[ closed ] dusk dropped her starry gown

[gramarye]

Who: Ilde Decima and Wolfgang Einhorn
What: A fairy and a witch investigate the river.
Where: The Gross Tar by Echomire
When: Givdi afternoon
Warnings: Creepy spooky stuff, violence, human death, animal death. TWs for discussion of suicide, sexual assault/rape.

Despite having slept upwards of ten hours, Wolfgang does not feel rested when he leaves the house. He is at least dressed for the occasion this time in shorts with his hair pulled back neatly out of his face, figuring he is probably going to get wet. Doing this in the middle of the afternoon does not make anyone any safer, but it will hopefully make it less awful than the last time he ran off to go chase something that felt wrong in the middle of the night in a creepy abandoned amusement park.

He likes to blame Baedal for this, but honestly, this is what he did back home, too.

He arrives roughly at three, sidling up to the bank of the river, figuring Ilde will be easy to spot. Then again, so is he. While he walks up, he's opening his senses, trying to see if he can feel anything off, and the closer he gets to this part of the river, the more he feels it. The cold. He frowns down at the water, his brow furrowed as he tries to sort through what that might mean. He won't jump to any conclusions, but Ilde mentioned an awareness, and he's inclined to believe her.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

“Um...okay. What do we know? He is fae. He killed her. He's probably killed before. We don't know if it's purposeful or just...indifference.” Her expression is steady - mostly, except for on that last word. There, there's tension she has more trouble locking down. “And...she's a ghost. What do we know about ghosts?”

[gramarye]

"Ghosts stay in the material realm when something is keeping them from moving on, and when their spirit is strong enough to outlive the flesh. They can get — trapped like this, locked in their pain, especially in this city. Reliving their last moments over and over."

He brushes his hair out of his face, his gaze firmly planted on the ground. "I mean, I'm not an expert, I just..." He trails off. "Knew a lot." Of ghosts. Lonely children will befriend anyone. "When they get closure, they tend to move on, and I think — I think if anyone does anything about this... person... it needs to be her."

He is talking about letting her kill him, yes. It seems more fair, in a way, than passing this off on well-meaning but detached strangers to review evidence — this woman's life — and then decide on some arbitrary punishment.

[rhinemaid]

“So...we find him. And we bring him here.”

This makes sense to her; she remembers being in the rain, wearing a borrowed coat, being told to choose the one she hated most. When she's frightened, when she's uncertain, when she doesn't know where to find steadiness-- she remembers how his blood was so warm it felt like it'd burn her cold fingers, that he didn't make any sound, and how it had been almost like her own heart started beating again when his stopped.

She understands retribution, even if she doesn't always understand justice or closure.

[gramarye]

"Yeah." He plucks a stray long white hair off his arm. It isn't his. Frowning at it and then the river, he considers for a while. "Okay. I can find out his name, but my things are all at home. You can come if you'd like, or I can meet you back here."

[rhinemaid]

“I'll meet you back here,” she decides, mirroring his expression unintentionally as she glances back toward the river. “I should tell someone what I'm up to.”

...not...in any great detail, from the absent-minded tone of her voice.

[gramarye]

"All right," he says, getting up slowly to leave. His everything is sore, but whatever, he'll deal with it, he's not dead. "An hour-ish, then." And he's got his CiD, should something happen between then and now.

He makes his way back home, because there are some supplies there he needs -- he's figuring out all this focus and ritual stuff mostly on his own, or else out of books, some from notes taken in Martel's library (and he's not certain whether the other man is keeping track of which volumes Wolfgang is studying, but would not be surprised) and some from books from occult stores, secondhand, other people's notes in them. It's one of those he takes up to the roof with him, because it is written in Hebrew, and he trusts his own people over others.

He also brings a saucepan from the kitchen, because like hell will he ever own anything that can actually be called a cauldron.

It's a pretty simple ritual: the pan gets filled halfway with distilled water, into which he adds three drops of river water, three drops of wax, and then spits in three times. (Sometimes magic is gross, but virgin spittle comes up over and over in his books, and -- it works.) He braids two of the hairs from the river along with one of his own together, then ties a golden ring to the end and suspends it over this, gently rocking it back and forth until it hits the edge -- ping, ping, ping...

On the seventh strike, the sounds begin to change, to take shape. He has to close his eyes to hear it properly, to see, his mind fixed on that face, her anger, her sadness, that face.

Berach Carmody, it says.

When he opens his eyes, he sees, in the wax floating on the surface of the water, that it has taken the shape of a house on a street, and it must be Baedal because he recognises the Spire in the distance behind it. It's gone just as suddenly, but he remembers, has it locked in his mind's eye.

Frowning heavily, he dips the ring in the water and swirls the whole thing up with his hand, disrupting the magic and ending the rote. It takes little effort to clean up, dry his hands, and climb back downstairs and back out the door, heading towards that same spot on the river -- this time armed with a name, a face, and an idea of where to look.

[rhinemaid]

When he gets back to the river, Ilde is there waiting for him - having cleaned herself up a bit, or at least having convincingly pretended to, and having sent a text to Ivan not to expect her for a while. Which is apparently what 'telling someone what she's up to' means when it's at home, because it certainly doesn't involve 'mention the fact she might be conspiring to murder someone'. The word she has in mind is 'closure', but the image is of rain, and it doesn't involve talking it out.

“Did you get it?” she asks, one hand clutching the other elbow, one hand by her thigh, looking up towards him as he comes down.