I see a bad moon rising

[indiscreet]

Who: the Huntress (Anna) and “lucky” you (OPEN)
What: breaking down and going full True Fae, for your pleasure and entertainment
Where: ~moonpools~
When: the night after the Missions conclude
Notes: For the binding in question, see this log. Also, the Huntress is fun, but difficult, to write... so tags may be on the slow side.
Warnings: creepiness, and possible triggery-ness. This is the sort of character who will casually talk of violence and of using mortal humans as playthings. Oh, and skinny dipping.

The worst part of the fog, she thought, had been the way it had clawed at not just her body, but her mind. Yes, there had been dangers of the kind she could shoot, but that hadn’t really been the point of them, had it? They were a distraction, more like, as sharp teeth and serpents drained whatever mental resolve had been keeping Anna and the Huntress separate.

She had remembered things, out in the fog, from before she was Anna. Beautiful, vivid, perfect hunts through Arcadian forests, chasing deer that had once been mortals. Crimson blood is so very striking on white fur, and white skin.

Anna recalled hearing about the moonpools, when she first arrived in Baedal. They had interested her, then, but -- the realization had hit her suddenly, after Nuala’s binding -- not because of the part of her that was Anna. Now, that barrier is crumbling, and covering herself in liquid moonlight seems like exactly the recovery she is owed. She rubs her thumb along the embroidered ribbon tied about her left wrist. The stitching is frayed, though she can’t recall how it got that way.

And she loves the forest at night, doesn’t she? Hasn’t she always? It’s so easy to get there, her power quickening her feet. There’s a flicker of a thought: that she ought to hold back, that there is something she shouldn’t be doing. But her mind is tired, and glamour is heavy. Silly to wear one, and she shrugs it off, lightning streaming through her dark hair and over her pale skin. A sigh of relief: how light she feels, like she had forgotten how it felt to be anything but clumsy and heavy.

The Huntress scatters Anna’s clothing over the moss and the ferns, and slides herself into a silvery pool.

Comments

[wandandsickle]

Jones has never really been sure whether to be relieved or worried that the Huntress seems to like her. (The Huntress would probably say she should feel honored, but she has never put a whole lot of stock in the Huntress's opinions. For obvious reasons.) Anna was who she was looking for, though, so she takes a seat, dangling her legs over the edge of the pool.

"I hope you don't mind if I don't join you," she says. "I didn't bring my swimming clothes."

[indiscreet]

"It is of no matter; I did not bring any either." Still the smile on her lips. The Huntress wears friendliness like she might an elaborate new hat: if it sits a bit awkwardly on her, it does not lessen her pleasure at the lark of trying it on.

She swirls the moonlight with her toes, and wonders idly if the mage will run. That would be entertaining.

[wandandsickle]

"I suppose that's true. I'll preserve my modesty, though, if you don't mind. I'm not sure the moonlight flatters me as well." If there's one thing Jones and the Huntress have in common, it's that they're both willing to stick around to see if things continue to get interesting. She dips a toe in the pool; it comes out glowing. "Wow, that's fascinating," she says, and dips a finger in the water, painting the Moros rune in the grass. "It's lovely. You like the moon, don't you, Huntress?"

[indiscreet]

Of course she finds the moon interesting -- they had made it a symbol of victory, had they not? Or it would be, were she back...home. A sudden and unpleasant flash of resentment: at herself, for being so comparatively mortal, and so trapped. At her sister-self, the Queen, for exiling her to this strange dead flesh, where it was such a struggle even to remember who she was. But she remembers now, and clings eagerly to the remembering.

"Modesty is a pointless flaw to have." There is no particular reason, the Huntress thinks, to answer Jones's question; rather, she picks and chooses the parts of the conversation she feels like having. And, since she likes Jones, the Huntress considers it only fair to let her know when she is disappointed in her. Modesty? Tsk.

She pauses to admire the moonlight on Jones's finger, but what truly holds her attention is the shape the mage traces on the bank. Curiosity narrows her eyes.

"Tell me what that means."

[wandandsickle]

The Huntress unsettles—and irritates her, in turns—her more than she shows, or would like to admit, mostly by dint of driving Anna around like an automobile. Free will is something that mages hold dear, and the Huntress using Anna this way is a bit of an affront as well as something that makes her wary. And while Anna is self-centered in the way a teenager tends to be, the Huntress is old enough to know better.

She'll explain, though. "A sigil of my kind. The shape of creation, and of destruction. That which giveth and taketh away." The Moros path is one of contradictions, of building up and breaking down. Mortality, and works with potential to survive a thousand years or more. She speaks its name aloud, although she doesn't know if the Huntress will understand the Atlantean tongue. "I think it'd be more appropriate for it to be etched in stone, but it looks rather pretty like this."

She continues drawing; below it she sketches a tower, and a path, and a river. "I suppose such things would be of little notice to one of a realm where many things don't have beginning nor end."

[indiscreet]

The word, like the symbol it names, is made of power; that much the Huntress can tell, though the tongue is unfamiliar and means nothing to her. Maybe, if she could remember herself better, it might be different... but this mind is an insufficient vessel for everything she is sure she once knew how to do.

What the mage says is intriguing, though, so she makes herself pay attention to the answer to her own question: information, freely given, is a good sort of gift.

"Not beginning, nor end, nor a middle, since there is no measuring time at all, except as we will it to exist or no," the Huntress adds matter-of-factly, with an expression that suggests she imagines she is being helpful. "Though there is a great deal of creation and destruction as well: I think your kind would not be so out of place as you expect."

She has been watching Jones sketch, but now she pauses, and traces the path in the drawing with a fingertip, ending with that finger at Jones's wrist. "...You would not be so out of place there." A subtle emphasis on the word; a subtle acquisitory fervor to her tone.

[wandandsickle]

"Would I?" Jones laughs. "I'll take your word for it, although I can't really imagine myself among such..." Flattery, flattery. She likes flattery. "...such creatures of ethereal beauty. I've always been a bit of a salt-of-the-earth sort of person, I feel." She smiles, though, and meets the Huntress's eyes as she shifts her hand subtly and lays the other on top of Anna's wrist.

And, with a quick movement of her fingers, draws a glowing cross there with the last of the moonpool water on her fingertip.

[indiscreet]

She screams, high and agonized.

The flesh beneath the moonlit cross boils with a horrible smell of meat and rot, and she swipes at her wrist instinctively, destroying the cross before it can hurt her further, though the shape remains like a brand.

Instinctively, too, she reaches for the lightning.

Hurts. Hurt her back, the mortal bitch, for reminding her of it, of how she was Damned--
But being Damned was a different sort of pain. Kindred pain.

Anna lets out a gasped sob, and curls into herself, covering her nakedness.

[wandandsickle]

Oh, she hadn't meant it to hurt, but she can't help but feel relief as the body language shifts back to Anna's. She gingerly wraps an arm around Anna's wet shoulders in a motherly way. "Anna, are you all right?" Beat. "Sorry I had to do that."

[indiscreet]

At first she cringes under Jones's hand -- a twitch in her skin like a spooked horse -- and for a split second it seems like she might lash out at the touch, but then Anna relaxes, and leans against the offered shoulder. "I saw such terrible things out in the fog," she whispers. And then for several minutes she says nothing at all.

"I really would have done it, you know," she says at last, still almost whispering. "I would have tried to take you, even though there's nowhere here to go."

[wandandsickle]

"It wasn't you, Anna," Jones says, running a hand through her hair like she'd do with her little sister, Justina. "You know humility, restraint, remorse. You're Anna Demirovna, and you need to hold on to that. Because you should."

[indiscreet]

The Lance taught that the Kindred had been Damned by God. And, whether or not others were affected the same way, the burn on her wrist seemed like pretty strong evidence in their favor. It is an unexpected relief, therefore, for Jones to find such positive traits remaining in her. Between Anna and the Huntress, it had been hard not to believe that the latter was the better, stronger choice. Jones's hand in her hair is very soothing. (She has never had a sister before.)

"...We should go home, shouldn't we."

[wandandsickle]

Jones nods. "We should. It'll be dawn sooner or later, and you should rest. And—" She rests her hands on Anna's shoulders. "If it would help to talk about what you saw, I'm here. But perhaps we should get you dressed first. Although I can't say you'll catch your death of cold."