Scene Archives

isn’t bothered by that, though is the Obsidian Road still here?

takes the Obsidian Road. Trains and ships and swifts aside, she’s always preferred her own two feet. She walks away from the Ziggurat. She doesn’t look back.

isn’t quite going on a simple stroll. She’s looking to get as far away as she can. Not permanently; just for—just long enough. Is there an end?

looks down the path, and wonders. For a brief moment, she considers walking the path as far as it will go, imagines walking it forever, in some horrible stasis. She shakes her head to clear the thought. Idle wondering isn’t going to get her anywhere, and—well. She’s done enough Void-staring of late.

sits down on the path, cross-legged. She takes out her Tomestone and looks at it briefly. Does she get a signal this far out?

swipes through a couple screens. Reads. Frowns in frustration. Types something quickly, then tucks the little rectangle away. Enough of that. She looks up at the blackness above her. At you, or where she imagines you sit, watching. “Do you know what I’m about to do?”

: “Observing is all you need to do. Thank you for being with me.”

closes her eyes and imagines a home. It is an Almachadtan home. It is her home, or is the memory of her home. Its courtyard where the rainwater pooled. Her stuffed-straw bed shoved as close to the hearth as it could be without catching fire. The atelier, the Centrelight. But it is also—more. There are rooms, sprawling out in a rootmass, a threadmass. Aurelius crafts fiends in one, Awoken juggles gnosis in another, Wolf sings and sings and sings. Luĉja, patiently carving, Archie, riffling through books and crystals with Caion hooked over his shoulder. Jorule, even, tugging at threads of magic she doesn’t understand, couldn’t. Wider still—Badri, Tsem, Silver-Throat, Solei, Synthesis. A house, but also a village, but also a city, and herself at the center, in the rain-clear pool. She thinks of Melpomene and Ksenija. She thinks of strangers, coming to call. She thinks of hospitality.

: “You belong here too,” she says, though she has no way to invite you. “But this is not about you, not this time, not yet.”

thinks of strangers, the first stranger, the strangest stranger. She does not cast her self out through the Song. She opens her self up—a house, a home, herself. “I celebrate myself and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” And then she casts out into the Void, into the planes, into the collapsing space between heartwood and heartwood, an invitation.

furrows her brow, thinking, recalling the words. This is not a poem she knows by heart. “Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? / Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening.” It is a demand, but it is also a plea. “Come in, come talk to me, Omniclast, Stranger, whoever else you are.”

knows that this is her will, and it would be foolish as well as insulting to ask for certainty that this is so. And, yet, there is resistance to her demand. The resistance against her plea is weaker, though. She hears a sudden sussurus, a whispered wish, the suggestion of sounds that could have been words, once, before wind in this windless place carried them too far to fathom.

: “I am not afraid,” she tells the suggestion, the memory of sound. “Perhaps that is foolish, perhaps that is unwise, but I am not afraid. I wish only to know you, to understand.” There are no walls, or fences, or barriers here. There is only her, whatever she is, and whatever he is or wishes to be. “She called it Xenia. Willingness to love a stranger. That is what I am offering you. Come into my house. Talk with me. And if something gets broken, then it gets broken, and we will continue on in whatever way we can.”

rustles, builds, and then Salme does feel a breeze kick up, and the breeze and the sound incoherent within it and the way it ripples her clothes and her hair are all part of who– of what– she’s talking to. faceless, voiceless. Indirect.

laughs a little at the breeze, startled and joyous. “Can you not speak here? Is this the wrong place to do this? Or is it me? If you can’t speak through the wind, I have a voice. You may use it.”

whispers, “Your voice is yours. I would not take it, under any circumstances.”

: “I would share. I could bear it. I am large, I contain multitudes.” And then she smiles, and says, simply, “hello.”

whispers, “That which is yours is sacred unto you. I could not take it, even offered, without no longer being what I am.” And then the wind ceases, for a moment, and kicks back up, and says, “hello.”

: “And what are you?”

whispers, “I am the wind.”

: “And I am fire. A thing the wind can only fan to greater heights.” She pauses, considering, and then laughs. “Or, fierce enough, the wind can snuff it out I suppose. I wanted—I want many things, I guess, from you. The truth, as much truth as you can give. To understand everything. Answers, of course. But I don’t know how far any of that would get me, so instead I wanted to ask if you were lonely.”

whispers, with bitter honesty, “Terribly lonely.” And then, more gently: “To fan your flames, without snuffing them out… In olden days were ships with wind-filled sails; those same ships sunk splintered in storm-tossed seas. So you are not afraid. But I am.”

lets the emotion in her spill out, lets it overrun the boundaries of herself into the void. The love it takes to fill a sail with wind, the sorrow when it splinters on the storm-tossed seas, and the certainty that it’s better than to have never sailed at all. Flame and feeling like a nasturtium-bloom grows around her, and she blinks away tears. “I do not want you to be lonely. Is there a way I could make it not so?”

whispers, with hope in the interstices between discernible phonemes, in the pauses and lifts. “I believe so, yes. I believe in your capacity to discover it.”

: “That is part of what we’re doing, isn’t it? Maybe the whole of it.” She swallows. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me? Anything else I can do?” She unspools from herself more emotion, this time thick-woven, deep-rooted hope and determination, flourishing, flourishing, flourishing.

whispers, at length and in detail, a real monograph of a mistral, but it’s all just- wind, tossing Salme’s hair this way and that. There’s always something faintly suggestive of a melody when the right kind of wind blows; sometimes it’s mournful, sometimes it’s joyous. This time it’s both.

listens as best she can, even if she does not understand, even if she cannot understand. Maybe some day she might. She says as much, then adds, “I will keep this close to my heart until I can one day understand, Tuuli.” She is also mournful and joyous. ⁂

laughs. “Tuuli and Tuli. Wind and flame. A letter’s difference.” ⁂

whispers, and the whispers are bright, unexpected, delighted laughter, harmonious with hers.

: “I felt it, but I did not say—even if I were to crash on the rocks and sink beneath the waves, even if I were to be snuffed out like a brief candle, I would not trade the wind in my hair for a lifetime of safety. You should know that.” 🙧

whispers, “I know.”

whispers, “In this, you honor me.”

whispers, “In this, you honor yourself.”

: “I know.” She looks towards the Ziggurat. “I should get back, but … when you get lonely, or at your loneliest, you can always speak to me on the breeze. I will try to listen, Tuuli, as best I can.”

whispers. Softly, so as to not blow you off the course which you have chosen. Strongly, so as for you to feel the wind at your back. Whispers, so as there will always be a melody in the air.

, as she walks back toward the Ziggurat, hums tunelessly with the wind, and then, pulling her hair free from its bun, lets it blow in the wind, and laughs and dances and performs all the joy she’s felt, what she’s stored up inside her, hoarded, like one day she might lose it. Let the wind see it, let it know. And you, too.

looks up at the sky. “Are you lonely, too?”

nods. She has thought of you, in fits and starts. She hadn’t been quite sure what to think—she’s used to being the storyteller, the watcher-whilst-others-act. She’d loved it, because it had given her something she had always needed, but she had also become to still, so flat, so passive. She had made the mistake of thinking everyone in that position chafed against it in the same way, but you’re different, aren’t you? Not that you never want to reach out, touch, comfort, care, but it doesn’t erode you in the same way, does it?

: “I too am who I ought to be, silminnäkijä.” And then, tuneless and joyous and riotous, still returning home, walking with you next to her heart, she sings.