World Tree MUSH

  It's late evening over Salome Highscribe's hidden beach camp. Rain lashes the ocean further out to sea. Here the palm fronds only shiver in a stiff wind, rattling. It's an odd combination of quiet and windy. It's a night of omen, of curious deeds and unexpected happenings.

  Naruiel, the Mirrahi sand-dancer stallion formerly owned by Lucatiel of Mirrah, has been staying close to the camp. Sometimes he even wades into the shallows to keep Ianthe company, nosing at the girl who had treated him kindly. Other times he acts as a guard, racing up to any intruders and whistling, thrashing hooves and flashing teeth. Locals stopped trying to corral the wild horse on the beach after he broke a man's arm.

  Maybe the people here have more pressing concerns. No form of animal control has come to collect him.

  So he's been let to stay, since nothing Salome does has any effect in running him off.

  Tonight, the animal lingers near the edges of camp, right on the edges of where the bonfire will light him. His eyes flash in the dark when he moves; the sound of his hooves and the whuff of his breath.

  At some point during the evening, he leaves.

  There is an odd sound near the periphery of camp. A shuffling, scraping sound.

  A thud, as of something falling into the sand. And then the sound of something being dragged. The whuff of the horse's breath is audible in the gloom.

  And then Naruiel is back. The stallion is dragging something with his teeth, picking his way over the sand. It's very large, but his body is between the thing he's dragging and the campfire... but he's a strong hoss, as Salome has observed, and he makes his way steadily into the light with his burden.

    Salome Highscribe does not sleep. She waits.
    This is literal. As an elf, she does not sleep. Requiring only a scant four hours of meditation to gain her rest, and having already performed that for the night, she rests reclined in her beach chair by the fire, mimic hat covering her face, a half-consumed bottle of pitorro dangling loosely from her fingers at her side as she whiles away the night.
    Long ago has she given up on shooing away that damned horse; every attempt only to be met with Naruiel returning even more smug than the last time. Why the beast is so faithful, Salome has no clue. With its master dead and gone she certainly had no need for him. But when the horse finally leaves on his own?
    That... That makes Salome peer up from under the brim of her hat. She pays it no further mind though, taking simple mental note that, now, she can properly leave, she'll break camp in the morning and start making her way off to do whatever it is she has planned next.
    Right up until something at the outskirts of the camp makes her ears twitch.
    Subtly the elven witch shifts, letting her bottle rest in the sand as her other hand slowly slides to the gun holstered in her duster, thumbing back the hammer and resting her hand on the butt of the grip. ... Only to be greeted by that damned horse again.
    Salome Highscribe's sigh is legendary.
    "Whaaaat? What the hell is it, what do you want from me you accursed hoss?!" She blurts, sitting up, fire in her eyes as the horse draws nearer. "Just what in the nine hells is that now that you come to plague me with?!"

  For all the mind the sand-dancer pays the witch, she might as well not be there. Naruiel has set his shoulders and haunches, muscles bunching beneath a glossy but somewhat patchy coat s he gathers himself and pulls. Whatever he's dragging through the sand is making good headway, and it must be heavy.

  Once the horse and his burden cross the limn of firelight, it becomes clear just what it is that he's dragging. Scraps of white silk stained brown with blood. Black leather chased with gold. That hat, somehow staying on, and the mask, tilted but more or less in the right place to hide its owner's face. Swords dragging from scabbards, warped buckler over her shoulder. Scuffed boots, dried mud on their soles.

  Lucatiel of Mirrah is actually conscious, but not by very much. Now that the firelight falls across her, it's clear that she's breathing. How is she breathing? She's dead. There's a hole in that cuirass that should have punched her clean through, and did. Closer to the fire, too, the sound of her ragged breath is audible; irregular and laboured, but there.

  The question is...

  How did she get here? Naruiel didn't drag her all that far. He's been here, most of the time.

  ...oh, gods, did that raggedy corpse just stir?

    Naruiel better be dragging over a bigass treasure chest full of gold, for all the work he's doing in bringing his burden to the witch.
    Slowly Salome sits up, tipping her hat back as the horse pulls something through the sands towards the fire, she doesn't stand quite yet as she watches the sand-dancer approach and...
    Deposit Lucatiel by the fire.
    "..."
    The dusky-skinned witch is stone silent for a long beat.
    "......"
    Because the horse just brought her a corpse.
    The witch opens her mouth as though to speak, though no words come out as she mouths the words 'what in tarnation?', hand lowering from her gun.
    "And just what am I supposed to do with that?" She asks of the horse. "First off, how did-- you know what nevermind, I--" She trails off when another realization hits her.
    Lucatiel is breathing.
    Once again her hand returns to the butt of her gun, mismatched eyes watching the 'corpse' for a long moment, eyes narrowing as she slowly draws her Colt from the holster, ready to shoot either a clothes stealing graverobber or a zombie.

  The figure lies motionless beside the fire. With his task completed, the horse noses at the untidy pile of bloody silk and cured leather, before turning to saunter back towards the periphery, contentedly cropping at the sea-grass.

  Meanwhile there is the figure of what is either a graverobber or a corpse lying sprawled beside the campfire. Salome doesn't have too much time to ponder this, because the figure huddled in on itself is breathing, coughing, and... shivering?

  Slowly, the figure uncurls from where it had been dropped. No sooner does it move than it's obvious that this is, in fact, Lucatiel of Mirrah. The woman gives a horrible-sounding wet cough, but she's breathing. This is usually a thing living people do. Not corpses. Not even zombies, sometimes.

  "Help me."

  The words are small. It's a rasp, but not the desperate voice of the damned, or even a zombie's hair-raising groan. It's the familiar voice of the witch's associate, even if said associate does look and sound like death.

  She tries to pull herself up, knocking her hat off her head and away from the fire with a swat of a hand. It's definitely the right hat. The feathers are a bit ruffled and some of them are a bit muddy, but it's the right hat. So is the mask beneath it. Gloved fingers try to fumble at the buckled catches, but that requires too much dexterity. The hands fall, and for a moment Lucatiel just tries to keep herself upright, shivering.

  "I cannot... by myself... help me."

  Okay, so she probably won't turn around and try to eat Salome's brain, but... one can never be too sure, right?

    That is, in fact, Lucatiel herself and not a graverobber. That's good. But what about the state of her undeath? Well, asking for help like that, it's not very likely she's the brain munching variety of zombie, they're usually not intelligent enough to ask for aid. Let alone set a trap. In two words, the elf witch's disbelief and consternation all come to the fore.
    "Aw sheeyit."
    She breathes the curse out in an exasperated hiss as she decocks her gun and stuffs it back into the holster, as she rises from her beach chair and briskly clears the distance between herself and the downed knight.
    Taking to a knee to help hoist Lucatiel to sitting position by the fire, she gingerly sets the hat aside- knowing full well how cherished a possession a good hat can be and all. It's okay. If Lucatiel does try to bite her or anything, Salome is fast on the draw, but the elf gets the sense that that isn't the case as she reaches up to the fasteners of the mask and starts unclasping them.
    "Jee-sus, how are you not dead. I saw you little better off than a corpse on Methuselah's doorstep." She mutters.

  The knight allows herself to be levered half-upright, still shivering as she braces herself against the sand. While Salome helps with unclasping the mask's buckles, the knight busies herself with shucking off her gloves, tossing them aside. Almost all of her gear feels like it's either been soaked through, or soaked through and dried that way. Leather straps are stiff and uncooperative. Flecks of tarnish spot the metal.

  There's probably not much chance of an attack happening. She looks like she couldn't spit a drunken pig on the end of her sword, right now. She's shaking like a leaf just with the effort of keeping herself upright, and what little of her can be seen looks haggard.

  Numb-white fingers are struggling with the clasps of her cuirass and pauldrons, shucking those off as Salome takes care of the more delicate clasps of the mask.

  The clasps fall away, springing open at last. Small wonder why the woman needed help. Soaking the leather of the straps has ruined them, and the buckles will need to be taken apart and scoured. A tug will free the mask.

  Lucatiel of Mirrah was a pretty woman, once; a woman of her early thirties possessed of a classical beauty. Her features are strong without being overly bold, and one eye is a startlingly brilliant shade of emerald, flecked with gold.

  The other one is the milky white of the blind, but that isn't so unusual. What's unusual is the ring of deadened tissue around it. The patch seems to reach out from her left eye, dark and tinged almost green. Both eyes blink rapidly in an effort to focus, before her mouth twists in an expression of mingled disgust and displeasure.

  "I was dead," Lucatiel says instead, confirming the witch's suspicions. "You saw truly."

    "Come on now, sit up." Salome says with what might be a surprising gentleness to her tone as she holds Lucatiel half upright. But then the clasps are undone and the mask comes free.
    And a lot is explained in a very brief amount of time and in so very few words.
    "Ah." The elf says at first.
    "Ah hah." She follows it up shortly there after, planting a hand on her knee as she gets a full force view of the knight's face and that ring of necrotized flesh, and for a moment, she looks from Lucatiel to the bronze mask now in her hand.
    Well that does explain why that never came off, at least.
    "Well. You ain't dead now," the witch says matter of factly. "But you sure look like death warmed over."
    Waiting a moment until the fallen knight can remain sitting up on her own, Salome returns to her beach chair and... Plucks up the bottle of liquor from the sand, passing it right on over. "Hell, you look like you need this more than I do, right about now."

  "In point of fact, I am neither dead nor living." Lucatiel's voice is rough. She sounds like she's trying to hold herself together as best she can. "I spoke to you of the Curse of Undeath, that I suspected my brother had fallen to such a fate. I do not know if he has or not, but in the course of my travels, I have."

  The woman endures Salome's regard in stoic silence. For a long moment she doesn't move, aside from shivering and trying not to collapse. The right side of her face is flushed, and her eyes are glassy in the manner of one feverish.

  It had taken a lot of slogging through rain and storm to get back here.

  "I did not lie, precisely, when I told you my story. I simply chose not to reveal all of the details." After a few seconds of careful shifting, Lucatiel manages to hold herself upright without help, and the bottle of pitorro is taken with a tilt of her head that might be gratitude. It's held up in sarcastically jaunty salute, and a healthy swig taken.

  It's a testament to her condition that she doesn't even flinch as she passes the bottle back to Sally.

  "Where is the child?"

    "So you suffer the same accursed fate as your brother, then." Salome murmurs as she plops back into her beach chair and leans back to brood, one cheek resting on the knuckles of her fist. Her regard certainly is keen and scrutinizing, but she doesn't say a word beyond that for a good moment.
    "Far be it from me of all people to bgrudge someone not telling a whole story." She snorts, waving her free hand in a lazy and dismissive gesture. "I ain't the type to go burrowing my nose into other people's business unless there's somethin' in it for me, I'll have you know." She points out as the bottle is passed back. She considers it a moment. But then decides Lucatiel probably needs it more and waves her off to keep it.
    She's already had half anyway.
    The question though earns a jerk of one thum towards the sea, waves lapping softly at the sandy beach.
    "She's as wild and free as the day she was born. She's been coming back every night though to play with that horse of yours and sing." She says. Which means Ianthe will probably be making a return this evening, sometime soon, as the witch reclines in her sandy throne.
    "It's been a real tearjerker, lemme tell you. When a sad mermaid sings, you can tell it. It's pretty but at the same time it's a real ugly kind of pretty. Like a dead unicorn; the kind of thing that makes a man wanna fall to his knees and weep."

  "I do not know with certainty whether he succumbed, but I can only assume that is what drove him from Mirrah. I know my brother," Lucatiel says, thoughtful. She studies her hands in her lap. "Aslatiel would not have left Mirrah for anything less. He had grown comfortable with the accolades and lifestyle we had earned; he would not have left it willingly."

  After a moment she takes the bottle back, and gives no reaction to the waved offer to keep it. She takes a healthy swig, pauses to collect her bearings, and then takes another. After a second she holds it up, eyeing it and squinting slowly at it.

  "...This is terrible. I love it."

  Those mismatched eyes slide back to Salome, and the dead one reflects the orange light of the campfire. "True enough. But I can ill afford to spend my trust as freely as silver, Salome Highscribe. There are those who make a business of hunting those like myself. In the bounds of my own world, we are seen not as those who might be saved, but as monsters to be put down for what we will in time become."

  Another pull of pitorro, and this time she grimaces, baring her teeth briefly. "I will speak to her. Naruiel is here?" That, at least, seems to be welcome news. The woman looks relieved. "Good. I had feared you might sell him, though you would fetch a fine price."

  Her expression falls, slightly, as she looks seaward. "I am sorry to have put her through such a thing. I did not think she would..." Bond to her as hard as she did. Lucatiel looks uncomfortable for a moment. "I will make it right. Worry not."

    "Shit, I didn't think of selling him." Salome mutters, rubbing her jaw. But it's definitely a moot point now as she waves one hand off. "But that ain't happening now that you're back. I tried settin' him free but the damned hoss wouldn't leave. Probably because he knew you'd be back." The elf says, shoulders lifting into a shrug.
    "It's called pitorro. It's a local brew. They mix in coconut and bury it under the soil for a few weeks after distilling it, so it hits like a gunshot." She explains in regards to the liquor before returning to more serious topics.
    "It's a solid enough reason to assume he left home." The elf muses on the topic of the curse of undeath, before she props her chin on her palm.
    "Yeah I can understand that. I've run into my fair share of Witch Hunters in my time, but that was mainly off world, here on Pandemonium, magic's as common as a copper coin. We've got witches and mermaids and dragons and gryphons, you name it." The witch explains in a pitorro-sleepy drawl, before a splash by the water's edge makes her turn her head.
    "Well speak of the devil and he shall appear." Salome mutters, mismatched eyes focusing on the small fgure resting on a rock by the sand's edge; a child with the upper body of a human and the lower of a powerful aquatic beast. And she's staring intently at Lucatiel's form by the fire, a flutter of confustion working across her youthful features.

  The knight's eyes flick sideways toward Salome. That the witch didn't think of selling the horse is a genuine surprise. She'd pegged her as the type to shrug and turn to using that kind of advantage, if it suited her... but horses don't seem to be as commonplace in this world. Not like Mirrah. Not in worlds where internal combustion engines and motors and brooms exist.

  Lucatiel actually grins a little once she hears Salome's plan. "You tried to set him free? Noble, but useless. He will wait. Oh, perhaps eventually he would give up and move on, if I took too much time in returning to him, but... my brother purchased him as a colt. I personally saw to his training. Mirrahi sand-dancers are bred for their ingelligence and loyalty."

  "I know it to be true. Aslatiel is as much a consummate professional as I, for all his easy charisma and skirt-chasing." Lucatiel's second-hand scolding is fond in spite of her words. "He would not dishonour the trust placed in him by the lord we served. That being the case, I have found no word of him in my travels, and I have travelled far since leaving Mirrah."

  As Salome glances aside to the mermaid, so does Lucatiel. When she sees whose eyes are on her, the knight takes a final swig of pitorro, wedging the butt end of the bottle into the sand. This may take some doing.

  With a grunt, the knight levers herself to her feet, swaying uncertainly from lock-kneed stance like an unsteady colt. A second or two is taken to make sure she won't pitch back onto her face, before she shuffles through the sand toward the shore.

  Ianthe hasn't seen her face, yet, but it is unmistakably Lucatiel: Complete with a tidy hole through her silk tunic, crusted with blood. The point below her heart is at least not a hole -- there's not even a mark on her skin for the hole in her tunic to reveal.

  She staggers; lets herself fall to sit in the shallows. "I am sorry to have frightened you so." The woman's half-smile seems out of place on such an aloof, dour face; it lights her up, and perhaps that's why Aslatiel struck one side of her coin with a desert bloom. Her brief smile is like the benediction of rain over the desert, however fleeting it might be. "But... did I not tell you I would keep you safe?"

    Salome is the type to shrug and turn that advantage to her favor. She just simply didn't think to sell the damned horse, this time. And now, knowing that Lucatiel comes back she certainly thinks better than to do so. Far be it from her to want to earn the ire of one of her few associates. But it is true, horses, while extant on Pandemonium, are outpaced by magic and technology.
    It's a pretty tragic story, all told. A brother and sister both afflicted by the same curse, forced to leave their homelands and wander, one in constant search of the other. Though Salome knows better than to comment, the witch holds her tongue, watching with half-lidded mismatched eyes as the knight picks herself up and goes to the mermaid.
    Even without the mask, Ianthe can tell who this is. And she doesn't shy away at the sight of Lucatiel's face as the knight splashes down to sit in the crystal clear waters. A small, web-fingered hand reaches up; delicate and damp fingers cupping Lucatiel by the cheek as the sea child stares in rapt silence for a long moment. She doesn't speak for but a moment before her head dips in a nod, flashing a small smile of her own. "You did."

  "Good." The woman seems genuinely pleased, reaching up to pat unsteadily at the webbed hand over her face The dampness doesn't seem to bother her any, nor does sitting in the surf, because getting up right now is a little beyond her expectations of herself. Lucatiel doesn't look to be in particularly great shape right now.

  "Ianthe. You showed courage. Courage as fine as any knight's that I have seen." She reaches for a pouch at her belt, producing a pouch, and its shape suggests an odd scattering of things. Something is fished out and offered to Ianthe. It's a claw, a sleek curve of black that gleams in the light of the fire. Whatever it was, it came from something very large. "I would like you to have this. A token of your courage. Do you see the black feather in my hat? This is a dewclaw from the same beast. Perhaps Miss Highscribe can have it fashioned into a necklace for you."

  "I cannot promise I will always be here. My path will doubtless take me in different directions, sooner or later; that is my nature, and my way. But I will remember you, and if I am able, I will return to visit you throughout my own journeys."

  She puts her things back away, struggles back to her feet, and stands for a moment streaming water from her clothing. It's already ruined, so frankly she doesn't care about that. "For now... I am cold, sweetling; I must sit by the fire."

  Only when she's sure she won't fall does she move slowly and carefully back to the campfire. Lucatiel doesn't really sit down so much as fall, catching herself on the soft sand with a grunt. "How much more of that pitorro have you left, Highscribe?"