky out the windows frosted by the difference between the wintry air and the warmer interior of his cottage. He tried to reinforce his vision of his cottage, as well, reinforcing reality. He didn't know if he could maintain it for days on end, but he could give Arry a respite.

"Back to normal?" he asked.

[Arvælyn]

"Aye..." Arry sighed at Aurin's assessment. It was vexing to hear. Not because he was wrong, but because he was right and because despite of the imbalance, he still wanted more time with her. Even with as frustrating, cryptic and borderline insulting as her visitations were, he still coveted more.

"LOCUSTS!" Arry answered, now yelling at the top of his voice, as the overwhelming din of buzzing and clicking grew louder still. He furrowed his brow in confusion as Aurin approached and placed a palm against his head.

"WHAT ARE YOU...?" A surge of power coursed from the human to the elf and answered his question more keenly than any comment might have done, as the cacophony ebbed and his view of the window warped before his eyes and returned to the way he'd seen it prior to the plague of devouring insects.

"Oh, right." The frost on the window reminded him that it was Frost in Kalzasi, which made the idea of an inner city locust swarm all the more absurd. "Yes... back to normal." He confirmed, as he lifted his bandaged wrist and looked at it. He couldn't see anything, apart from a little bit of darkness from the blood that soaked the lower layers of fabric. It felt weird, though. Not the same as his Mesmer Rune felt when it was active, but neither did it feel like a simple fresh wound. It was different. Or, again, perhaps he was just looking for something to be different and his mind was making him feel a phantom sensation that wasn't really there.

"Thank you..." He took a deep breath and tried to melt into the cushions as he let it out. "Tell me, Aurin... When you first acquired this Rune, what was the first thing you did with it?"

[Aurin]

Aurin didn't really have a leg to stand on when it came to fucked up maternal relations. He didn't actually know if Ava was alive and, if so, where she might be, whether she might come for him someday, wanting blood or bonding. He could still see with a bit more objectivity when it came to Arry and his mother, but he might also fight the woman for whatever paternal feelings he held for the younger man. They were complicated because of course they were.

When his reassertion of reality seemed to work, he didn't give an audible sigh of relief, but the tension in him did relax a bit. This was the first time he had passed his magic on to someone else and he felt the weight of responsibility for it all the more keenly because it was Arry.

"I'll try to hold this for a few hours," he promised. "If you don't get bored and fall asleep, we can give you one of the sleeping draughts and you can sleep through some of it and give me a break. Then I'll be able to do it again when I've rested and you've woken up.

"Mm, they gave me both at once, which... Well, from what I understand, you can't initiate someone without consent, but I was... out of it at the time, so consent can be a bit of a gray area. I was also doped up with things that were supposed to mitigate it, but made it last longer. So most of what I was doing was trying to shut it down when it would go off without me trying. But once I wasn't having magical hiccoughs, I suppose I worked on being invisible and silent... being able to stealth through situations was really helpful for me."

He realized that was the opposite of what Arry was likely to do, but that only made him smile.

[Arvælyn]

"Thank you..." Arry was speaking softly now in contrast to the shouting of moments earlier. His voice had a bit of an airy, huskiness about it from that exertion now. "Gods- I wish being bored made me fall asleep. I'd be much better rested in general..." He sighed, as he settled back into some semblance of comfort- Even if he couldn't get fully settled whilst the stark memory of that dreadful clangour still rung in his ears.

It helped to focus on Aurin's voice, so Arry was glad his question yielded such a thorough response. Not that Aurin couldn't be verbose when he had a mind to be, but prolixity certainly wasn't his default. It was a switch he turned on from time to time and often as a means to an end, but he'd have been a poor information broker if he wasn't prone to listening more than speaking.

"Oh, how interesting... I hadn't thought of using it that way, but I suppose that would serve me well in the off-stage career you've carved out for me..." In the theatre, his goal was to draw the eye, but as a gatherer of intelligence his goal was to deter it. He'd learnt practical ways to achieve this from back when he'd been a petty pickpocket, but the addition of an arcane addendum to his stealthy skillset promised to be a great boon.

"But tell me more..." Arry longed for distraction, and an education in the new Rune seemed like a two birds, one stone sort of endeavour. "What are the things I ought to know about Masquerade that they don't tell you in the instruction manual?"

[Aurin]

Aurin considered. He had never really articulated much about his tricks before. Deception had always been what kept him alive, and even the magical tools that helped him were shrouded in the same.

"We'll go over technique later," he said, "when we know you're recovered. I mean, technique insofar as I have any that I've managed to cobble together. But you won't be able to do much more than simple things at first, purely visual. Later, you'll be able to play with sound and other senses. A lot of it depends on your imagination, though, in the end. You learn to project things and perfect them. Important things can be committed to memory. You'll get better at detail with practice and power... and at maintaining them. At first, you'll have to maintain them for them to last, but as you get better, you can leave them behind and the illusions will stick for a time. So... you could set up dummy Arry up in the background for a scene, and then wander off to have a piss or something with none the wiser..."

He snickered, imagining Arry playing fast and loose with that one. Sometimes, actors were basically scenery; other times, they actually got to perform the complex and rewarding roles they wanted.

"Am I making sense? I don't really know the right words for all this. I sort of learned on my own, a bit here and there from other people." His eyes tried to gauge whether he was clear or Arry was floundering. An actual magus might explain things better, or perhaps they would explain things in such an academic, pedantic fashion that only another highly educated magus would understand them. To each their own.

[Arvælyn]

"Fair enough..." Arry deferred to Aurin's guidance, and supposed that technique could wait. In truth, it was the diversion he was seeking and the topic proposed was just the first to enter his mind because it seemed passing obvious. He'd have been just as content for Aurin to brief him on tasks for his espionage racket- As long as it was something to keep his mind engaged and to stave off boredom and whatever else that might yield.

"Oi!" Arry grimaced, "Don't call my hypothetical self-replica a dummy!" He cracked a smile, which was not long lived as a discomfort began to burgeon. He tipped his head back and wrinkled his nose as an uncomfortable pressure began to form in the space behind his nose and between his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose and took in a breath through his teeth. It felt rather like a sinus headache, but perhaps deeper into his skull. Within a few moments, the discomfort had turned into slight pain.

"Yes..." He forced himself to focus, "Yes, you're making sense, I'm just... getting a bit of an headache." He reached for his tea and took a long, slow sip. He placed it down and sighed.

"Bit nippy in here, innit?" He remarked with a shiver, as he drew his knees up and hugged them to his chest. Holding his legs together, he rested his chin on his knees.

"I didn't know your 'trick' was so versatile. Mostly I've seen you use it to rib me- Aping my voice back at me and that, like you do. I've always known it had more practical uses, but... I suppose I'll have plenty of time to explore those, if me head doesn't explode over the next day or so."

[Aurin]

A smirk twisted his lips as he replied without a pause, "Like replica, like original."

But while neither of them was a scholar, they were both clever. It was either something one picked up when surviving against all odds or else the odds just killed those who weren't clever. Their lives might be more comfortable than they had been in ages past, but the patterns of survival were laid deep—or perhaps that was their trauma. They might have been one and the same.

Aurin squinted slightly at him, concerned but not worried.

"I wonder... I've never managed to make my illusions real enough to touch, but I suppose that's something that either of us might accomplish with enough time and power. And touch is a cousin of pain. Could we trick the mind to feel pain? Or to not feel pain?" His mind only wandered down that path for a moment before returning to the present and his ward. "Well, I've got your mind only seeing and hearing and smelling what's real, so it's possible your wild talent is focusing the rest of your new power into pain. Or the pain might just be your power settling into your mind. I had headaches, but nobody ever told me what was causing them. You want something for the pain or to just sleep through some of this?"

If he wasn't as knowledgeable as some Tower mage, he was prepared for everything that he had gone through and some other eventualities just in case. But he wasn't going to force anything on Arry unless the kid was overwhelmed and the choice was something Aurin was forced to make in his stead. Life had taken quite a few choices out of their hands, so he preferred not to steal a man's agency—unless that man needed to be dead.

[Arvælyn]

Arry chuckled and described Aurin using a particularly potent Mythrasi expletive for his little jape. His own smirk answered Aurin's as he shook his aching head.

"I don't reckon there's any important education to be got from sticking out an 'eadache..." Arry conceded, as he lifted his hands to rub at his temples.

"I'll take your sleeping draft and accelerate this part of the experience.... Just to get it over with." He'd had his flesh carved and felt the infusion of new energies mingling with the old, he'd asked the pertinent questions that had been burning in his brain before his brain started burning. Even if there were more to be gleaned in the here and now, it was difficult to focus.

"Thank you for this, Aurin." His golden eyes caught Aurin's hazel and he nodded earnestly to emphasise the veracity of his gratitude. It was not an idle expression of thanks, for this was not an idle bestowal. Aurin had clearly put time, thought and effort into preparing all this. It was sweet and Arry was touched. He knew he could be cavalier sometimes and he often overlooked thoughtful gestures- Seeing only the results that benefited him and being neglectful of the effort put in by the other person. He was trying to be better, largely for Finn's sake, but he wasn't perfect.

He requested a cup of warm wine to accompany his sleeping draft, which made it that much more soothing going down. He felt the pulsing in his head beginning to dwindle as his eyelids became heavier. His legs slumped over to one side and his head lolled in that same direction until his body melted into a foetal position and he drifted off.

End