TBOS Round 1

The pub is warm and dimly lit, shadows pooling where the scattered lamps and firelight don't reach. Alice knocks the snow off her boots (one, two, pause, shuffle, one, two, an extra shake for good measure), before she steps inside, throat tightening against the smell of smoke and old brandy that permeates the air. On a frosty night like this, barely an empty seat remains, most of those simply waiting for their occupants to return from the bar. Alice feels very small as she makes her way through a forest of legs and conversations towards the counter, slipping quietly between expansive, flailing gestures and loud, friendly arguments.
The man behind the counter is old, laugh lines and wrinkles mapping out his history across his face, the dimple in his cheek and the crow's-feet beside his eyes speaking of a life lived well and with good cheer. His coarse gray hair, just long enough to curl over his collar, is thinning, a little, at the top of his head, but his short, well kept beard is still streaked with black in places; age, it seems, is only beginning to catch up with him. A sudden, alien rush of affection for him, from neither Grace nor Verity, but somewhere else inside her head, as he laughs at something one of his patrons has said while pouring a draft of something alcoholic and sliding it down to a waiting hand, is almost enough to stop her in her tracks as she weaves her careful way towards him, disquieting both in its intensity and its subject. She's absolutely sure she's never seen him before in her life; how can she be fond of him?
The bar, when she reaches it, is level with her collarbones; she has to stand on her toes to rest her arms on its polished surface, lamplight catching in the nicks and scratches that come from years of abuse, sliding into golden puddles where the varnish has worn thin. She has to crane her neck to meet the barman's eyes, bag sliding heavily against her thigh as she stretches up to get a better look at him.
"Alice, my girl!" He cries, delighted, when he catches sight of her a heartbeat later, sending another drink down the bar and reaching across the counter to ruffle her neatly braided hair. Again, that warm glow of affection, familiar and unfamiliar together, and simply wrong inside her head. She opens her mouth to ask one of the myriad questions she has that really do need answering, 'where am I?' or 'who are you?' or any of the other things that might help her understand what's going on, but what comes out is a very different thing.
"Hello, Grandfather." She says, smiling up at him, her voice light and happy, innocently pleased to be speaking to this man. "Mother isn't feeling at all well."
She can feel the words twist into her brain as she speaks them, like lines off a script she didn't know she was following, but the sensation isn't that of a telepath forcing the issue; it's subtler, somehow gentler, and only slightly less uncomfortable for that. The virulent orange worry is Grace, already tracing the source of whatever this is, skimming along the trace that leads out of her head to somewhere else, the heat like a blush against her eyes, confusion and discomfort together, Verity, doing her own version of the same thing.
The barman, Grandfather, apparently, frowns and interrupts her before she can find out where this is leading, which might be the point, actually.
"Your mother sent you out here, alone, without any sort of protection? The streets aren't safe after dark, my dear, even more so since the moon went missing." Verity's gift reveals just how unhappy he is with that, with the woman who is her mother here, endorphin and serotonin levels dropping, adrenaline production turning up just a hair. Midwifery, at its best, is a bit like a cross between empathy and true healing, with a touch of spirifery, just to round things out. Most of what Verity can do, what she's been trained to do, involves birth and pregnancy, how a woman's body, and her soul, changes with her mood and health and the child within her, but much of it can also be turned towards anyone, man, woman, or child. This is one of those things.
"It's not that dark." The script in her head makes her reply, even as Grace figures out what's happening and explodes with shimmering kaleidoscopic hysterical laughter. "And it isn't that far either." Her mouth smiles, even as Verity projects icy fingers up her back, confused annoyance at its finest. "And I'm really quite hungry, Grandfather."
This feels like the prologue to something larger, and so Alice doesn't fight the thing in her head as Grandfather ruffles her hair again and pushes her gently towards the far wall, and her feet carry her across the room to the fireplace, where a large pot of something liquid and savory bubbles.
There's a bowl and a spoon waiting on the mantlepiece, and she handles them with a familiarity that isn't her own, ladling soup into her bowl quietly, before her feet take her off again. She is carried, not entirely unwilling, to squeeze onto the end of a bench occupied by large, burly men Grandfather's apparent age, drinking and laughing, and warmly welcoming of her when she appears at an elbow.
She is surprised to discover that the somewhat felicitous comment about being hungry isn't just the product of the script she's being fed, one line at a time; she's starving, and the soup is thick and warm and flavorful, and she eats it more quickly than she expected, leaving her with less time than she would like to see what these men are made of.
They aren't real.
The discovery is lavender-blue ice in the pit of her stomach, reflected shock across both her souls. She isn't sure what they are, exactly, not constructs or revenants or ghosts or even pockets of collected emotion, which sometimes get caught in the fabric of the world whenever something truly dreadful happens. They have no souls, not even the spaces for one that all things come with. They don't exist, and it's utterly terrifying, sitting beside them, listening to their rowdy conversation, their genial humor, the way they easily include her in this circle of camaraderie as if they've known her all her life. Alice puts the spoon in her mouth and clamps down, teeth digging into the wood of the handle, molars squeezed tight together at the back of her jaw, lips tight and pressed as close as they can, the way she did before she learned to talk properly, when she was frightened and wanted to run away, when she couldn't, and doesn't say a word.
She takes the spoon out of her mouth a moment later, the thing ('Book.' Grace corrects, sickly green shifting quickly into eye-searing fuchsia panic still overlaying the lavender of her terror, 'It's the Book that's doing this, the one the construct wanted fixed.') in her head pulling at her hands so that she can finish the last spoonfuls of her soup. She casts herself wide instead, Grace reaching for someone, anyone real in this room, finds nothing. Grandfather comes the closest, the beginnings of a soul-space opening within him, but even he, for all the bright, human warmth that Verity had felt, true as anything else she'd ever known, isn't actually alive, doesn't actually exist.
She thinks she might be sick, if the Book would let her be, even as she sets spoon and bowl aside, turning towards the men, eyes wide and wondering, waiting for the reason she sat here in the first place.
"Why did the moon go missing?" Her voice is as foreign to her ears as the words it says are to her mouth, plaintive and a little wistful, a little girl asking for a well-loved story. It's a story she wants to hear, certainly, but not how she would have asked for it, simply because she is who she is, and that voice is for little girls who can't hear their dolls plotting murder or find the unmarked graves in the neighbor's yard.
One of the men, the one across from her, laughs, takes a long swallow from his drink, and smiles indulgently.
"You sure you want to hear this one again, Alice?" The tone is teasing; this man, if he can really be called that, knows she wouldn't have asked for it if she didn't. She nods, enthusiasm she hasn't felt in years bubbling up within her mind.
"Right, then."
She folds her hands in her lap, one of the few things she's done of her on volition in the past while, as he settles himself more comfortably on the bench and takes another long sip of his drink, and she can feel the moment that the beginning of a soul-space shifts, jumping from Grandfather into him.
"Up until just a few months ago, the moon sat high and pretty on her seat in the sky, shining like the stars in your eyes, love, and keeping all the haunts and bogles and nasty things that lurk in the bog away from little girls like you during the night. They don't like the light, you see, hide away from it so that it won't burn them into nothing. Still dangerous to go out at night, for there are places the moon's light couldn't reach, and those things, well, they don't mind the darkness one whit." He pauses, takes another swallow from his mug, then continues.
"Well, the moon, for all her own concerns, has a soft spot for us mortals, and one night she decided she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So she wrapped herself up with a spare piece of the night, (Yes, there are spare bits. Most of them end up as the midnight shadows that show up at noon, but the moon had snagged herself one back when sky was first cut to fit), and came down to take a look herself."
He pauses again to look affectionately at her, a glance that would be comforting if it came from something real. The other people at the table are now in the middle of an argument that feels well practiced, something about what type of seed is best to sow in the early spring, or possibly how it should be sown, a soothing background rumble she can't actually listen to.
"That was a mistake." The affection has gone out of his voice, leaving only weary resignation. Alice wonders what the loss of the moon really cost him. "With her light all covered up like that, the haunts just grabbed her right off the path, hid her somewhere in the bog. And now it's always dark at night." He smiles at her, a tired quirk of his lips, reaches across to tap the tip of her nose. "Speaking of which, you should get yourself off home before it gets any darker."
She smiles back, a bright, sweet smile that pulls at her mouth and hurts, a little, stands and traipses back through the room, bowl in one hand, spoon in the other, to slip behind the counter and put them in the waiting water. Grandfather spares her a minute to wrap an arm around her, reminding her loudly to look out for herself. She embraces him warmly, her small arms not reaching all the way around his broad waist, holding fiercely onto what she can. This hurts, too, for different reasons than simple disuse, and not all her reluctance to let him go is feigned by the Book.
Fortunately for her pride, the tears stinging at her eyes for something she will never, ever have can be explained by the air outside the pub, cold as a blade of ice right through her. Her feet carry her out of the warmth into the snow; she lets them, mind far away as her heart breaks and her souls search for something she's not sure they'll find. The tears are gone by the time she's taken three steps, her grief locked away by the time she's taken twelve. The Book directs her right, towards a row of lighted houses, in one of which waits a woman who, even though she isn't real, still worries for the daughter she isn't, and so she goes left, towards the bog, pins-and-needles in the soles of her feet as the Book fights her for control of her own body. It's not a fight it can win, though she doesn't think it knows that, and she ignores the sensation, which gets stronger as she goes further towards the misty hollows in the woods, the way she's ignored Verity's more unpleasant reactions to the things in her life.
By the time she reaches the bog, boots squelching unpleasantly in mud that's only mostly frozen, it feels as if she's walking barefoot across a field of needles, stabbing viciously into her feet with every step. Her feet aren't actually bleeding, though, so she isn't concerned. Grace's unnerving, psychedelic hysteria has faded with the Book's increasing annoyance, and the air is like glass, pressing every thought into precise, exact forms, clear and sharp and exhilarating.
It really is very dark, with only the starlight that can squeeze through the greedy branches that stretch overhead to show the way, but the air she breathes and the pain in her feet deny her the luxury of fear, something she should probably be grateful for. She picks her way across the snow and mud, avoiding the black ice where the swamp has frozen over as best she can, not entirely sure of where she's going except for the fact that the Book doesn't want her here, which makes it the right way to go. It gets easier as her eyes adjust to the almost total darkness, the world slowly coming into focus, greys and whites joining the ever present black. She can feel the protections woven into the fabric of her robes beginning to wake, reacting to the things the Book has created as if they were real. It's an odd feeling, knowing that there is something to worry about, something she has the training to deal with, and also knowing that it's all in her head, like fever dreams or hallucinations.
She has no idea how long she's been walking, hours or minutes or no time at all, when she reaches a small clearing that is slightly less frozen than the rest of the swamp, a difference that hits her like a furnace blast against her icy fingertips, ears and nose and eyelids burning, even if it is only a few degrees warmer than two steps back. It's brighter, too, suffused with a dim, unearthly light without an obvious source. The protections surrounding her fade as she crosses the boundary between the trees and the clearing, lets that strange pale glow wash over her.
The clearing is centered around a small, oblong pool of muck, just the size of a grave, that vanishes at one end into the woods it extends from. At the other end is a cluster of short, thorny bushes, their vine-like branches so very intertwined that it takes her a minute to realize that it's not just one prickly mass. Snow lies thick and silent on the ground, despite the extra warmth, untouched and spotless through the mist that hangs like a heavy curtain over the water, and Alice shivers, pulling her coat closer around her, the bag at her side a comforting weight. Again, she feels very small, vulnerable, even though now she's not in the middle of a crowd.
As she walks further into the clearing, boots crunching through the snow, it becomes apparent that the light is coming from somewhere within the murky depths of the pool, and she goes to stand by the bushes, the stinging in her feet becoming real pain now, fierce and uncomfortable, which is how she knows this is where she needs to be. She releases the edges of her coat to peer curiously into the black mirror in front of her feet, and catches a momentary, startling glimpse of a pale, sleeping face surrounded by starlight hair and she stumbles back a step, straight into the thornbush. Instinct makes her reach backwards to break her fall, and she's arm deep in among the branches, the long sleeve of her coat and dress shoved up over her elbow, before the pain registers. She yelps, the sound shattering the stillness of the night, as her hand closes over something in reflex as she drags her arm back out, rising clumsily out of her backwards half-crouch without thought for the damage she might cause herself. Her hand snaps to her chest, the other coming up to press hard over the stinging scratches that start at her wrist and continue from there. Long lines of blood blossom between her fingers, the same bright color of her coat, and she hisses between her teeth in pain. It's not a lot of blood, and it will scab over before it has time to even begin to drip out of the channels the thorns have carved in her skin, but it hurts, and it's eerie in the darkness, the brightness of her blood against the snow and the white of her shock-drained skin. Her hand is closed about something velvety and soft, with the same sharp thorns of the plant as an unpleasant counterpoint. She opens it, slowly, and can't understand what she's seeing. A deep red rose, the color of ichor, rests in her palm, tiny droplets of her blood sparkling like dew on it's petals from the thorns.
"That looks painful, girlie." someone murmurs into her ear, the sudden heat of another body behind hers like a physical blow, and she clenches her hand shut again. The voice is a man's, low and rough, with a light, mocking edge she doesn't like. He's close enough to touch, bare inches from her back, the water the same distance from her front, so she doesn't turn to face him, but bows her head over her wounded arm, shoulders curling in protectively. She can feel the weight of his soul against her heart, knows he's real in a way nothing else here is, but that doesn't make him any less dangerous. If anything, it makes him more so.
"Not really." She answers, quietly, her voice her own for the first time since this whole thing started, and Verity dredges up the entirety of her ability to heal, faint warmth blooming at her fingertips. Her hand ghosts down her arm from wrist to elbow, smearing the blood and closing up the scratches as she goes, leaving almost no sign she'd ever been hurt when she lets it fall away. It's at the outer edges of her gift, made for purification of the body and improving blood flow and digestion and easing pain, and she feels drained afterward, wishing, not for the first time, that she was a true healer, and not a midwife at all. That, however, is foolish, for one cannot change what one is, and she sets it aside as always, turning her attention to the person at her back instead.
He's taller than she is by at least a foot, probably more, but not much wider, narrow lines for a man, and having him behind her is unnerving, to say the least. She steps sideways, away from the pool and the thorns and turns to face him with a twist on the ball of one foot, keeping her back to the woods and her feet solidly on the snow. Her first cautious impression of him, standing next to the moon's grave as if he hasn't a care in the world, is that he's far more dangerous than he wants to let on, and he belongs here even less than she does. He isn't bad looking, handsome, even, the sort of man the older girls sigh after and follow with their eyes, dressed in a well-tailored suit and subtly expensive shoes. His eyes behind his sunglasses are wrong, the opposite of hers, white and black and gray hopelessly scrambled, and it doesn't take the touch of the soul she knows he has to know what he is.
"You're a demon." She says, soft and gentle and unshakably correct.
"So I am." He agrees, complacently, that mocking lilt to his voice more pronounced now. He nods his head at her blood-streaked arm, still pressed over her heart, clutching the rose with involuntary heartsick possessiveness.
"That's a pretty trick."
"Is it?" She considers him, tilting her head gently to one side. Grace is panicking again, giant swirls of every color imaginable spinning through her head, because he's at least third rank, probably second, and she hasn't even taken her journeyman trials yet, and has no idea whatsoever about how to get rid of him before he eats her or worse.
He laughs, a rich throaty chuckle, and for a moment she is back in the pub, listening to a story about the moon. Her fingers itch to collapse on the snow and open her codex, find out what he is and what he wants and what she can do to make him go away, now, before he can do something dreadful, like his kind does.
"I'd say." He grins, and slides a cigarette out of his sleeve, lighting it with a flick of a fine silver lighter that vanishes again as soon as he's done, a flash of sliver going into a pocket. He takes a deep draw, blowing out smoke that curls and dissipates into the thickening mist as she stares, mesmerized.
"So, what else can you do, girlie?" The question is put casually, but there's a thread of real power under it, and Alice swallows hard against the compulsion to answer, biting at her lip instead of speaking. She rolls the rose between her fingers as she thinks of something, anything to say, something that won't imply agreement to anything he asks and get her into a mess even bigger than the one her last confrontation with the supernatural, just hours ago, did. The petals brush the notch of her collarbone, hiding themselves in the part of her collar like a frightened child, soft as a lover's touch, with the cant of her wrist, thorns pricking her fingers. She can feel blood beading there, spreading across the pad of her thumb and under her nails, getting on the petals and stem and thorns and the collar of her dress and up the column of her throat, and she is struck with a foolish, suicidal idea that will probably get her killed if it fails, which it most likely will, but is at the same time her best chance of surviving this if it doesn't. She has no illusions about her ability to bind anything of his power, even half his power, to her will, but...
She brings the rose up to her mouth, marking out the most basic of the runes for unbinding with short sweeps of her dampened thumb on one petal, and begins to murmur the words to the only thing she knows that has even a slight chance of working. Her eyes are downcast, her lips hidden by the flower, and she can feel him watching with those odd eyes of his, knows he knows she's up to something, and nearly swallows the final words of the ritual, barely able to spit them out against Grace's renewed panic. She feels it when it takes, seeping into the rose and changing its very nature beneath her fingers, and she smiles a little, even as the dizzying spiral of color threatens to make her black out.
She stares straight at him, face as blank as she can make it, and offers him the flower.
"Why don't you find out?" she says, arm outstretched, sleeve gathered at her elbow, the only hope she's got left held loosely in her small hand.
Catching a demon is a delicate, tricky thing at best, nigh on impossible at worst. If she were older, she would tempt him with her body, with the hints and whispers of something older than even he is, hedonistic and joyous and indulgent, not a rose the color of murder, marked with a child's bright yearnings. She is too old for true innocence's sweet corruptibility, has always been too old, perhaps, but she is also not yet old enough for experience's heady flirtations, rich with the promise of something unnamed. This is probably the most vulnerable she'll ever be, in this space between the protections of not knowing and the protections of knowing too much, and that, in itself, might be enough.
He smirks at her around his cigarette, not at all fooled by her show of innocent bravery, but reaches out and accepts the flower anyway.
The cigarette fizzles out in the snow as he yells in pain as the spell, a variation on the strongest exorcism she knows, attempts to cut the bonds between his soul and his body and he flings it away, snarling, before turning on her, and Alice knows, in a frozen, crystalline moment of pure terror, that her gamble has failed, and she's going to die.
The rose falls, unnoticed, into the still black pool beside them, and the spell, utterly forgotten by both Alice and the demon, finds a new target in that moment. Unbinding the strands of a soul and a body is complicated, delicate business, apt to fail or backfire without utmost precision, but the stretched thin lines of a simple ward are nothing in comparison, and the ritual in question is rather overpowered for this sort of work. The layers of power and despair keeping the moon in stasis fall apart faster than thought, long before the demon can reach the girl, and the clearing is filled with light, pure and unforgiving, the backlash of the broken spell, seeking out the girl who smashed it like porcelain and casting her far from where she stands, mixed with the flood of banishing light sweeping through everything, catching the things that lurked elsewhere in the woods, and the demon, too, and sending them where the light cannot reach.
When the light fades, the moon is in the sky once more, and the clearing is empty, save for a few scattered petals, a failure that worked out in the end.