[ender of names] Every time Lukas's heart comes back from a beat, another shadow dies in his jaws. They drip, they vanish, but leave no trace, no taste. Nothing remains but a brief wash of cold, a hint of clinging darkness that turns his mind towards sinister urges his mind and heart usually repress. He turns on the last, the quivering tall shadow against the wall, and when he's done with it, it does nothing but flicker. Does nothing but waver, small and shredded, its long hisses broken and stilted.
Seeing him corner this last, Laura and her Ragabash -- unnamed, thus far -- walk to either side of him. Lukas's talen bag is dropped back at his feet. The Ragabash retains the Bloody Bandage he took from the bag, still ready to apply it if necessary. The Galliard is gone. A moment later, so too is Shrieking Sky.
"The other is in Sky's sister," says the Ragabash, who is able to speak because he, unlike Laura, is not quaking with rage. She thrashes her head every so often, wild-eyed, on the verge of frenzy. So close. So very close. "He and Call are going to get it out." He doesn't say how.
Laura roars. "Should has finished summoning."
The Ragabash, a sort of scout who is neither sly nor witty by personality, responds as level as any Half Moon: "It may not have worked."
Laura just growls, bristling. "Wyrmbreaker-yuf. How many are left?"
[Cold Victory] In Sky's sister, the Ragabash says, and Lukas snarls at that. It's not unbridled rage that drives him. It's something colder, closer to the bone: a sense of defeat, failure, that it took him so fucking long to bring these down.
"Just this one," he replies to Night Warder. "And the one that slipped across the Gauntlet. Night Warder, they're intelligent. Maybe your Theurge can ask questions. Find out why they're here."
[ender of names] A thought passes over Lukas's head, between the minds of the packmates. Laura turns to him. "Do you have Nightshade?"
[Cold Victory] A flicker in Lukas's eyes - an almost-idea that flares, doesn't quite form. He's not quite on the same page as the pack, but he doesn't hesitate. "Yes." He bends, flicks the pouch open with his teeth, delicately. By the time he hands the Nightshades over, he's in Crinos, the vials tiny and fragile in the huge palm of his handpaw.
[ender of names] Danicka did not get her perceptiveness from her mother. She did not get her ability to intuit the emotions of others from Laura. She got a refusal to deal with whining. She got her looks. She got many things from this Ahroun Lukas fights beside, but her empathy is all her own. Laura does not notice that flicker, not with her rage so high. She merely waits for the Nightshade to be handed to her, shifting one paw to take it, flip the cork out, and down it. She can't, right now, even manage a Thank You.
"Be ready," she says, as the spirit of Night begins to soak through her flesh, her fur, even her eyes, blackening her til she looks much like the shadows they fight. "For the other one to be exorcised from the Kinswoman."
The Ragabash pulls back at that, turning to watch the room, waiting to see that fifth shadow return.
The one Lukas cornered is still terrified, quavering against the wall. When Laura becomes a shadow, it lets out something between a shriek and a hiss, unable to run. Unable to do anything but writhe. Laura's jaws stretch into a snarling smile. "You can see me now."
She reaches out, nicks a claw against it. It flinches. "You can feel me now."
There's a pause, presumably as she tells her packmates what to do, how to affect the shadows when they cross back into the umbra. Her eyes fix on the shade again. "We have questions for you."
[Cold Victory] [hide reaction!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 7, 7, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[ender of names] [Laura
LALALALA I HAVE LIKE RAGE 12 OR SOMETHING RIGHT NOW I DON'T CARE HOW YOU FEEL]
[ender of names] [Ragabash
I, however, am much calmer and more perceptive.]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 3, 8, 8, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[Cold Victory] Laura doesn't have much in the way of perception, of empathy. It possible even Lukas's flimsy attempt at hiding his reaction goes unnoticed.
By her, anyway. The rest of the pack might note the way his tail drops; the uncomfortable way he twists his head on his shoulders. It looks like self-beratement, that he didn't think of that. First. Didn't think of that already. So obvious: fighting creatures of shadow by turning to shadow. He'd been so focused on his own sudden unanchoring from time's march, so convinced that it was only such a disjunction that could possibly allow him to touch these creatures, that he'd never once stopped to consider the obvious.
A talen. A simple thing a cub could make. That was all that was necessary for this entire pack to have sprang into action, destroying the enemies that much faster, preventing the kinswoman's possession.
It feels like sheer stupidity. It feels like failure upon failure. It feels like -- inferiority, in truth, which is not something he's very used to. A twisting recognition that he might share Laura's tribe and auspice, that he might even share her rank right now, but he was not her equal; might never be. Even out of her mind with rage, she had a sharpness, a cunning that he did not.
Wyrmbreaker shifts forward. He flexes his claws, and then he sinks to his haunches. His first question isn't for the shadowman after all, but for Laura.
"You said there were reports of shadows hunting kin. When did this begin? Tonight? Or earlier?"
[ender of names] "Tonight," says the Ragabash, watching Lukas instead of his Alpha. And the shadow -- it cannot laugh, it is too afraid still -- shudders.
"So much longer than that," it says, and Laura snarls, thrusting her face into its empty mask of one. It's hard to tell if there's such a thing as a sensitive spot on a shadow. No fingernails to shove anything under. No teeth to yank out, no raw holes in the gums to probe. No genitals to --
Instead, she slowly rakes her claws down what could be its leg, down down. Then twists at the corner where the ground meets the wall, as though to pin in there, nail it. "How long?"
The shadow seems to arch, bending away from the wall towards them, then flopping back. "The brighter moon... throws... longer shadows..."
[Cold Victory] "Always here, then -- just more powerful with a brighter moon? What are you, corrupted Lunes?" Pause. "Or a shadow of something yet to come?
"Why can I touch you like this, without swallowing shadow, when the others couldn't?"
[ender of names] "Only one moon throwss thiss sshadow," hisses the thing. "We are not your Lunesss."
Laura yanks her claws out. The thing thrashes again, flickering as though it's about to go out.
"We will come back when She is clossse," it hisses to her, directly to her. "Ssstep from the seas of Luna down to your earth and come for your Kin again. We can wait."
She swipes at its head. It lets out a shriek. "Answer his question."
The shadow turns its head to the thing that frightened it to begin with, and twice. It flickers again, ever weakening. Even its gasps have the sound of a hiss to them, a steel burr sliding down satin. "You. You are nothing but a Ssshadow here."
[Cold Victory] "Why come after our kin?" Lukas presses. He's losing it -- they're losing it, this flickering shadow-thing, this creature cast down by the brightest moon. He tries to twist his claws into it, not to torture but simply to hold on, but -- it's there and it's not, it's flickering and sputtering like a shadow from a candleflame. "What is it you want from them?"
[ender of names] "You will die...ssso much fassster... without your kin," wavers the shadow, with something like a holdover of laughter in the words. "One by one. Female by female. Taking your ssseed. Raisssing your cubsss."
[This is not going to end well.]
Dice Rolled:[ 12 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 7 at target 3)
[Cold Victory] [oh my god please]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 2 at target 3)
[ender of names] Those last words barely make it out of the creature. They are overtaken by the sound Laura makes, rabid and howling, when it tells them
that's why they possessed Shrieking Sky's sister. That's why they were stalking her daughter. That's why they're here. That's why they'll come back. That's what they've been doing, every perigee of the moon. That now they have to wonder
how many Kin. How many of their own, over the years, twisted by possession and twisting the cubs in their care. How many dark souls in their tribe whispering horrors and betrayal into the ears of their children. But all it takes, for Laura, is hearing what they were after. What they were going to do to Danicka. And she snaps. She doesn't just snap. She can't halt this frenzy, she can't even begin to fight it off. The rage that's been building in her all night erupts, her eyes glowing red in the spirit world, a corona of fury literally appearing around her as she tears into the enemy that is not nearly as solid as it takes to satisfy her bloodlust. And her sudden, overpowering hunger.
It dies easily enough with a swipe of her claws. She turns then, on more solid prey.
Just then, across the room, one last shadow appears, exorcised from the Theurge's sister. Theurge and Galliard are right behind it, the Crescent Moon pushing through the gauntlet with all his spiritual power, pulling his packmate along behind him through the rift. The Ragabash standing by Lukas does not need to tell them what they seem to already know: Galliard and Theurge down nightshade, and the Ragabash stands by the stranger from the future.
Laura is lunging at him.
[ender of names] [Ragabash. Let's call him Eyes of Razor. Razor for short.
+8]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 5
[Cold Victory] +20!
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[ender of names] [Razor is actually +10]
[ender of names] [Laura +2[]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[ender of names] [...er, that was +20]
[ender of names] Order:
Lukas
Laura
Razor
[ender of names] [Razor
Totemphoning like crazy SHIT SHIT SHIT YOU GUYS KILL IT QUICK SHE'S GONNA EAT SOMEBODY
1a. Get behind Night Warder
1b.
R1.
R2. -- bites on Laura, pulling at Incap if necessary.]
[ender of names] [Note: Laura is wearing a +5 BB. She dropped Luna's Armor when it became apparent she and the others could not fight the shadows. Resist Pain is active (not that it matters, since she's frenzied). Not going to bother with totem boons since I never figured out what her pack's totem is anyway.]
[Cold Victory] [Grandfather Thunder!]
[ender of names] [LOL]
[ender of names] [Laura
1. OM
R1. NOM
R2. NOM
R3. NOM
R4. NOMNOMNOMNOMNOM.]
[Cold Victory] 1a.
b.
c.
d. OM NOM NOM TO YOU TOO, FUTURE MOM IN LAW.
e. Oh and have a trapdoor boon too, just in case. They're good for you. -1Gn!
and pulling at incap if necessary!
[Cold Victory] -5!
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 5) Re-rolls: 1
[Cold Victory] [whoops, -1, crinos!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 7, 10 (Success x 4 at target 5)
[Cold Victory] [erp, reroll on the 10.]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 1 (Botch x 1 at target 5)
[Cold Victory] [dam +4 BECAUSE 1 ON A 10 DOESN'T COUNT FFS. RAR.]
Dice Rolled:[ 13 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Cold Victory] [argh! dam +3 i meant! HURR DURR.]
Dice Rolled:[ 12 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[ender of names] [Soak]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[Cold Victory] -6!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 3, 6, 6, 8, 9 (Success x 3 at target 5)
[Cold Victory] [dam +2]
Dice Rolled:[ 11 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6)
[ender of names] [Soak]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 4, 5, 5, 9, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[Cold Victory] -7 STOP SOAKING SO WELL
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 2, 4, 7, 8 (Success x 2 at target 5)
[Cold Victory] [dam +1]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 8, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[ender of names] [Soak I'M TRYING I SWEAR :[ ]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 7, 10 (Failure at target 6)
[Cold Victory] -8 *reattains zen* ooooom.
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 3, 6, 7, 10 (Success x 2 at target 5) Re-rolls: 1
[Cold Victory] [dam +1]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 10, 10 (Success x 9 at target 6)
[ender of names] [you're giving mothers in law an even worse name, here]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Cold Victory] -9, we chomp again! +WP on this cuz. well. -9!!
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 4, 5, 7 (Success x 3 at target 5) [WP]
[Cold Victory] [+2!]
Dice Rolled:[ 11 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[ender of names] [stopppiiiitttt]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[ender of names] [ARGH]
[ender of names] [Laura]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 4, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8 (Success x 2 at target 5)
[ender of names] [Dmg! +1]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 5, 5, 7, 7, 7, 8 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Cold Victory]
Dice Rolled:[ 15 d10 ] 3, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 10, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 10 at target 6)
[ender of names] [Razor
1a. Hup!
1b. Bite! -3]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 (Success x 6 at target 3)
[ender of names] [Damage +5]
Dice Rolled:[ 13 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[ender of names] [Laura Soak]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 6, 10 (Failure at target 6)
[ender of names] Laura lunges at Lukas, but tonight, he's just a shred faster. Just a hair. A stroke of luck has him meeting her in the air, jaws to jaws, the two Adrens slamming together and wrestling back to the ground. Ether swirls away from them as, not so far away, two nightshaded Garou tear at a shadow that possessed one's sister. Lukas bites at her again and again, ripping into her skin -- some of it knits instantly again. For her part, Laura is thrashing, snapping her jaws, roaring at him, trying to taste him
while he rips at her so fiercely that for a moment, Razor wonders if Lukas frenzied, too. He doesn't know -- none of Laura's packmates know -- what he told her about his connection to her daughter, about his connection to her family. Only that he came from the future, supposedly. Only that he had submitted to her leadership tonight, submitted to honor in her territory.
But there's a moment when Lukas thinks -- when it's obvious in those sharp blue eyes of his that he's debating what to do next. It's just a flicker, but Razor is sharp as his name and he sees it. Catches it. He knows Wyrmbreaker-rhya isn't, in that moment, out of his mind. He bites one last time at Laura, and she just snarls in answer.
Then thrashes her fangs at his throat. It doesn't even graze his fur.
In an eyeblink, Razor darts behind her. In another, he leaps onto her and digs his teeth into her leg, yanking it hard enough to shred flesh. Not hard enough to kill. Just... barely. He has a surprising amount of control, but then, on tonight of all nights any level of control seems surprising to an Ahroun. Laura drops, bloody and unconscious.
Her rage is still the strongest in the room, even like this. Too strong to take home and sleep beside her mate. Too strong to go home and check in on her daughter without giving the little blonde girl nightmares. Too strong to let her be unconscious for long. But no matter. For now she's out cold, and Razor spits her blood out of his mouth, looking at Lukas. He chuffs something that seems like gratitude, and then goes and picks up the bloody bandage he got from Lukas's bag -- the one he meant to use for him earlier if need be.
Razor doesn't pause to ask if it's okay. He does glance over to make sure Shrieking Sky and Call of Thunder have brought down the shadow they fought. He doesn't ask Lukas if it's all right if he heals his Alpha with Lukas's blood or not -- not after Laura healed him twice with her own. Not after they fought together, and after he killed those shadows while they couldn't. Not when he instantly fought Laura, with all he had, to take her out of a frenzy. He knows he doesn't have to ask.
He lays Lukas's bandage on the Ahroun who will one day be named Elder in her death, and the threads merge with the dried blood to look like the leech spirits that first came to the creation of the talen. They knit her back together with the very blood they once took from Lukas. They feed it to her, and evaporate from existence as soon as they are done, as soon as she is nearly whole again.
Call and Sky are padding their way over now, still swathed in shadow. They come to stand by their Alpha, side to side with Razor and with Lukas as she opens her eyes. Rage burns in her as she, without a word at first, rises to her feet as though by doing so she can prove that no. She is not weak. She is not dishonored. She is still herself, and she will not remain in a pool of her own blood on the floor.
A family trait, then: to believe that there is nothing more pathetic than to be brought not just close to one's weakness, but to sink to the ground and dwell in it there. Bleed on the ground. Cry on the floor.
Her green eyes find Lukas. She looks him over for wounds that might need healing, for any opportunity to undo some wrong. Slowly, her gaze meets his. Finally, a chuff: "Come. We will all see to our kin. And if we find more of these things, we know how to fight them now."
No words about the rest of it. The fight is not over. From the way she turns and begins to walk away, from the way her packmates all turn to join her though they are all going different places -- Shrieking Sky is, even now, crossing back over the gauntlet immediately so he can return to his sister -- from the way she glances back to make sure Lukas is following,
it becomes very clear that for Night Warder, no battle is ever over.
[Cold Victory] It's a short, vicious, bloody battle. These things always are. Wyrmbreaker realizes -- even snarling, snapping, going for the throat every bit as viciously as the frenzied Garou goes for his flesh, his blood, the meat on his bones -- Wyrmbreaker realizes that there are plenty of Ahrouns, plenty of Shadow Lords, who would kill to be where he is
right now,
for the privilege of fighting Night Warder. For the opportunity to take her down. Maybe even leave her with a scar to remember them by, and damned be the timeline.
Lukas isn't like that; never was, never will be. There's a side in him that twisted to know he was not the most cunning warrior here, a very large part of him that wished he'd done better. But his ambition has never come at the expense of another. Even when Bones to Dust won supremacy over the Ahrouns, even when she faltered and was challenged and stood on the brink of losing, Wyrmbreaker did not tear her down to raise himself up. Even with Night Warder frenzied, vulnerable, out of her mind,
he doesn't want to tear her down to raise himself up. To prove himself somehow superior after all.
Which doesn't mean he doesn't try. He tries, because he knows to get her down was more important than any philosophy, any honor. That if he doesn't do his best to tear her to shreds, it's possible she'll kill them all.
In the end it's Night Warder's packmate that takes her down -- and that's okay. Wyrmbreaker steps back. Razor lays Night Warder out with a sort of care and precision that would remind Lukas of the way Katherine once took a frenzied Sinclair down, if he'd been there to see it. He wasn't there to see it. But something in that gesture rings familiar anyway. They're a good pack. Close. They've been together a long time. He supposes they'll be together until Night Warder dies, and perhaps even after -- though he can't imagine who amongst them would lead after her. Her presence eclipses everything else, even now.
Or maybe that's just the rage. Or maybe it's just what he knows of her.
When Laura wakes, he stands as he is, no challenge in his eyes. No pride, no shame. When she gives an order, he follows, sparing Shrieking Sky one glance as he goes back to his sister.
The pack scatters as they exit the factory. Lukas stays with Night Warder. There's a sort of turmoil and uncertainty about his silence. After a while -- and after two or three false starts -- he turns to her and speaks.
"I don't know how long I'm going to be here," he says. "I don't know if or when I'll be called back to the time I came from. So I think maybe I should say this now.
"I've already told you that by my time, you were an Elder, and you were dead. And you were glorious, Night Warder-rhya. They still sing about you. I don't know if that will make a difference to you when you face your death. I hope this will, though:
"Your mate goes on without you. He's still alive even today. They never gave him to another after you, and they won't. Your son is an Adren, the last I heard. He's done well. He's well-respected. He's -- "
it's on the tip of his tongue for a moment: monstrous, twisted, fucked up. But he doesn't dare say it; doesn't dare alter the past so. Lukas bites it back, continues,
" -- different from you, but I think he tries to remember what you've taught him.
"Your daughter Danička." It's that same softness he saw on Laura's face for a moment, reflected in his tone. He can't help it; doesn't try to hide it. "She is loved, Night Warder. She is protected, and cared for, and loved deeply. And she has grown stronger than you would believe. She has the strength of her mother."
They walk in silence a while. Danicka has her mother's coloring, has the very look of her mother, but in Laura those same features, those same colors, seem so different. There is nothing soft or welcoming about Night Warder. There is no compromise to her, no yield.
"If there's anything you want me to say to her," Lukas adds, quiet, "I'll bring it back with me."
[Cold Victory] [NEVARMIND HE TTLY WAS THAR.]
[ender of names] There's no telling if Laura was of a mind to speak to him as they walk away, as her packmates unweave into the night to see to their Kin. There's no telling if she thinks to tell him to go check on his own family, over in the Bronx. Perhaps she expects he'll wink out of existence any moment now, if he isn't stuck back in time forever. Perhaps she is just... waiting. If she's noticed one thing about him in a single night, it's that he can and will speak. At length. Less orator than warrior, she thinks, having seen him fight. Having been brought down by his jaws as much as Razor's.
So they lope along, alone, and he begins to try to speak. Once, twice, three times. On the fourth he manages, and when the words finally start to spill out of him, Laura just keeps on walking. She doesn't turn to look at him, because she's watching the area around them, keeping her eyes peeled for the shadows, waiting to see the enemy that she now knows how to engage and now wants to tear into pieces.
Her rage is so strong. It is as strong as her children, his mate-as-a-child, lives with almost every day. It flickers as shadows move. It flickers as he speaks again of her inevitable death. She has not asked when, she knows only that she will at least achieve Athro before that time. That alone is more than she wants to know, more than she wants to focus on. But he tells her of her mate, how he outlives her, and she thinks of how old he must be. He was so much older than her even when they met.
What Lukas doesn't know are the details of her life, the songs that never get sung. How Miloslav tried to teach her Czech, but she wasn't around enough and never had the time or patience. How he was her first, this man with two children, one a Changed Cub already, and how she was scared, and how he tried so hard to calm her. How she thought of that night when she came back from her frenzy, wondering if they were all dead, if she'd killed them all. How after that night, he didn't suggest they practice her Czech anymore. He just became so... quiet. He didn't try to calm her anymore. He just began to fade.
But Lukas is telling her that Miloslav walks closer every day to his own death, alone. That Vladislav -- because that is the one implied by the 'they', it would have to be, if he's a Cliath by then -- never sought a new mate for him. That Vladislav is an Adren Theurge. Like Shrieking Sky.
She exhales a breath, walking alongside Lukas with her long arms swinging at her sides. She hears the hesitation. She doesn't want to ask. She doesn't want to know. She doesn't want him to keep telling her all these things she will never know, never see, that have not even happened yet. That she may yet destroy, just because she knows.
He mentions her daughter, and a muscle flexes in her cheek, her jaw tight. Tells her that Danicka is as strong as she is, and he can sense that rage building inside of her, a rising tide about to crash to shore. He offers to bring her back a message and she wheels on him, stopping suddenly, her teeth bared, her eyes the vivid green that Danicka's are when she is her most angry. Or her most afraid.
"Tell her to leave you," she snaps. "Tell her that had I lived to see you challenge me for her, I would have taken your throat for it, and taken any punishment for your death that came to me if it meant keeping her from you. What I want you to say to her, Wyrmbreaker-yuf," and there's venom in that honorific of equality, the note of their shared rank, "is that if you are strong enough to bring down her mother from the thrall of the Wyrm, then there is no 'strength', and no measure of love, that will save her from you."
[Cold Victory] Had Lukas been telling Laura all of this, any of it, to make her like him, to win the favor of a one-day Elder -- had he been telling her these things for his own sake or even for Danicka's, surely he would've flown straight into frenzy. To have it all spat back in his face like that. To have it all thrown in his teeth like that.
But he didn't tell her any of that for himself. Or for Danicka. Or for anyone else other than herself, Night Warder, who must nearly be Athro already. Who will be Elder before long,
and dead.
She knows that already. He told her, and he'd call it back if he could, but he can't. She knows it, and he knows she knows, but he knows something else besides. He knows when she'll die, down to the day, down to the hour. He knows where and by whom and how, and it's not an easy death; it never is. He knows now -- having met the woman, having seen her face to face and eye to eye -- that at the moment of her death her thoughts won't be of her coming glory, won't be the realization of just how and why and how gloriously she attains Elderhood; won't even be of the way the sky itself rolls back and Thunder welcomes her home.
Her thoughts will be of her family. Her den. Her mate and her cubs, the man who she'll have watched burn slowly to ash in the face of her rage; her frail little daughter who can barely stand the sight of her; her son who will, by that age, already show such signs of the monster he is that even she can't be blind to it. She'll think of that as she roars the last blood of her life out in the faces of her enemies. She'll think of them as her strength fails and her body begins to lose its grip on its shape, its rage. Dying, it won't be war or victory or vengeance on her mind, but --
I must return to them.
I must live to return to them.
I must protect them.
How will they survive
And that's why Lukas told her what he did. So that on that day, pierced on silver lances, Night Warder might just be able to look back on this day and have some measure of -- not comfort, not trust, not belief, but maybe, just maybe -- hope.
Hope that her mate goes on without her. Hope that her son is at least sane enough to fake it, and fake it well enough to succeed. Hope that her youngest, weakest cub
will be strong one day.
So he doesn't lunge at her in a wild frenzy. A muscle in his cheek pulls; half-flinching. Then Wyrmbreaker simply lowers his eyes and turns his face half away, submitting, waiting until she's finished.
Then waiting a little longer.
Then:
"I'll tell her that." Even, his words. Level, his eyes. His rage is a lower simmer now than it has been all night. Almost bearable. "But she knows that already. I know that."
A pause.
"You know that."
Another.
Very softly: "Why do you go home to them every night, Night Warder?"
[ender of names] Not an Ahroun,
when he told her who he was mated to.
Not you. Anything but you.
There will be so much glory in that death. How her enemies knew of her by then, how they fought to separate her, played on her hubris, found some way to get her alone and then met her with lances of silver. How they literally nailed her to the earth, how many fomori she killed and how many Spirals beside, before death took her down. Before she came back in frenzy and was met with that last, seventh lance. There is glory and honor in how her pack and sept annihilated those who killed her.
Not much said about Call of Thunder's belated visit to that row home in Ridgewood, and no songs sung about the words he used to tell that pale, silent teenager how her mother died. No glory in carrying news of the dead to the unimportant.
Once upon a time, Danicka asked if he though her mother and brother loved her. If they could have loved her, and hurt her and scared her as badly as they did, at the same time. She was desperate, though she didn't know for what answer. To hear that she was unloved, or to hear that those who love you the most can also do that kind of cruelty. Lukas just told her he didn't know. He didn't know them. He coudl only tell her what he would do, in their place. In his own place.
More and more tonight, he's starting to get a different answer. A much more complex, painful one.
She just watches him, her eyes as bright and searing in the moonlight as his own, and shakes her head. It's no answer as paltry as asking him in return why he stays with her daughter. She doesn't even know if he does. She hopes he doesn't. But he said he loves her. Deeply. Laura just shakes her head at him. "They're mine,' she says, her voice as firm as before, as level. "They are shattered, and I have broken them, but they are still mine."
[Cold Victory] "Then protect them." For the first time, an equal ferocity in the reply, a step forward, teeth flashing. "Your son brutalizes your daughter. Do you know that? Don't you see it? If you don't stop him, now, no one will. No one can.
"For god's sake, Laura, if you don't want your daughter to be with me, then change the future. Make it so her home isn't a house of horrors. Make it so her brother doesn't dog her heels and bruise her body. Make it so she can stay home without fearing for her safety and her life. Give her no reason to have to run to Chicago just to breathe, and she'll never have met me at all."
Those last words take something out of him. He feels short of breath; like the air's too thin, too hot to breathe. There's a short silence.
"She'll thrive wherever she is," he says then, "if she just has the chance. She doesn't need me. She sure as hell doesn't need fifteen more years of abuse."
[ender of names] "I do!" she roars, before he gets past his teeth flashing in her face, past the words protect them. Advances on him. "Everything I do is to protect them!"
Spirits around them shiver, retreating in the night. Spiders and Lunes and flickers of smaller, weaker things barely thriving in the midst of this city. Spirits that wouldn't be here at all if they weren't in the territory of a strong pack.
"And don't you dare come into my territory and suggest otherwise. Don't you dare imply you know what goes on in my house better than I do, or that my every waking thought is ever more than a breath from them."
[Cold Victory] Only he doesn't stop; he raises his voice and roars right back:
"Your son beats your daughter!"
[ender of names] It says something about her control that she doesn't fight him right there. But she's got something harder than a fist, sharper than a claw: "How close have you come to killing her?"
[Cold Victory] [please to be 1's!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 6 at target 3)
[ender of names] 20
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Cold Victory] [forfeit for the sake of SPACETIME CONTINUUM!]
[ender of names] [ZAP.]
[ender of names] Those words drive Lukas over the edge, the same edge he came close to when the shadows told them what they were doing to Kin -- what they may have been doing to Kin for centuries. It drives him hard, and fast, over the same edge that Laura careened off of earlier. He feels rage, a frantic scrambling for control, then nothing but a roaring red hunger.
Above him are stars and sky and a great, serene moon. He feels no agony, little pain. There's a pressure on his chest where Night Warder's forepaw presses him down. There's blood dripping to the ground from a shoulder wound, a massive bite where her black fur is wet and matted. Truth be told they're both a mess. Healing a wound doesn't stop the blood from flowing. They're both sticky with it, matted and horrifying to look at if they weren't both so used to it.
When his eyes open, blue and sane, NIght Warder removes her paw from his body and steps back. His talen bag is open on the ground. The bandage she just applied to him was another one of his own.
She chuffs. "It was a dishonorable question."
Without another word, she turns and begins walking again, towards her house again. It is as close as he'll get to an apology for the words that drove him into frenzy.
[Cold Victory] He sits up as she turns; before she's two steps away he answers.
"It was. But the only answer I had was also dishonorable. That's why I ... " -- he turns to the side, he coughs, retches, spits up the chunk of flesh and fur he'd torn off Night Warder. Swallowed, because in his frenzy it wasn't just an enemy he went at but prey, food, flesh. "Fuck," he says, low. And then he lays back down, facing the sky. He doesn't care if she doesn't stop walking. He speaks anyway.
"I've come very close. Three times. The first night we ... the first time she gave herself to me, it was a full moon, and there was ...so much going on. I almost snapped.
"Another time, we were ambushed by wyrm-spawn. One of them took her to the ground; I saw it going for her throat. That's the last thing I remembered. When I woke everything was dead except me. And her. She never told me just how close I came. I never asked."
A quiet; the corner of his jaw flexing as he swallows. He can still taste blood in the back of his throat. It churns in his stomach.
"And the third time, I thought she had ... betrayed me. The other two times, I didn't want to hurt her; I wanted her or I wanted to protect her; I frenzied or I almost frenzied. This last time, I didn't frenzy. I was cold with fury. I wanted to hurt her. She was mine. The only reason I stopped was because ... "
he puts his hands over his face, wants to scream at the moon. Doesn't. Silent, drops his hands again.
"Because I didn't want to be like Vladik.
"Night-Warder, listen to me. I wasn't trying to insult your honor; I wasn't challenging your dominance over your territory and kin. I'm trying to tell you, if you want to protect your daughter, if you want to keep her from me, then you need to stop your son. You need to stop him because no one else can, least of all himself. If you don't, then when you're gone he'll become worse than you can imagine.
"You love your kin. So you protect them, and they are yours. You understand that, both sides of that equation. Vladik only understands the latter. It's always that cold fury for him, do you understand? Even his protection is cold; he protects them because they are his. If he loves them, it's because they are his. Nothing more. Nothing less.
"And your daughter will run from that. All the way to Chicago, where she'll meet me."
[ender of names] He just won't stop. And that's what has Laura stopping in her tracks when he keeps talking, her back to him as he does so, and then turning to look at him as he gets to the point of begging her to do something about her son. Keeping her from meeting him.
Just like that, she's in homid again.
"Stop," she says, worn out. Her rage is dim. So is his, knocked down til he's less than he was even at his first change. Hers is faded, whispering, compared to what it was earlier. Humans would still run from them.
"Just stop," Laura repeats. "Stop telling me about the future you come from. Stop talking about my daughter like she's a woman. Stop talking about my son like he's a monster. Stop. You have no idea --"
She looks away, exhaling, and turns back to him. Blood stains her shoulder, her shirt, her crisply tailored suit. She'll wash it out of her mouth later. "They are my cubs. I watch them. I protect them. I fought to keep them both alive when I couldn't even carry the two that came between them because the war kept coming to me. I teach them respect, I teach them how to survive in this tribe. And you stand there telling me I've failed. That he beats her once I'm gone, that she's so broken she runs away and right into the jaws of a Full Moon. That every day, thinking of them, working to make them the best they can be, and I fail.
"You talk to me about ...sex with her?" Laura says, almost spitting it, choking on it. "She's eight years old." The look in her eyes is almost pleading, but the anger eclipses it. Swallows it whole. "I can't know the things you keep insisting on saying to me. I can't believe them. I can't act on them. All you make me do is see my life as a countdown to the death that will leave my mate alone, my son evil, my daughter broken. What do I change, that could not ruin them all further?"
She's quiet a moment. "But you won't stop. What promise do you think you are going to extract from me that I have not already given my life to fulfilling? Do you believe that if I say to you that I will watch them closer, work harder to protect them, to make them good, to make them strong, that somehow it will all change the world you know? Do you think that hasn't been my singular goal since the day they were born, you arrogant pup!"
Those last words, she roars at him.
"Fine," she says then, a rush of almost hissing air, a sweep of her arm. "I will do more, Wyrmbreaker-yuf. I will do my best to find a good teacher for my son when he changes. I will tell him again and again that he must protect his Kin and keep them safe. I will teach him everything I know until the day I die, ever-so-gloriously. I will watch my daughter and try to get her to tell me if she needs my help so that I can keep her safe. I will try to save their bodies and their souls before mine are both gone. But only because you asked me," she snaps then, the words arch and bitter and verging on furious laughter. "Not because I am their mother. Not because I carried them, and bore them, and tried to show them I loved them when they screamed when I came near or fed them from my own body. Not because I love them more than you can fathom.
"Know this," she says, soft now. "It is what I have always done. It is what I have fought for and failed at for well over a decade now. It is what I will do to my dying breath. It is what I was doing tonight. It is what I'm doing as we speak."
[Cold Victory] Perhaps this isn't the first time he's been here after all. Perhaps this isn't the first time some force has ripped him out of the present, cast him into the past. Perhaps he's been here before; when he was seven, some adult version of him came back on this very night to fight alongside, and then fight with, and then plead with Night Warder. Perhaps right now, somewhere out there, there's some seven-year-old version of himself waiting to grow up,
come back,
live this night again.
Because maybe he's not making changes after all. Maybe he can't. It's all preordained -- not by some higher power, not by some celestine or some god, the triat, Gaia -- but by the essential unchangeable nature of the players in this drama.
No matter how many lifetimes cycle, how many times a seven-year-old Lukas grows up, becomes Wyrmbreaker, come back; no matter how many times he'll open his mouth and let slip that Laura will be long dead by then; no matter how many times he tries to ease the shock of that prophecy by telling her no, it's okay, your family-pack will be okay without you, it'll still come down to this. He'll still tell her everything else he's told her, plead with her to change it while she still can, call your son back from the monster he'll become, protect your daughter from the violence that awaits her, wipe me out of the picture if need be, only don't let her get hurt again.
Once, he said to Danicka -- or perhaps only thought it -- I wish I could protect you from the past.
Here, standing in the past, given that very chance, he sees that he can't. He can't, because no matter how many times he comes back, how many times he's already come back, how many times he's offered love and happiness and everything he has as a sacrifice to time itself -- it hasn't changed anything. Laura is who she is; she's done the best she can. She is only capable of what she is capable of. Nothing more or less.
Not a god. Not a monster. Just an Ahroun, trying, failing.
"I'm sorry," he says. This too is soft. He's still on the ground; sometime between the then and now he's sat up. He looks at Night Warder again. "I shouldn't have said anything at all. I shouldn't have told you who I was and where I was from.
"Believe me, it was never my intention to hang this over your head. I can't imagine what that must feel like. I can't imagine what harm I've done. But I wanted to help you. I wanted to tell you that whatever else, your family survives after you die. For all their faults, they're doing all right. They're doing well. I wanted to give you that much to hold on to, because I know in the end all the glory in the world will mean nothing.
"I couldn't keep silent, Night Warder. Not when it became clear that you weren't blind to what was happening around you; not when it seemed like there was still time to change it. I'm sorry, but I love her more than I respect you. And knowing what I know, seeing what I've seen -- you don't know how often I've wished for a chance to protect Danička from what's already happened. I thought I had that chance tonight. I thought if I could change the past, make you see, change you --
" -- but I can't. You are who you are, Night Warder-yuf. I can't change that."
He plants a hand on the ground. It's wet -- not dew but blood. They fought here a second time. There's a strange sort of symmetry in that. Rising, he wipes that hand on the front of his shirt, lifts his chin, looks at her.
"No more badgering to change your ways and see the light, then. No more sweet little lies either. Yes: you're long dead by the time I'm twenty-five. Yes: you die an elder and a hero. Yes: your mate is alone. No: your son is not evil. He's just twisted and broken. No: your daughter is not broken. She is not weak. She's strong, and she's doing well, and I know you can't believe that right now, but it's the truth, and it's the only goddamn comfort I can give you."
He looks past her then, the direction she was heading. And back. He thinks he knws the answer already, but he asks anyway.
"Do you want me to come with you?"
[ender of names] She says now what she didn't say a moment ago, what she did not say because she wanted to at least give him a chance to speak. He fought alongside her. He, a mere shadow in this world, able to fight the shadows she could only see but not touch. He helped bring her down from a frenzy. And now, having done the same for him, she's seen him at his most vulnerable, and shown him mercy.
But she says it now, and like everything before, it's hard to tell if anything he's said has any impact on her other than her desire for him to just stop. What he's told her tonight has broken something in her, taken more hope than it's given, though that may just be because she is ultimately such a different wolf than he is, with so much more at stake. The only words he can see any reaction to are perhaps the most simple: I love her more than i respect you. Her eyes flicker at that, meet his, hold.
Too proud to tell him to just go away, too realistic to tell him she wishes he'd never come here, Night Warder just shakes her head. "I was going to ask you to come home with me, to see her again if you wanted to," she tells him, with the sort of brutal honesty her daughter still cannot muster except on the rarest of occasions. "I wanted to ask you what sort of mate you are. What sort of woman she is. What you knew of everything I missed. I wanted to ask questions I would have asked if you were coming to me to challenge for her, and not my son. I wanted you to give me something to hold onto other than the horrors I can only fail to prevent, because knowing that one day she'll be okay is paltry comfort in the face of everything else you've said."
A beat. A huff of air. "I hope you've gained something tonight that strengthens you," she says. "But now, I want to go home to my family and forget you. I want you out of my territory. Now."
[Cold Victory] Gained something, Night Warder says in the end, cutting. Lukas almost laughs. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and these last few seconds drive that knife home. There's a sense of having lost something that was never his to begin with: a chance to sit down with the mother of his mate, to talk to her, to tell her what he knew, who her daughter was. Is. Will be. A chance to know Night Warder.
To earn her approval. If he's absolutely honest with himself -- and he so often is -- he would've liked that, too.
But that's not how it turned out. Reality turned out so much messier, bloodier, more savage, more painful. Night Warder's approval is the last thing he might have earned tonight, but the truth is -- he doesn't need that anymore, either. She was a god in his mind, or a monster. She's neither now. She's an Ahroun, and a Shadow Lord, and a woman that tried her best.
Didn't do as well as she'd hoped. But tried.
He interrupts her only once, only when she says what sort of mate you are -- and only to say:
"You already know what sort of mate I am. If you've learned nothing else of me tonight, you've learned that much."
And after, he's just silent. And when she's done, he stands a moment, silent. Then he nods.
"Goodbye, Night Warder."
[Danicka] It's possible that there'd be no way. No way, tonight, to earn the approval of a woman who has been convinced for a half-decade now that no Ahroun worth their own blood would impose their presence on their mate, on their cubs. She frenzied. She threw her mate through a wall in front of an eight year old and a three year old, and to this day does not know how deep those scars are on his physical brain, his intangible psyche -- only that after that, he lost some inner strength he'd once had. She watched her cubs -- the ones that survived her womb, that is -- both grow up consistently underweight and realized, too late, that it was her fault, and not something she could fix.
It's possible that, had she taken him home, she would have been trying as hard as Lukas to find some way to make it okay for Danicka to be with a Full Moon. It's possible that she'd want to hear that he leaves her when Luna waxes, and protects her with his absence, and that hearing anything else would have led to exactly this conversation. It's possible that it wouldn't even have been a fair shake, a real companionship: that she decided, as soon as she awoke from her frenzy, that her nightmare wasn't all the things he's told her tonight but the idea of something like him loving her daughter.
The truth is, she dies gloriously and is sung of even as he grows to Adren rank himself. And the truth is, the reality is so much messier, bloodier, more savage and more painful than that. The reality is that she's always known her death would come, sooner than she'd be ready for. In 1993 the war is already at a screaming pitch, it's not as it once was. There are no Garou left alive who remember the war being anything but on the verge of Apocalypse, a losing battle tipping them all right into the pit. She's had little hope, for a long time now, that she would even live to see her children grow as old as they have.
Her rage gets stronger every day. He asks her why she stays. She couldn't answer, but the truth -- the reality -- is messy, and bloody, and painful: she can't leave them. Not when she knows how little time she has left. Not when he comes and reminds her of that everpresent truth, that her death is coming, riding not a pale horse but a freight train. Even when this night brings her to frenzy, to rage greater than she's known in nearly two decades, she thinks of walking away from them for their own good -- she's already given up on more children -- and she can't.
She wonders if this wolf, who seems so willing to sacrifice any chance he has of ever being with the one he says he loves, could understand that. If he, being incapable of motherhood, could understand why she can't leave them. Why she never will.
Across the few feet that have opened up between them, she just watches him. He interjects once -- she halts for a moment, lets him say it, then continues.
They both would have liked to sit down. To perhaps pretend, for a little while, that she could believe entirely that he is who he says he is. To pretend that maybe he could have some influence on the past, or give her some home. To hope that maybe none of it was pretend. But they're Shadow Lords, and they are Full Moons. They seldom get moments as quiet as that. As peaceful.
Certainly not with each other.
"Goodbye, Lukáš," she says, her pronunciation not as effortless as her child's. It isn't meant as disrespect. If anything, it's acknowledgement of the one connection they have outside of this night: that he is, even in this time, a little boy who enters her house sometimes, not knowing that the last time he does, it will be to claim the girl he once befriended there. Acknowledgement, perhaps, of his humanity.
She turns then, and walks away. After a few steps she flows down into lupus, and those steps quicken, taking her homeward faster. Maybe she enters the house then, goes to check on her children, goes to bed with her mate. Maybe she just waits outside. Watches. Protects them, sleepless, matted with her blood and Wyrmbreaker's, waiting for the perigee to end.
As for Lukas, there is no fading back to his time as soon as Night Warder is gone. The night stretches on around him, empty and cold. He goes where he goes, or stays where he is. He is alone for hours. Time is hard to tell in the umbra, but it's well past four in the morning when the moon reaches its true zenith, the difference between one minute ago and this exact moment invisible to the naked eye. But that is when, without preamble, without a song of rage or the tipping of the earth, he finds himself on the same street he stood on when the moon rose.
A dark shadow moves across the ground, stretching and shortening. Hunting. He knows what to do. The Nightshade feels cold as he swallows it. The shadow feels like nothing when he hunts it down, kills it. Hunts another, but there are no roving packs of five or six. Maybe they, like the Garou, are dying out as the world moves beyond the need for monsters and bogeymen.
It is still well before dawn when the moon starts to set. Luna moves away from him. Away from the earth. Away from this night. That subtle, secretive threat ends for another eighteen years, if it will even come back again. If they will even be alive by then.
The sky turns from black to indigo.
celebration.
9 years ago