Falling into stars

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[A woman steps onto the Plane, barefoot and dressed oddly--a gown that was fine once, until loose threads and jewels were absently picked out of the stitching and cobwebs and dust coated the fabric. The sleeves are spotted with ink and soot and stranger stains. The woman wearing the dress is pale, and her hair is black and unruly, escaping a gold clasp she's pinned it up with. She stands, still and motionless, looking at the stars around and below and above, colorless eyes wide in a pale face. She turns, slowly, and looks up at the stars.]

Constellations and riddles falling into my lap, and now stars in my parlor. [A deep breath and she nibbles on her thumb, eyes narrowing.] I didn't enter a little black house. And I see no tinkers. So which story have I wandered out of time into?

[Her eyes narrow, intent, thoughtful, and she hikes her skirts up, strides towards the kiosk and takes up the brochure, movements abrupt and brusque. She picks at a thread as she reads, then creases the paper into shapes when she finishes, looking again at the stars around her. Not alarmed or confused, but interested, murmuring to herself.]

How strange...

Walking out of a story of stars into a field of stars. One story after another, and in layers together. Connect them to make shapes and eventually make sense of the whole.

How strange.

Comments

[collector]

[Braxiatel's appearance is silent. He is as loud or as quiet as he wishes to be, and now he chooses to be heralded by nothing. In his crisp charcoal suit, he may as well be a statue--untouched by any fleck of ink or speck of food, pristine. A statue under a museum's protection, then. All of his movements are measured and precise, and his smile is calm and easy, warm and distant both at once, a practised mask of humanity.]

[Though the amount of shirtsleeve showing under his jacket is perfectly measured, he lifts a hand to the wrist as if to correct the distance--a slight of hand that really doesn't change it at all.]

Has anybody ever told you that you have a lovely way of speaking?

[Brax hits on all the ladies]

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[She goes still and quiet as he approaches, adjusts his cuff without adjusting it, and speaks. She watches him like a fox watches movement, alert for it to be anything, bird or hunter. When he does speak, she shifts, fingers creasing and folding the brochure into the shape of petals, a flower taking form under her fingers.]

[Her expression is mostly still, save a slight tightening around the lips, a narrowing of the eyes that shows she is not impressed.]

Yes. [A moment, because now she recalls it, and her expression falls a little further towards annoyance.] Many times.

Who are you?

[collector]

[His smile doesn't shift at all. His eyes are very still--once they would flicker and dart, taking in everything around him, unsettling the humans he kept company with. Now he has learned to use them differently.] Then forgive me for being trite. I'd blame history for having me write in its grooves again, but it's really no more than a lack of imagination. [His voice is smooth and fluid, a mirror but not an image of its speaker. He talks like curving glass. His two hearts beat calm and steady under a cage of bones.] My name is Irving Braxiatel. Collector of arts and antiquities.

[Not an answer to her question. But an answer to a question that looks like what she asked.]

May I ask who you are?

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[Her fingers still, then begin undoing what she's done, smoothing out the edges and creating new folds. The shape of what she's making now is harder to determine, but her eyes don't leave Braxiatel's face, as if memorizing the line of his jaw or how shadows fall across his eyes. She ignores the apology, the pretty words, to focus on his answer.]

[Not the one she wanted, but it is an answer of sorts. And that is a start. It is not always wise to give strangers one's name, especially not in a field of stars surrounded by constellations, talking to a collector of things. She answers anyway.]

Nyx Ro. [She raises the paper to press the edge of a crease to her lips, releases Brax from her gaze for a moment to consider the stars again. She's trying to feel if he fits here, but she can't be sure. Nothing seems to fit here. It doesn't feel right, and it's no magic she knows. She asks, instead.]

Do you belong here?

[collector]

[The first true shift--a touch of amusement stretching the smile, but only by a fraction of an expression. He always looks half-amused. How many can tell the difference? He is a very still man, naturally so, and he observes.] A little more than I did when I first arrived. [His blood belongs here, and his blood is a part of him.] But very little belongs here that it doesn't first make its own.

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[It catches her eye, but what she makes of it is unclear, her own expression opaque. She finishes her folding, looks down at the swan in her hands, taking flight in still motion.]

So you and this place are alike. You collect. But what for? To have? To boast of having? For the curiosity of it?

What part of the collection are you?

[collector]

Motives come in pieces. [He doesn't hesitate for a moment to slip into universal truths, to generalise, to lecture. A born professor. But his hands haven't moved from where they don't rest, linked together.] And it takes the leap of a good mind to fathom the fragmented desires of a Machine.

[Not quite her question again. He doesn't like to answer questions about himself. Not piercing ones.]

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[She tucks the evasion away in the back of her mind, something to circle back to later. Perhaps. People are very fond of their secrets. Sometimes they're harmless things. Guilty pleasures. Stories they tell themselves in the dark to feel better. This man does not strike her as harmless. If he tells himself stories at night, she suspects they are the kind that come to life and cause trouble to harmless Wayfolk and send them on quests to collect stars. He strikes her of magic, but she can't decide how. Not like anyone she's met.]

[She changes the topic, questioning directly once more, to see if he'll give her a straight answer about anything, or if she'll be stuck speaking in riddles with this man.]

What are you?

[collector]

[His eyebrows lift, but it isn't in surprise. Not much surprises Irving Braxiatel. The question is too easy. He is almost spoiled for choices in honest answers that lie.]

A Time Lord. From the planet Gallifrey. In the constellation Kasterborous. At the heart of Mutter's Spiral.

But it gets to be a bit of a mouthful, when you start adding the House names and the continents, so I prefer to just stick with my name.

[What is he? He has already told her. A collector. It is what he has chosen for himself. The rest was just an accident of birth.]

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[Constellations she doesn't know. More stars and time. The thought of a Blind Lady wearing a silver Ring of Time passes through her mind, and she brushes a finger over the paper swan's wing.]

[A Time Lord? A collector from a strange set of stars who belongs to a collection among a strange set of stars. She makes a soft noise, more a breath of air than anything, her eyes catching light and almost gaining color, a hint of lavender, then colorless again.]

How strange...

What is a Time Lord?

[collector]

It's an arrogant name that the first species to master time travel took for itself. Or, rather, we supposed we're the first species. Things do get messy with five-dimensional thinking, and English isn't the language for it. None of the right tenses. With time travel comes temporal manipulation--editing, erasure, recreation. But of course, Gallifrey is sworn strictly to non-intervention.

[His tone moves and shifts, lightning quick, with expressions of feelings at least one step removed from what is real, perhaps more. He is not expressing the truth, but he is expressing something, a version of the truth. An incarnation of reality. The breath of scorn as he calls it arrogance, the coating of irony as he mentions non-intervention. Everything is an object in a collection, and Braxiatel is the master curator. Highlight this flaw, shadow that crack. Well does he know how to display what he wants seen.]

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[She listens to his voice, head tilting like a curious bird as she watches him, eyes staring through him as if she could watch the tangled march of time as he travels back and forward and sideways around it with his words.]

Time travel was never my best skill. [Those mages skilled enough at walking through time never seemed to write much about it. Those witches who see time as a ring taught her what they could, but she has enough challenges in the present to not be overly concerned with exploring the past or the future. Puzzles for another day.]

[Or, perhaps, right now. Since she has one of the self-styled Lords of Time in her presence. A collector of arts and antiquities.]

[But his voice is really quite soothing... Fascinating to listen to. Her focus wavers from the past and future, focuses back on the present, her gaze no longer trying to chase invisible shadows.]

Perhaps you'll teach me what language to use, when traveling through time. Or how to manage it so easily. I have more questions.

[Which is as close as she will come to asking if he will allow them. She will ask anyway, but it's better if he wants to answer, in his own fashion.]

[collector]

[She is not the only one who has taken a certain interest. Braxiatel is a collector of strange and valuable things. The Plane has been a gift in showing him all sorts of interesting works.]

Not to worry. [As if she would.] I taught undergraduates. Questions don't frighten me. ['No. Nothing ever ruffled your feathers, did it?' He talks in light and glittering words, like mirror hall's crystal chandeliers. Be careful where you stand. And when he smiles, he is a gentleman, educated and urbane.]

If you have any particularly immediate questions, there is a library, and it has the most comfortable of armchairs. You might ask away there.

[cruxified]

[For a moment, there's a shadow like a tall bird nearby, like an Icarus, but then the aura-lights of the Plane come to life around him and he seems human. His hair is peculiarly unruly, and his dress is not what one would expect of a mercenary, but he is all ice and sharp edges and about as ready as his sword. His gaze is also of an unnatural color, a deep red that scrutinizes the newest fey-like arrival with a trained eye.

She looks like trouble.]

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[The shadow catches her eye and she turns, traces it with her eyes and looks up to catch the one who casts it. Only a man. More than a man. Was the man the bird, or is the bird the man? He looks normal enough, though outlandishly dressed, with hair that reminds her of a blood fox's red pelt, and eyes as piercing red. Perhaps blood fox is a better description, she muses, than bird. Something about him seems half-wild, all too knowing. Remote.]

[She stands still and meets his eyes, her own movements going still, so still it's hard to tell if she's breathing, or if she's just an illusion of a woman moulded out of stars and the shadows between. She doesn't blink, waiting like someone might wait when faced with a wild creature, cultivating stillness so as not to frighten or provoke.]

[cruxified]

[Her stillness does not escape him. He's been in this situation before. Intimidation is a common reaction with him around. Though he doesn't display his power, something unfathomable and ancient lurks beneath his skin, bracing against the lines of his jaw. It's in the way he carries himself: a veteran, a warrior, a bone soldier told to march, and he's as stiff as a dead man too.]

Greetings.

[His voice has a shadow of its own, deep and dark and surprisingly soft at the edges. It might have been warm once.]

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[He seems haunted, she decides. With what, she isn't sure. Time, perhaps. Or ghosts. Memories. She doesn't know, but there is something old and dead about him, even in the way he is both dangerous and remote. Even his voice seems caught up in something distant, a time or place far removed from the one they both currently occupy.]

What are you?

[No preamble, because it's the first words she thinks to speak, when confronted with the riddle he presents. He's alive, she thinks, but she isn't sure. He himself is not a ghost, she knows. Or at least like no spirit she's ever met.]

[cruxified]

[If he's surprised by the question, he doesn't show it beyond much more than the slight arch of an eyebrow. There is indeed something ageless about him, something haunted, something dead. He doesn't look a day over twenty-six, but there are lifetimes in his eyes. All the more reason for him to hide behind his fringe.]

Generally, one asks for a name.

[He sounds vaguely condescending, as if her questions aren't even worth his time.]

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[He's right, of course, normally one does ask for a name. It's the social norm. But normally one isn't confronted by someone haunted. Maybe he's enchanted. Be-spelled by some cranky wizard to live a thousand years as a swan. Something fanciful. But that is the sort of story her sister Calyx would favor, and he seems to feel more of the dead than of birds.]

Generally I do not step out of my kitchen into a field of stars. [But she amends her question, because she is also curious.] Who are you, then?

[cruxified]

It's because you've met the shopkeepers. This place is theirs.

[He's so tall that he seems to be eternally looking down at her. It's not surprising, really.]

I am Kratos. And you are?

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[She takes that information and files it away. He is quite tall, and she is not so tall. It doesn't bother her. But what he is does.]

Nyx. [Now that they have that out of the way, she asks again.] What are you? You seem haunted. Or dead. Frozen. Stopped.

...You aren't dead, are you? Ensorcelled, perhaps?

[cruxified]

[Damn, he was hoping she'd just leave him alone.]

Human. Whatever you can see, forget it. It isn't your concern.

[He has to shut her down. He doesn't tell her that she's right about all of it, and that bothers him, because it's hard to lie blatantly with proof. But he has the perfect face to lie with. He's made a goddamn career of it.]

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

[She goes motionless again, watching him. Trying to sense what ghosts or magic bind him. But it's alien to her. Without his consent, there's little she can do but observe--or little she is willing to try, at least. There is much she could attempt, but he seems uninterested in her curiosity, and she has no reason to force it. Except curiosity. And he seems to be alive, in a way. If he were truly dead, maybe she wouldn't respect the boundary he wants. As it is... She shrugs, moving again, folding the paper between her fingers.]

Very well. Tell me about this place.

[cruxified]

[She might not know fear, but at least she knows to keep her distance. He is more than uninterested in her curiosity, he is uninterested in everything. He is alert, but hardly restless, as if he is only observing and reacting to the world around him rather than actively taking part in it.

And he doesn't fidget.]

This is the Astral Plane, a kind of experiment. It might appear to be magic, but the source is mechanical. It's commonly referred to as the Machine. You can travel between the Plane and your home world with a thought.

[torturesbirds.livejournal.com]

Yes. [A quirk of her lips.] I read.

[She creases the brochure further, forms a wing in the folded paper, eyes still staring at Kratos, or through him. Is he of this place? She can't tell. She has to ask.]

Is this place yours? [He doesn't refer to it possessively, like one who really lives here.] Or do you belong to the Machine?