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Post by Smoke on May 26, 2010 2:15:06 GMT -5
Smoke had finally gotten around to clearing out the lab that used to adjoin Yaodensi's office and re-adjoining it to his own office; then this morning, he'd spent most of his time post-breakfast getting the place into the proper shape for a divination ritual of his own divising.
The room was warded from distractions and suffused with a murky, dreamlike sort of feeling; it smelled of lilacs and lemon. Three soft purple mats were tossed in the floor around a shape drawn in oil pastel; in the middle of that shape was a silvery basin of water.
He waited at his desk with his door open, reading.
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Post by Hitoshi Gilespi on Jun 2, 2010 23:58:01 GMT -5
Hitoshi felt his stomach tighten up as he neared Professor Smoke's office, and he gripped Alex's hand for support perhaps a little too tightly. He was hopefully going to find out what had drawn him to Alex the first time he had seen him, and even more astonishingly, he was going to see what his mother had seen. He was thrilled, but he was also the most terrified he could remember being in a long time.
He stopped and looked over at Alex. "Ready?" he asked.
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Post by Alex Meriweather on Jun 3, 2010 0:15:24 GMT -5
Alex wrapped one arm around Hitoshi and hugged him. He would've been a lot more frightened than he was if he hadn't been concentrating on making sure Hitoshi was okay- and telling himself that this wasn't about him.
"I am if you are." He smiled.
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Post by Hitoshi Gilespi on Jun 3, 2010 1:07:59 GMT -5
"I haven't seen my mother since I was eleven. If this works..." His voice caught in his throat, and he tried to blink away the burning sensation in his eyes. "You'll like her," he said at last.
He pushed open the door to Professor Smoke's office, the airy scent of lilac and lemon wafting through the air. There was something calm about the room, something almost otherworldly. He felt the knot in his stomach begin to loosen.
"Professor Smoke?"
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Post by Smoke on Jun 3, 2010 1:18:06 GMT -5
Smoke looked up from his book; he pulled his feet down off the desk and sat up straight, sitting his book down and marking his place.
"Hey, Hitoshi, Alex. I've got everything set up; do you have any last-minute questions, or are we ready to go?"
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Post by Hitoshi Gilespi on Jun 3, 2010 1:34:34 GMT -5
Hitoshi nodded. "I'm ready. What do we need to do?"
He glanced down at the circle on the floor, the small part of him that wasn't preoccupied with thoughts of the prophecy marveling at the idea of actually seeing such a complicated ritual.
"So how exactly does it work?" he asked softly.
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Post by Smoke on Jun 3, 2010 2:17:24 GMT -5
"First, take your shoes off and sit down over there, preferably not the mat facing the door." He gestured.
"The basic theory- you might remember correspondences from last year? How we can use spatial shortcuts to find unknown temporal variables, or whatever analogy I used that year, and how defining them is the point of most base-level divination actions?" Smoke shucked his slippers and stood by the door, waiting for them to go in first. "You two have a lot of them, and since I've already given you a tarot reading, I can say that the prophecy was and probably is still the biggest one. So we're gonna follow that thread back to whatever's the first divination-flavored circumstance we can find- basic energetic visualization- and manifest it in the water over there using pattern evocation."
"Make sense?" He smiled at Hitoshi. "If you give me a bit I can come up with something simpler."
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Post by Hitoshi Gilespi on Jun 3, 2010 2:36:26 GMT -5
"I think so," he said. Divination was never Hitoshi's strong suit, partly because he tended to have a very practical view of magic and partly because Hitoshi had a difficult time of wrapping his mind around such abstract magic, but it sounded reasonable enough.
Hitoshi sat down on the nearest mat, tucking his his legs beneath him. He stared into the still water, watching it as though it already reflected some deep secret. "What do we do first?"
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Post by Alex Meriweather on Jun 3, 2010 2:50:37 GMT -5
Alex sat beside Hitoshi, watching him, crossing his legs. What Professor Smoke had said made very little sense to him, but he tucked it away in his mind anyway, in case it would be useful later.
The whole business made him feel a little strange; the room felt like it should be darker than it was, and beneath the smell of lilac he thought he could detect something else.
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Post by Smoke on Jun 3, 2010 2:52:30 GMT -5
"You don't have to do much of anything except link hands and relax," Smoke replied. "When I've found the right event, it'll appear in the basin."
"Anything else?"
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Post by Hitoshi Gilespi on Jun 3, 2010 3:17:01 GMT -5
Hitoshi slipped his hand in Alex's and squeezed it gently. Alex's hand was soft and warm, and it made him feel better just to know that Alex was there with him.
"Not that I can think of. I'm ready."
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Post by Smoke on Jun 3, 2010 4:34:49 GMT -5
Smoke nodded. He closed the door and sat down across from them, eyes focused on a point between the two boys.
Slowly, a thin static began building in the air, beginning in the lines drawn on the floor, then running through Hitoshi and Alex. It span and grew into a cord, thick and enduring as steel cable, with a thousand smaller lines building off it in strengths ranging from silk rope to gossamer. It was long, impossibly long, stretching back beyond either of their lifelines, beyond Smoke's, a thousand times over, and stretching the other way into a distinct presence which made a fleeting appearance- a pair of violet eyes- and then forced perspective back in the other direction with a hard jolt.
Smoke spared a moment to catch his breath, then searched along the cable between them, double-checking not just for divination magic, but for something between the time Hitoshi and his sister would've been conceived and the time Alex was born, running glimpses past his eyes of each major possibility. He saw Hitoshi's grandmother, Tristan, Yaodensi, even a very brief glimpse of Hoshi, and passed all of them by. It took several minutes more than he'd expected.
Finally, pictures of Rivienne and what he could only presume was Hitoshi's mother arose, and he leaned forward to dip one finger in the water and run it around the edges of the basin, a picture slowly forming out of the light that hit the water. The perspective jittered around until it found a comfortable resting point, then became a hologram, then rose up and became the world around them...
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Post by Hitoshi Gilespi on Jun 3, 2010 5:24:55 GMT -5
Hitoshi watched, mesmerized, as the shimmering silver threads unfolded around them, filled with a sudden sense of wonder. There was something extremely significant about them, and as his eyes slid over the seemingly endless thread between them, images seemed to flicker before his eyes. Forms swam in front of his eyes, all people he had never seen before and yet...strangely familiar.
Then the air around him shifted and shimmered, and he was sitting in the floor of his aunt's kitchen. His aunt sat at the table, the coffee cup in her hand gently steaming, looking much younger and happier than he had ever seen her. His aunt had always been a lively, pretty woman, and it only now occurred to him how tired and listless she had seemed for the past few months. It was difficult to reconcile her with the smiling woman at the table.
And beside her... Hitoshi felt himself tremble, and he clenched Alex's hand until it was almost painful for him. Beside her at the table was a young, anxious looking woman with frizzy white-blonde hair and wide violet eyes.
"Mom," he whispered, his voice hoarse. He wanted to reach out, to try to touch her, but he knew it was only an illusion, and it would only hurt worse if he tried.
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Post by Rivienne Volkova on Jun 3, 2010 5:45:31 GMT -5
"--don't know what I'm going to do," Cassandra was saying, her wide violet eyes staring off at the distance, as though she could see something her sister could not. "I don't want to pressure him into anything, but it's not like I can just not tell him."
Rivienne took her sister's hand gently. "I can't tell you what to do," she replied evenly. "The best advice I can give you is just to be hon--Rudeth, put that down!" Rivienne jumped up from her seat and scooped the brown-haired toddler out of the floor, who was chewing on a dog toy. "What am I going to do with you, hm?" The toddler grinned and cooed at his mother, and she gave a long-suffering sigh.
Cassandra smiled, then something seemed to come to her attention. She pursed her lips. "Riv... Where's Rudeth?"
"No, this one's Rudeth. If you mean Dmitry, he's..." She trailed off. Rivienne's eyes swept the room, and sure enough, the toddler was nowhere to be seen. She took a deep breath, then handed Rudeth to her sister. "You'd better get use to this," she said dryly. "Twins are a handful."
Cassandra smiled and held the toddler, who seemed content enough to cuddle against his aunt. Rivienne shimmered off the edge of the projection, then returned momentarily with a naked two-year old kicking and flailing in her arms.
"No! No!" The toddler flailed about helplessly and wailed. "Me down! No clothes!"
Rivienne plopped the toddler down on the table and began fighting his clothes back onto him.
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Post by Alex Meriweather on Jun 3, 2010 6:06:04 GMT -5
The hand that wasn't holding Hitoshi's flew over Alex's mouth as he tried not to laugh. Seeing Rudy and Thrall as toddlers was... oddly enlightening.
He looked at Hitoshi and thought that he might've been about to cry. If he could've done so without moving strangely, he would've hugged Hitoshi again; he'd never lost anyone himself, and had no idea what the other boy must've been feeling.
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Post by Rivienne Volkova on Jun 3, 2010 6:43:00 GMT -5
Rivienne finished dressing the disgruntled toddler at last and set him back on the floor, staring at him imperiously. "Now, you're going to keep your clothes on from now on, mister. Think you can handle that?"
The toddler sat in the floor and pouted indignantly, and his brother scrambled out of his aunt's lap and over to his brother. Dmitry grabbed a handful of Rudeth's overlong hair and yanked; Rudeth bit down on his brother's hand. Rivienne huffed and bent into the floor to pry the two apart.
Cassandra stood up from her chair and crossed the room, staring dreamily out the window. She lifted her coffee to her lips, and suddenly her eyes glazed over. The ceramic cup slipped from her fingers and smashed against the tile floor.
"Cass..." Rivienne whispered, pulling her sons close to her. A look of understanding and fear passed over her face.
Cassandra opened her mouth to speak, but the voice that came out was not entirely hers. It seemed hallow, echoing against itself, like a thousand different voices all speaking at once.
"These two shall be bound as gods are bound, to their works and to their oaths and as they have bound the gods further, further than war, further than hatred and brotherhood, their blood shall be respite and release.
"This world shall be theirs, time and again, and crowds of the powerful shall know them, revered and reviled, in short lives until brutal ends, until this world has been forsaken for that of the conquered and love and strength are given away for fear.
"The sky will shine with thunder in those days, the breath of gods tainted by fire the works of men torn asunder and the vengeance of those who came before the gods exercised.
"The Third Cataclysm arrives."
Cassandra trembled, and her eyes rolled back into her head as she collapsed into her sister's arms.
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Post by Smoke on Jun 3, 2010 7:19:48 GMT -5
Smoke's endurance ran out and he collapsed; thankfully, he was already sitting (ritual safety 101 there) and only sort of rolled onto his side. The spell immediately died, and the smell of lemon popped and fizzled in the fading static, clearing out the lilac.
He spent as much time catching his breath as he thought he could before the kids got worried, then looked up at them. "When you're done... processing that, could you undo the wards for me? It shouldn't... take long... I'm'onna nap..."
And he fell asleep.
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Post by Hitoshi Gilespi on Jun 3, 2010 8:17:09 GMT -5
Hitoshi stared blankly at the space where his mother's image had been, his throat dry and his face sheet-white. He didn't know what to think, or how he was supposed to react, or what any of it meant. It sounded horrible... And some tiny part of Hitoshi whispered, I'll bet that's why she died. Because of what she foretold.
Hitoshi stared down at the floor, his vision blurring with tears. He make a soft, choking sound, and his hand trembled in Alex's.
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Post by Alex Meriweather on Jun 3, 2010 8:21:51 GMT -5
Alex wrapped his arms around Hitoshi and squeezed him close. He glanced worriedly at Professor Smoke, but decided he could just notify Miss Ellie or the groundskeeper later.
"Come on," he said, stroking Hitoshi's hair. "Come on, let's go back to the room where it's quiet, and then you can talk about it or we can spend time together or whatever you like."
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Post by Hitoshi Gilespi on Jun 3, 2010 8:42:22 GMT -5
Hitoshi latched onto Alex and pulled the other boy tight against him, his face buried in Alex's shoulder. He should move, should go back to the room, or release the wards, or something...
But Alex was warm and solid, and Hitoshi was fairly certain he wouldn't have been able to move if he tried.
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