water

[mnemosyne]

One day she wakes with damp hands and damp eyes and water in her mouth the memory of it and not salt water. Sediment yes but the tang is mineral, is metal, is granite, is mud. Even the sheets are damp and her pink hair is wet and the tinywindow is open but there was no rain last night and no scent of it in the air. The promise of it to come, a foreshadowing perhaps but this was then. Before the rains: it was high summer dry summer brilliant summer and there was a moon in the sky which was a different moon and she can hear them,

feel them,

her pack all breathing-close when she sits up and pushes the damp sheets off her body. Feels like sweat maybe but she knows it is not. She knows that somehow in her sleep she died and was reborn and see, remembers it all in the strangest ways. The searing shock of pain. The sudden uncoupling of spirit-from-flesh. Where time dissolves because there is no body to mark it, to heart to beat for it, nor lungs to breathe it in. Nothing except nothing which is everything, the world inverted and un- and re-folded and no time for sorrow. Sorrow is a thing for skin; is made for beating hearts and bleeding hands and breathing mouths. Sorrow is made for flesh.

The sudden reassertion of life the demand, the furious surge of a kind of fury that usually sleeps inside of her like a hot, uncertain little seed. Blood in her mouth and also bile you see; it is a girl's body flung down and a girl's body that returns and a girl's death-mad mind that remembers the water and the river and the pact and calls it now, for a different sort of flood.

Come come come.

And -

- she wakes up in her cubby-of-a-bed in a dark and quiet hour and the little window open to the idyllic valley and the air sharp with pine, not the acrid flash-pan of gunfire.

Sits there upright on the mattress the sheets wound around her skinny hips her hair a wild, unshakeable mess, a pale nimbus around the crown of her skull. Rises to her knees and scoots to the window and pushes open the curtains and breathes in sharp and whole the cool, dry, familiar air. The surreal sheen of the moon in the dark night sky calling to some wayward piece of an animal soul.

Charlotte slips out of the bed and out of the tinyhouse and out of her girlskin into a different one which is: small and sleek and the same silver-pale as moonlight on a mountain lake. Scrambles through the underbrush and follows the familiar cut of the stream down to the mountain lake it feeds and plashes into the shallows amidst the reeds and settles on her belly and laps at the water, open mouthed, tongue lolling, and not because she is thirsty.

--

In the days and weeks that follow Charlotte returns to the lake. When it is roiling and mudladen and furious from the rains, overtopping every boundary it remembers and then more, sluicing down the canyon like a waterwall. When it is calm and clear again in the aftermath of the rains, on a brick and clear September day, blue skies turning pink at the edges, the mountains sheened the color of the setting sun. She brings with her clear glass vials that have been both cleansed and purified. Corks with which to stopper them and wax with which to seal the corks over the glass. Wades, fully clothed, into the shockingly cold mountain lake up to her calves, up to her knees, up to her thighs, up to her hips, up to her waist, teeth chattering now, her breathing sharp with the shock of it, up to her ribs, up to her breasts, up to her neck, until the ground has given way beneath her feet and she's treading water, furiously, to stay both vaguely warm and somewhat afloat.

This, in its way, is a kind of chiminage.

Charlotte fills the vials and returns with them to the graveled shore where she has laid out her implements. A bronze bowl, clear as the morning sky, which sings when empty and gleams when full. A switch of willow, a silver coin. A knife, on edge dull, one razor-sharp. A whetstone. A handful of purslane flowers, already wilting from the heat of her hand. She kindles a fire and begins to work.

--

The next time Charlotte and Erich go to Denver, and the time after that, and <i>every</i> time after that, Charlotte insists that they take a detour. They go to Confluence Park, follow the Platte River Trail, walk the river's shadow beneath and against the crawlingly human city. Sometimes Charlotte follows its tributaries. The winding skein of them through the city's parks and under the city's streets and shunted beneath culverts and through concrete tunnels and on and on. Once Tamsin finds her crouched at the edge of an open culvert near East Colfax where Westerly Creek emerges briefly, before going back to ground.

Each and every time, Charlotte pours a small vial of water from that mountain lake into the river, or its streams. Watches it disappear into the swirling rapids and makes a small, self-satisfied noise as it goes.

--

[The rolls are the boring part. But Charlotte is making and pouring an activated clear water talen into the Platte downtown or its tributaries at least once a week throughout September and into October.

mnemosyne

Charlotte: Rite of Binding for Clear Water Talen. Dif is talen's gnosis: 4 -1 for gnosis spent? Or something? WP

Dice: 6 d10 TN3 (3, 6, 6, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 6 )

Rolls at different times since I realized she is doing this every week of the month so.

mnemosyne @ 9:09PM

Clear Water Talen Week 2. Dif 4 -1 (gnosis spent)
Roll: 6 d10 TN3 (1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) VALID
mnemosyne @ 9:09PM

Clear Water Talen Week 3. Dif 4 -1 (gnosis spent)
Roll: 6 d10 TN3 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 5 ) VALID
mnemosyne @ 9:10PM

Clear Water Talen Week 4 yadda
Roll: 6 d10 TN3 (1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) VALID
mnemosyne @ 9:10PM

aaand Clear Water talen for the first week of October
Roll: 6 d10 TN3 (1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) VALID

Samael @ 9:10PM

Witnessed!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch that first week, what the heck:

mnemosyne

Charlotte: Rite of Binding for Fire Tooth talen. Dif is talen's gnosis 8 -2 for gnosis spent. WP.

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Samael

[[Don't forget to check the WP box, you're robbing yourself of successes! That's 7 and 5 succ.]]

mnemosyne

(Oh, no. I'm not spending WP. I'm rolling WP versus talen's gnosis. )

Samael

OH! Never mind then, ignore me. Witnessed on those though!

mnemosyne

Nightshade! Rite of Binding. Dif is talen's gnosis 5 -1 for gnosis spent. WP

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )

mnemosyne

Lessee. And some Gaia's Breath. Dif is 4-1 for gnosis spent.

Dice: 6 d10 TN3 (2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6) ( success x 5 )]