faderift | new faces

WHO: Flint
WHAT: A problem to be solved.
WHEN: Now
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Gross Bloodborne themes.

Despite how much he had betrayed her, she still considered Gehrman her superior, even now. He had been betrayed and used, just as she had. The head dog in a pack of snapping dogs, all used to Hunt under pretenses that were not true. Cleaning up a mess that should not have been made. He had known first, and he should have confessed. He should have let them make up their own minds instead of letting them die on the swords of Yharnam. Maybe so many of them-- Maria --wouldn't have killed themselves upon finding the knowledge on their own. Then again, he would suffer the most out of any of them. He was the one in the Dream, waiting and waiting and waiting.

He could free any of them, whenever they were ready for it. He had offered Anna his scythe while she had been there, again and still and again and still. She could join all the others. But she would not die for the Church's crimes, whatever that stubbornness meant. There was no reason to force her, though he well could. She didn't have the true insights to replace him, had not gazed upon the babe and refused to. Her death would just be her death, and there was no reason she couldn't wander Yharnam's bloody streets alone if that was her only aspiration. He had stopped appearing in her Dream then. They would speak no more, and the doll had nothing left to give her either. Only vague rumination on the nature of love and religion.

James Flint will never be her superior, just as Luwenna Coupe was never her superior before him. Anna had never taken the vials to Coupe, despite being instructed to do so by Lakshmi Bai. Lakshmi Bai is not here; and she had never been Anna's authority either. For a moment, a compatriot, and then gone; leaving Anna angry in her wake.

Anna was willing to kill for these people, to earn her keep and find her way. But they would never win over her spirit. She was not interested in loyalty or devotion to their institutions. She had no stake in their world. Just a visiting dreamer, not a player in their war games.

She does not make an appointment. She breaks in to the office and waits for him, has heard enough gossip to know he is the replacement. In a way, that makes things easier. A new start. A new face. She would try again, as she always tried again. The vials of blood are in plain sight on his desk, as is her hideous coat over the back of a chair. A friendly gesture, to know that someone is waiting but not really trying to jump him. Still, someone who did not care for the bureaucracy of waiting their turn to be acknowledged.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What is wrong with fucking Kirkwall of all places in the world that a man cannot walk into his place of business without being surprised by a woman expecting to show him something secret and dangerous? May the void consume them all if there be two of Lakshmi Bai anywhere.

--And maybe this is why he takes the hunter's intrusion so easily in stride. Because she isn't the first to have done so. Because he is at this point curating a list of people who think themselves entitled to his time. The Gallows runs nothing like a ship, and he cannot point every inquiry in Mr Silver's direction as much as he might prefer it. Flint, with his square packet under his arm, crosses the room to the desk with its charge of ostensibly cursed objects. He sets the edge of the package there at the edge of it and begins to strip the carefully wrapped paper from it. Under the wrapping lies a canvas in a frame. The painting is very plain, but recognizable to anyone who has stood on the Kirkwall docks: some sketching of the harbor, and at its center a dark black ship with some gesture of ornate scroll work at its stern, flying no flag at all amidst a series of merchant trade vessels.

"Go on."

What are they? How are they dangerous? Don't expect him to supply these questions.

She gazes on the vials silently for a moment. She hates the exposition required to explain this problem. It had, indeed, been easier with Lakshmi because she had already understood half the story. Anna had spent a long time on the crystal with her, outlining the details of the beasts and how to kill them.

"It is healing blood. It's not... quite the blood magic of this world," she starts with. "But I am afraid of what would happen if one of your blood mages or researchers were to know of it."

What would happen if your dear enemy Corypheus were to sniff it out. "It is a small amount... but so it was when Yharnam first discovered the old blood. It can be purified in a body. So... I am... I am, perhaps, the purest vial here."

Hard to admit, but maybe also not. "Heal it will. Intoxicate it will. But it also turns man into beast, when he's drunk too much of it and his will is too weak to resist."

The vials glint, reflecting little eyes of light played through the window. Meanwhile, the paper having been stripped back from the canvas, he takes the folding it into rough squares. It's decent wrapping and might be recut for envelopes.

This, at least, is some manageable quantity - objects divorced from the person which might be put into a strongbox and lost in the mountain of Riftwatch's archives. They might be thrown into the sea. They might be surrendered to the Provost, or to Fabria or Averesch for study. Or, or, or: a dozen options that don't require meddling with the contents of an individual's veins.

"You're clearly familiar with the substance. What would you suggest be done with it?"

She looks away at nothing, her lips pursing almost white. "I don't know. If I keep them and consume them, as I would, I am afraid it will be enough to turn me. I am afraid where the blood may go to be later found if I simply... decant them. I am afraid of what some scholar will do, finding them, if I hide them."

"I don't know how to destroy the blood," she concludes, snapping her attention back to him, dark brows furrowed. "And more comes with me, when the Rift sends me back to The Dream."

That was simply the way of it, to awaken outfitted and ready for The Hunt. She inhales, rubs one eye tiredly.

"That is why I came now, and because Lakshmi is gone."

Now there is something to make the small hairs at the back of his neck stand to. Never mind the ichor black blood in their beetle dark vials; he's seen blood magic, and he's seen the flesh on Lakshmi's palm knit itself back together. But there is something nauseating about the stark unreality of 'It comes with me, when the Rift sends me back to the Dream'. It sounds like the sort of thing twisted spirits say in old stories to mages who should know better, only he's no mage.

He leans the painting against the desk at an angle. Funny, isn't it? How he can sit across from Kitty and hardly think of the Fade, but put the right Rifter across from him saying the right absurd thing and some subconscious party of him begins to crawl with uneasiness.

"If your situation is at all similar to Lakshmi Bai's, I would first recommend that we handle this quietly. As for the rest--" A pause. He draws back the chair, the one meant for guests, and sits in it. Let them talk like respectable people discussing something sensible. "You say the volume is part of the issue?"

"I entrusted Lakshmi to hunt me, should I turn," a corrective, flat affect. Whatever else they had in common, she didn't know. She didn't ask. What she had seen was a hunter chasing down a lycanthrope, and that was all she had needed to know.

"That was my first concern. I did not trust myself to retain my mind... but Thedas is different." What was once flat acquires a wistfulness for the wind in her face. The sun rising. She licks the corner of her mouth, brows furrowing.

"I would not trust a single drop."

"Different how?"

Is that a complicated question? He senses it must be, but there is a demand to ask. What good is a decision made divorced of what makes it difficult.

She can taste the words in her mouth. Rotten like Yharnam's foul air, and she purses her lips against the sourness of it.

"The city is doomed, but it dreams of its final hours over and over again. In Yharnam, I never see the sun. It is always the Night of the Hunt. There are always beasts to run through, there is always more blood."

She refuses the rising burn to emote, dark eyes bleak.

"I've died many times in that dream, only to awaken in another where my old master waits to remind me that a Hunter must hunt. So I go out again, and I kill what I've killed before, or maybe it kills me, and I go out again until I've memorized every one of its breaths."

That was how it crept upon you, the turning. The line between your breath and their breath, their heartbeats, blurring until eventually--

"I could die here. Thedas could kill me."

She brushes her gloved fingertips over the row of vials fondly.

Maybe she is mad. It sounds like a kind of a fever, the kind that's meant to be sweat from the body and burns off everything poured down the throat. He wants to think Who hasn't died once or twice?, but refuses to. It feels somehow like a dangerous moment to indulge in poetry.

Instead, he regards her. It's a study of the woman more than it is the glinting glass shapes on the desk between them; the back of his knuckles stray as if by habit to the underside of his chin, scuffing lightly there at the bristle of his beard as if the scrape might clarify whatever there is to see in her.

"At the very least, they should be divided." Said without looking away from her. "Hidden or buried somewhere no one would think to look for anything."

She nods, glad he's taking her seriously but also... distracted as the reality of saying goodbye to the blood comes closer. She'll never taste it again. She'll never feel it burning inside of her, healing her body like a fire.

"I can't know."

new faces

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cool thanks for nothing dw notifs

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