thecrossinglogs | THE CROSSING #1

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THE CROSSING #1

It's time.

For more detail on the particulars of the event, be sure to refer to our info and planning post!

time to choose

— CALM BEFORE THE STORM

It likely isn’t a surprise, when The Ferryman speaks into your mind again. You’ve known The Crossing was coming, and for the past hours, days, or weeks (however you prefer to section your time in this place), you’ve been feeling it drawing closer.

You’ve felt the pull on your soul, guiding you to follow The River; you’ve felt the changes in the Cavern, and in yourself, a shift in atmosphere that seems to start in the humidity of the air and sinks deep down into your bones. You feel solid. More importantly, you feel vulnerable.

Those who want to pay the toll are invited to gather at The Ferryman’s point of vigil; those who don’t will at least have the draw of The Crossing to guide them.

If you have anything to say before the split, now is the time to do it.

— LIGHTS OUT

Because when the moment comes, it waits for no one.

The Lantern doesn't extinguish immediately. Those gathered with The Ferryman (and, perhaps, those gathered near The Ferryman) will see it: a precarious flickering of flame behind glass. The light shrinks, and with it comes a feeling of something else retreating, too — something that you may have understood was there without realizing it, or that you may have assumed was simply another aspect of the light itself.

The bubble of safety, you realize, is receding. And when The Lantern's Light finally goes out, so too does the shield keeping you separated from the wraiths prowling the tunnels.

The darkness closes in. The Cavern's glowing plants are now the only steady source of light in the entire chamber, which allows your eyes to adjust, but only so much; it becomes difficult to make out the faces of even those standing right beside you.

It's time, so says The Ferryman. Make your decision.

follow the leader

— PAYMENT COMES DUE

There is no pomp or ceremony associated with The Ferryman's toll collection. You need only to be willing, and ready.

The darkness seems to shroud The Ferryman more than it does the rest of you, somehow. You can't make out the features of their face, only hear their voice bidding you to step forward when you're ready. For any of you who might need a moment, The Ferryman will wait.

A mote of light appears in The Ferryman's palms as the toll is paid, growing in proportion to the number of memories it receives. It's small, but you can feel the influence of it: that protective bubble you felt recede when The Lantern extinguished grows again around the light, just enough to envelop the group gathered here.

Time to go, says The Ferryman. And even though you can't track their movements in the darkness, the light tracks it for you: over the lip of the land bridge, and down to the black River below.

Nowhere to go but forward. When you step off yourself (even if it takes a bit of psyching up to get there), you'll find that the drop is gentle, and that your steps suspend safely over the water.

Just don't get left behind.

— HEAR A VOICE THAT CAUSES YOU PAIN

And so, you journey.

You walk on the surface of The River as if it were a wide, black road. Ahead of you, that same mote of light follows in the steps of The Ferryman, illuminating the ripples they leave in the water as breadcrumbs for you to follow. The air above The River is cold, certainly, and sometimes the icy water might splash up onto your shoes or ankles — but The River is wide, and there's room enough to walk together, even if you can't see each other well. It's as comfortable as a journey like this might ever be.

But The Crossing is a trial. You didn't forget, did you?

It starts slow: sounds from the darkness that could be voices, unless it's been dark for so long that your ears are playing tricks on you? Shouts of anger, high-pitched laughter, cries of fury and despair.

Then there are words. They beckon to you from the darkness: some plaintive, some punitive. They want you to stop. They want you to stay. They want you gone. Most of the voices are unfamiliar to you, but at least one, you know very well.

You need to keep moving. If you lose sight of The Ferryman's steps, you run the risk of being lost in the Cavern forever. Or perhaps it's someone beside you who's on the edge of losing their focus, someone who needs you to help keep them on the path?

trust your gut

— FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE

The rest of you, left behind on the banks of The River, have only your wits, the contents of your pockets, and the pull of something beyond the darkness to help you on the journey. The darkness is smothering, but not completely impenetrable: you have the glow of the Cavern plants, the faint gleam of the toll group’s steps on the surface of The River, and anything you may have picked up before you got here.

You can travel together or alone, but you must move. The metaphysical pull on you is growing stronger and more insistent the longer you stay in one place, and the Cavern, before preternaturally silent and still, is beginning to stir.

The wraiths, once silent, shapeless, harmless shadows following you about the Cavern, have changed. Where before they were merely unsettling to look at, now they have become larger and more monstrous: sharp eyes and claws, wide eyes and mouths. Where before they were silent, seemingly both unable and unwilling to make any sound, now they wail: wordless cries of pain and anger giving away their positions in the darkness.

Some of them may even be familiar to you, once they get close enough; the wraiths that before had seemingly taken a liking to you, seeking you out and following you wherever you went, now seem dedicated to hunting you specifically.

What the wraiths want from you, it's hard to say. If they catch you, they will tear at you without strategy or direction, like a ravenous animal — or perhaps a terrified one.

Any injuries you sustain during this time, whether from the wraiths or otherwise, are just as real to you as they would have been when you were alive: you bleed, you break, and you feel every inch of the pain inflicted on you.

Nowhere to go but forward. If you follow the pull in your gut, you'll get to where you're going. One way or another.

on the other side

— A MOMENT OF RESPITE

Whichever trial you've chosen, there is, eventually, the end.

You feel it first in the atmosphere: a resettling of the off-kilterness that's been surrounding you. The air slowly becomes drier, and the darkness less punishing. The plants that line the walls of the Cavern become more and more rare, their light replaced by ambient light leaking in from somewhere above you.

For the group traveling with The Ferryman, the wide expanse of The River gradually becomes shallower and narrower, until it's hardly a trickle beneath your feet, winding through the cave system. For the group traveling on their own, there comes a point where the wraiths seem unwilling or unable to follow, their shrieks in the darkness growing further and further away.

You feel it next in yourself: a smoothing of your rough edges, aches and muscle pain and physical exhaustion melting away. For any injured on the journey, your wounds resolve themselves as if natural healing on fast-forward. Natural healing is not always the cleanest or the most comfortable, though; you might be left with scars, crooked fingers or noses, or some other lasting memory of what you risked to be here.

Lastly, once The River has narrowed enough and two groups have reunited again: The Lantern relights. The Ferryman, for all that they were nearly invisible to you in the darkness, seems just the same as they were before. You made it through, they tell you, with no small amount of warmth and pride. Let's take a load off.

You should rest. If you took anything from the Cavern to help you on your journey, you'll find that it's gone from your pockets — when did that happen? Did you set it down? It's been such a long journey, it could have been a lapse of memory.

A memory? Ah, there's something else gone too, isn't there? Willingly or otherwise. If you try to reach for it now, it's like dust in the breeze, or a dream upon waking. You know it was there once, but the harder you try to recall it back, the thinner the details get. Eventually, you might not remember even that there was something to forget.

Congratulations. The Crossing is complete.

Image credits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 + stock imagery unless otherwise noted

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She'd had a glowing square pinned to her chest, but it's come undone at some point. Need goes ponderously to a crouch and her knees, remembering being aging mortal joints, protest the action. Celehar's in a bad state, about as bad as she's ever seen someone who wasn't unresponsive or seriously injured or ill. Need feels that urge to furl her wings around him. It's not possible as she is now, but that's fine, as a sword she'd only be able to get him up by seizing control of his body.

She touches three fingers to his cheek. "Lad, that's just part of being a person." In the darkness, seemingly only just out of sight, Need hears Vena sob and hiccup. Yes, that had tended to happen to the poor girl. Any time she laughed or cried for too long...

Oh, yes, the light is definitely dimmer now than even a minute ago. "I'm going to get you up and you can tell me as we go, all right?"

Lad. No one has called him that in - he can't remember then. It cuts through the black fog in his thoughts, and the callused brush of fingers, warmer around him than the cold air and the water beneath him, drags him away from the echo of voices. The physical symptoms of his distress don't fade so easily, but he focuses in on her, reaching up towards Need's hand. He grasps at it, squeezing to communicate his understanding.

"I'm sorry," he rasps. "Are you..."

The faintest hint of light catches on the track of a tear along her face - another jolt to his system. He grits his jaw against the trembling and nods, his eyes dropping back to the dark floor of the river, shamefaced. It might ache to accept the help, but if he could have gotten up by himself, he would have, before Need was forced to run to him through the dark.

Need revises her opinion; he doesn't want to stay here and let the darkness claim him, he's a little better than the worst she's ever seen someone. Still bad, he's shaking like he has a fever.

"I'm here." She genuinely doesn't understand what Celehar's not-quite-asking. Need is putting all of her focus on the task at hand. This seeming of a body is a tool that she feels distant from just now, and if it's doing some sub-optimal things like gasping and leaking from the face, that's something to consider later. Need could ignore her real apprentice-daughter when she was still most of the way human, she can ignore a specter of her and a tool not functioning quite as she wants it to. It's fine.

If Celehar's trembling this much sprawled half holding himself up with his arms, trying to brace him at her side to help him walk isn't going to work out. Need opts for the simple solution: she scoops the elf up against her chest like a bride carried over a threshhold, and heaves herself upright, a low groan forcing its way through her throat as she does.

"I've been carried around in some stupid, stupid ways. Dignity is overrated," she says. See, she can still make jokes(?). It's all fine. Now, where is that light...

He surely wasn't expecting the rough yank - he may occasionally feel like a pile of sticks tied together at the joints, but he's a grown man still, and certainly not an easy burden to be carried. And yet carried he is, despite his initial instinctive jolt at the practice. It gives him a strange flash of the carter-woman on the road to Tanvero and the ghoul, of the twin gravediggers who had to help him with the labor of burying that corpse.

The association alone would not have been enough to prevent him from trying to force his knock-kneed legs from carrying him once more, if it were not for two things - the receding light of the Ferryman's tolls, and his name, called again from the dark.

Celehar's hands curl towards his head. Despite the pain the voice seems to cause him, he doesn't block his ears.

"Evrin," the name tears its way out of his mouth, sharp enough to hurt him in the passing from thought to sound. It's a response to the voice itself more than any explanation for Need, but the emotion thickening his voice is an explanation all its own.

Oh, yes. Celehar's so thin that she thinks he weighs as much as a child, but children are actually quite heavy, and he's long-limbed enough that this is physically awkward, too. Like carrying a gangling teenager. Need's implement is a recreation of the body of a seventy-something woman who had had a measure of strength and vigor left, but nothing like what she had boasted in her prime. It protests this use and labors to do what she demands of it. Her vision is very unsatisfactory right now, but - turning, she thinks she has it. Need had wanted to accelerate into a charge. She manages a stumbling, unsteady run.

She should have taught some of these people to whistle, so they could locate each other in this cursed dark, she thinks as Vena's voice says you should have left me where you found me. Need turns her attention from that sharply as Celehar cries out a name.

"It's not him. How - hah - how do I know that? My daughter was older than this when she died." She has to stop talking to gasp for air, then, and doesn't understand why she said it so intensely. Sweat plasters the lower layers of her clothing to her skin, but aside from her apron they're perforated too and some of each breath escapes, carrying a faint scent of seared flesh. She's slowed down already. "It's memory, lad. It's real but it's - not - him."

It's mostly the distress that makes the smell of burnt flesh close his throat - the terrible memories there, those of the Amalese workers killed in an airship accident, are entirely separate from the memory of Evru, but the fragmentory recollections of the dead always did seem to plague him when other concerns hounded his waking hours.

The unspeakable well of grief wants him to protest that Evru or not, it is only right that he feel the grief welling up to drown him - that the guilt should swallow him up and leave him the same husk he was in the wake of Evru's execution. That selfishness such as carrying on...

But the sharp gasp to Need's words are like a slap to the face. Selfishness is here, too, in forcing Need to attend to him, and this guilt, too, adds itself to the pile gnawing at him. The shaking isn't lessened, but she's gasping for air and slowing down, and carrying him surely can't help.

"Your daughter - ?"

Onwards, onwards. History is sealed and unchangeable. There's no way back, only the road ahead, into the dark. Need's arms burn. She should have got Celehar on her back instead, she thinks indistinctly, it would at least hurt differently. The not-entirely-rational thought now is that if she lets go at all he'll drift away on the current.

"All my bearers are my daughters. Or sons. Or daughter-sons." Most of them. She won't claim Elspeth like that, and half the reason she'd claim Firesong is because he's so much fun to prod. "But she was my apprentice first. Little urchin tried to - pick my pocket. Caught her and she bit me. The guard there - they cut hands off. So I brought her - back home, to my Sisters. She trusted me first."

Need doesn't remember that. Not directly. She remembers it like the words laid out in summary, in much the same order as she's just said them. Maybe a little more coherently. She growls and shakes her head, trying to clear it, and keeps trudging doggedly, much less certain of the way now.

"I've got sweat in my eyes," she pants. It's not sweat. "Point me in a direction."

It's an echo of his Calling, to listen to the grief of others - to focus, in the midst of everything, to someone else's pain and provide, if not comfort, then a space where the emotions might be poured out Celehar latches onto it like a lifeline. His Calling has already saved him from this grief before, though here, with Evru's quiet voice seeking him like an arrow, it's a double-edged sword that he grasps blindly.

"Your - " Right. Her soul, sealed in a sword. The foundlings, who she sought justice for. It takes him a moment to remember it, in that conversation on the riverbank. "You knew her before." He doesn't - can't - know the details, but the pain in that voice - he's met many, who would do drastic things in moments of desperation. Who would make terrible choices...

It takes a moment for him to find his voice again, and when he does, it's more rasp than words. "There - the right. You do not have to carry me the whole way, Othalo."

"Her name was Vena," Need growls, gradually moving to a generalized anger. Anger is familiar, something she can recognize, one of the few emotions she's still felt strongly after so long in the sword. Sometimes it feels like her studied calm is just a skin over rage that goes to the bone. That isn't a good thing, but as long as that skin's intact it's better than feeling nothing. Controlled anger is a source of strength.

It shouldn't matter if the effort and a strange pain cloud her eyes, she shouldn't have eyes. She should be able to make up for that by impinging on the sight of others. The physical is something she should only be aware of secondhand. All that's actually hers is the dark, and the cold, and the awareness of the flow and the flicker of others' lives, right there, in her grasp.

She veers right, but it takes a few more steps to process what else Celehar said. "Are you up for it? It's going to be harder if you can't." Harder to get him up again if he collapses, she means.

It takes him a long moment to answer, to think through it. It's not that the tremors have ceased, or that the voice no longer affects him - he thinks it will tear through him, every time Evru says his name like a plea. It does, and each time he bows his head with it, quiet though it may be.

"He is my burden to bear."

There's a heavy certainty to his voice when he says it, squeezing her shoulder almost too tightly.

"I cannot ask you to carry it for me." Not when her own grief hangs around her neck like a stone, plainly visible - he can see the glint of the faint light off of her eyes, when he glances up towards her. A parent's grief, intermingled with their child's. He's seen it, twisted in all its forms enough to recognize it here. Whatever she needs he cannot give it - but he need not be another burden, in his grief. He has done so much of that, already.

"He is." Need isn't going to argue that. "Sure you can ask. You're a good lad. You should have help when it's too much. That's part of being a person too."

In a way that she isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. She grits her teeth and progresses, a little more certain now that she's going the right way. But she physically can't keep this up much longer, and knows that. This simulacrum of her body, a bit vague while everyone waited and tried to adjust, is more realistic now, a reminder that she'd had to do what she did. Her body hadn't had the strength and endurance it had boasted in her distant youth, and forget not being able to ride for days and sleep on a bedroll in winter, it couldn't have handled hauling a grown man around, however skinny, for all that long.

Need hisses between her teeth and threatens, "If you go down I'll have to drag you. There's not that much friction, it might work."

For a long few moments, he's silent, head bowed.

He truly is reminded of Anora, a thought that makes his chest ache. Or - or Pel-Thenhior, full of his opinions, but also the faintest hints of worry - the sheer willingness to go with Celehar, into danger.

Wildly, he wonders what might have happened, had the man been with him. If it had not been simply him and Othalo Tomasaran, and the weight of it stings. Already he's put too many lives in danger. Better to have let Iana stay in safety. Better not to risk Othalo Need, by asking her to carry two burdens, when her own weighs so heavily on her.

"I understand," he says, a rasp. "I - " He shifts in her arms, trying to will strength back into his body. The numb way he'd felt, after living this moment the first time - he'd continued to walk through it, surely. Even if he can't remember how he lived through the grief. "I only wish he'd had the same." It comes out more whisper than voice, the pain at the heart of it all. "Despite everything."

If asked, Need would say it doesn't weigh on her and that one of the perks of being what she made herself into is an unbreakable heart. And there is a great deal she can't feel very strongly under most circumstances. These aren't most circumstances.

She draws in a breath that has half of the air hissing back out under her leather apron. "In a better world your beloved would have had help, and you'd have someone better for this than I am. I'm sorry. We have to do our best with what's here." There are kinder, gentler souls out there that can nudge people into going on, but Need is a sword.

It's not going to be long before she stumbles past recovery. If there was any irregularity in the terrain she would have already, she hasn't been raising her feet high enough. So Need pauses, planting her boots. Trying to ease the strain on her arms she'd ended up holding Celehar closer, against her chest like he was a child.

"Try locking your knees," she says, trying for her part to lower him down feet-first in a controlled fashion and not just drop him.

Despite Need's best efforts, Celehar's descent to the ground - water - isn't entirely smooth. He stumbles, when his feet touch, one hand clinging hard to her shoulder still as he does his best to brace himself upright and not drag either of them to their knees. It takes a moment before his balance evens and the too-tight grip shifts, relaxing somewhat. He leaves the hand there, a steadying anchor for both their sakes. Uncomfortable as the contact might be, better that he submit to that than to being dragged when they're both at the end of their tether.

"There was no one, before," he says, more to the dark than to Need. "When I resigned my prelacy, after, the Archprelate was as kind as he could be, but... I had no family to turn to. There was only Csoru, and she was - " Oh, how tired the remembrance makes him. "She gave her help bitterly."

He has to take a moment, to swallow around it. Those months in the Untheileneise court were a misery, less acute than the death but no less leaving their mark. But he admits, in a quiet voice, "You are very kind, Othalo."

Need grunts before they find equilibrium. The leather apron she wears is tabard-style with a panel to the front and one to the back, connected by a belt strap and thick straps over her shoulders. One of those shoulder-straps probably works to hang on to.

"Nothing but obligation, was it? That's a sour cup to live off of." There's something that reminds her of - what? The life she's forgotten? Maybe. It's an old story, told by many voices; Need wouldn't be surprised if hers had been one of them. That thought is a linen thread that trails back into nothing.

Better to redirect her thoughts: Celehar had stopped being a prelate? There's a timeline there she can start setting into place.

He says she's kind and Need laughs, a ragged bark. "I am not. One of those stupid, hapless kids is going to need you. Someone's not going to want to go on the next Crossing."

He doesn't mean to grab the strap of it, but his fingers hook into it, and curl there - easier and gentler than digging fingers into her shoulder itself, as they begin once more to move forward. Celehar couldn't manage the run, even if Need could, now unburdened, but the breaking of inertia helps. Carefully, Celehar puts one foot in front of the other, mindful of his steps. He might not believe that she would drag him so indecorously, but neither would he render himself a burden, if he can.

It aches, to have a solid, steady presence at his side. He is reminded of his grandparents, in the time before - when the Celehada had not yet turned him away.

"Perhaps not gentle." He says, undaunted by the laugh. There is an ache in the words, at the mention of the youths. "I cannot blame them for it. It is not kind of me, either, to have set them to this."

Need can't get back to a run now. Letting Celehar walk on his own helps, but there's a grinding pain in her knees now, one worse than the other, and she's favoring that leg. Every other step comes with a splash. The arthritis, that painful joint-swelling that had irritated her in her last years, is making itself known, every bit as insistent as the voices. For the first time since her death, she wants that cane she'd used on bad days. Need sets her jaw, fixes her eyes ahead, and doesn't complain. At least they're not trailing behind so badly now. She's actually certain of the direction of the light, and it's not grayed out with effort or blurred too much to see.

She gets a stiff arm around Celehar's back, making sure she knows where he is. Probably a more familiar gesture than he'd like, he's a formal little thing, but - finding the humor in the situation, she grins, feels her lip split - dignity's already a hopeless mess. It can compose itself later.

"You didn't create this situation. These are circumstances we have to reckon with. Kindness is well and good but cosseting the children and pretending things are better than they are and they won't have to face - pain, or struggle, would be worse," she argues. She's operating based on the assumption that those who stay and don't manage to cross become wraiths. It's a bad thought that that might be happening to a handful of their fellows, but there's nothing for it. Neither of them are in a condition to turn back to look. "No one's shielded forever."

An arm around his back might have bothered him before, but having been carried like a child in her arms? The weight registers as something more reassuring than uncomfortable. Here in the dark, having nearly been left behind, the pressure is a reassurance that neither will be alone or abandoned. This close, he can feel the stiff hitch to Need's steps, and tightens his grip on her, doing his best to keep his weight from falling on her.

He's reminded of his trial on the Hill of Werewolves. This is, by his measure, the more trying of the two, with the ghost of a familiar voice still whispering in his ears, but now much easier the burden of the unfair test might sat on his shoulders, if Anora might have walked the path with him?

"So you say. And yet in those words... it seems to me they might do well with your help, Othalo Need," he says, casting a glance towards her face. He remembers the hint of scars there. He hasn't seen the blow that killed her in all its horror, but some part of him knew she took it. "I am a Witness. The skill I have, in the end... I might advise, but I am left after merely to listen." to listen to the defeated voice of a man, to the grief of a child. The rantings of a madwoman and the crazed fear of a man forced to fight to the death - all that, the voices swirling in the dark.

Need doesn't notice Celehar looking, her gaze too narrowly focused ahead. The scars on her face are old, long healed. She doesn't remember what caused them, it must have been long before she became a Sister. Long ago. All of it, so long ago.

Just the thought of how long it's been since she actually drew breath puts a heaviness into her chest. That's a strange feeling.

"Oh, I do what I can when I can keep myself from sounding too annoyed, but most of my skills are magic, violence, and horses. So far, listening is more useful here," she grunts. "Being heard is powerful. You ever see someone give advice when they obviously don't understand, or they're doing it to feel important? It's a travesty."

Edited (sets up for the desert: horses) 2025-02-10 12:55 (UTC)

It's a miserable attempt at a laugh if it even is one, the sound Celehar makes at that, but it's certainly not the hiccup of a sob, even. "All too often," he says, shaking his head. "To miserable effect. But listening and giving advice are different things. I was much the opposite - I did not blunt my tongue, when my audience was not yet ready to hear what I had to say. Occasionally it made for uncomfortable postings."

Not so dissimilar, in other words - but he turns his face forward again, showing some measure of that stubbornness as he continues, "You told me when we first spoke, that you were named for Woman's Need to rally for those who could not help themselves, in their circumstances. Do you not draw on a deep well of advice, yourself?"

Need stutters a breath that's also almost a laugh. "Oh. Yes, it's maddening if you have to honey your words so feelings and propriety aren't bruised, isn't it?" She hates to flatter and do little verbal dances but has at least learned some restraint. Long ago she was a fighter... a mercenary maybe? and then a swordsmith, and alienating those who paid her would not have gone well.

Now she's starting to flag, which is infuriating. They can't have gone far, she thinks, though it's hard to gauge distance. One foot in front of the other, try to walk straight. Focusing on that, it takes her a moment to realize Celehar's asked something.

"I do what I can. And that's a lot, I'm not going to downplay it. I'm better than most of the people who try. But that's the thing - I've had a lot of time to get really stuck as me. Do you know how many kids I've left crying like that to try and teach them something? I don't know." 'Like that', because she hasn't really tuned out Vena's voice.

He can feel their pace slowing, ever so faintly, as Need is worn down - he's in no state to drag her in return, so instead he drags ever so slightly in his steps, forcing her into a slower pace with him. Between her earlier dash and the steady pace, the light is steadily in view now, easing the dark of their surroundings. With no more pauses to listen - no more falling - they might catch up again.

And he listens to the grieving voice of that young woman, intertwined with the others, and he watches the Ferryman's light ahead of them, and asks; "Do you regret it?"

"No," she says with some force. "Not for a moment. If there was a way to go back, I'd do it again. The other option was sitting with folded hands and doing nothing while the man who ordered the strike on our enclave got away with it, and had some of our Sisters as prisoners."

Need's teeth are bared at the thought. "And I had to send Vena away when I killed herself because I knew she wouldn't understand and would try to stop me. Yes. It hurt her sorely when she was already bleeding from the heart. I'm not happy that I did that. But it didn't destroy her."

She can't regret it, can't allow herself to think of going back farther and somehow preventing the situation entirely. There isn't a way back, and wishing won't help.

"How about you?" she asks bluntly, limping on.

"No," Celehar murmurs. "I understand. There are many times... where the only recourse for pain is to choose what kind."

Need is, Celehar thinks, a woman easy to rely on.

He's seen people like this, the keystone in the arch of their community. They're often the ones who come to call on him in his function as Witness vel ama, resorting to practicality even if they weren't certain if he could truly speak to the dead. He's seen, too, the holes they leave behind in their passing, the many complicated feelings.

A story like Need's, he has not - but he can well imagine the ripples of emotion it would leave behind, and the resolution that would be left in the body.

He's not expecting his question to be turned back on him, though - it startles him into a jolt, and a sharp inhale. But he knows the answer to this. It is exactly the shape of the grief that has wracked him. "No," he says. "My - Evru, he... he killed her. It is my calling to speak for the dead." His voice goes thick. "No matter how detestable I find them. No matter how I might wish he had found some other way."

Even now, Need can make herself feel something of how she'd felt at the time. The hollowness deep in her chest. The stench of smoke and blood and the quiet where so many voices should have sounded. The disbelief, the numbness, holding herself together because Vena, pine needles in her hair, was sobbing in her arms. Something had broken in her that couldn't be healed. The options she'd sorted through, such a narrow pool of them, and the fear and resolve as she returned to the one that she knew, objectively, was a terrible thing. Yes. It's still there, even now.

Her eyes have started to burn again. Need swipes at them with her free hand and can only think of sweat or blood. She can't start that now, she can't think of herself too much. Compartmentalize.

She curls her fingers more firmly around Celehar's shoulder, lacking wings to fold. That defeated voice, sighing. Need can feel the shape of this tragedy, even if it's not all lined up neatly. "You were part of bringing him in?"

...She's going to have to not tell this kid about all the extrajudicial murder she's been involved in, Need realizes, he would not agree with her choices. She will not judge Celehar for putting principle first, just, there are a few fundamental differences at play.

THE CROSSING #1

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