(1875-01-18) You were Grail, and I was...
You were Grail, and I was …
Summary: Ludovic and Myrana spend some time in Lyionesse after the court. Myrana reveals some of what happened to her as a result of her studies, teaching Ludovic an old memory and picks a fight.
Date: 20th, 21st and 25th Jan 2019
Related: Mostly: (1875-01-18) High Court of Aequor & 1874-08-01: The Black Cat Studies
NPCs: None
Players:
Myrana  Ludovic  

Around Lyionesse, aequor
Room description
1875-01-18

Lyionesse has been called the has been called the city that never sleeps, and when the High Court is assembled within the royal grounds, it is even more true that usual. Every street is alive with light pouring through windows and spilling out from doorways and carriage boxes and shops and kaffe-houses, theatres, restaurants, galleries and smoking dens. The clatter of hooves and the rattle of wheels never utterly ceases, nor the piping sound of music and laughter from the many establishments serving the nobles and their retinues. While ranking members of the Court are welcome to stay inside the palace itself, the vast majority are olbiged to find lodging in the city itself.

And the marketplaces are ready for them, a hell of lanterns and shadows and tantalization.

Myrana steps out from one of her father's trading houses and shivvers in the freezing air, her breath pluming at her lips and the white fluff of her hair spilling out of the heavily felted angora hooded capelet she wears, with it's slightly outre twin liripipes. The bell at her throat rustles as she braces against the shock of the freezing outside, standing on the carefully shoveled street.

Snow is piled on every rooftop, and shoveled into every alley, but still the wealthy wear wooden patterns over their shoes to avoid its soaking touch. The street echoes with the odd click of wood on cobble, and the duller sounds of crunching heavy boots carefully and prayerfully waterproofed.

She herself wears a pair, and so as she walks out into the street and toward the sound of the marketplace nearby it is with a measured klakk klakk klakk that sets her hackles up and draws her shoulders into a tense, uncomfortable hunch. Her clothes are simple; the extravagant gown of earlier in the day traded out for a charcoal kirtle of warm cashmeri wool, belted once again with Ardaigh, and a pair of red kidskin gloves peeking from under her long warm sleeves. Something dangles at her waist besides the sword and her little hip-pouch; it bounces on her skirts as she crosses her arms beneath the lip of her capelet, picking her way along. A half-mask.

Down this way, she knows, are a number of bars where no-one is likely to recognize her.

The rabbit-lined leather of her gloves creak as, turning a corner into a little puddle of darkness between streetlamps, she lifts the mask from her reticule and slips the ties on beneath her hood.

Maybe, she will find someone rude tonight.

One thing can be relied on to always cheer Ludovic up when he needs a bit of a boost - Well two things - And both of those are very freely available in this part of town. Luckily he's a savvy enough drunk that he knows not to bring huge amounts of money or fancy clothes along when the goal is to get so drunk you pass out in a brothel.

He's not looking for company right now though. Instead he's sat with his arms wrapped about his knees and his back against the wall of a seedy looking bakery. He's hard to see actually given his dark clothing, dark hair and tanned skin. If it wasn't for the gleam of one of his spurs and the fact he moved his head he'd be practically invisible.

Seedy bakeries are where you get the best poppy-filled croissants; everybody fucking knows that. On her way to find someone and pick a duel with them, the masked Myrana catches a whiff of laminate pastry and makes a hard left turn.

Three whole inches taller in the patterns (which are easily enough kicked off), Myra walks in with a steady wooden click, and asks one of the boys serving to bring her one.

"Oh, he took the last one," says the boy, pointing at a young man dressed in flamboyant green hose and an extremely well-fitting doublet, from which an utter explosion of silk yardage peeps from fashionable slashing.

Myra turns her masked face towards the guy sitting at the table and cants her head to the side, frustrated. But growling thwartedly, she turns on a heel to go, not seeing Ludovic in the least.

"Pretty lady, wait a second." The young man grins under his moustache at her and leans forward from where he's draped half-drunk on his chair, nice legs just out there taking up as much real-estate as possible. Plucking a croissant from his plate, he waves it at her and grins, licking his lips. "I've just had a little nibble off one end."

Myrana stops dead in the doorway, back rigid and shoulders ramrod straight.

"What was that?" she asks, hand on her sword, like she wasn't quite sure what she heard.

"For fuck's sake," says the man carrying drinks around, and picks up crockery from an eminently kickable-overable table in a hurry.

Ludovic stirs as the familiar voice, and no doubt electrical leakage, tickles at the edge of his awareness. He squints across first at Myrana, then the dandy at the table and then Myrana again.

He makes a low grumbling complaint from somewhere deep inside and then starts to haul himself up to his feet. An action that takes quite a bit of effort given that the floor refuses to remain straight..

No words though. That would take too much effort.

The dandy is about to repeat himself, practically wiggling in excitement at getting such an immediate and easy rise out of the little woman- but then the big, big, big man over in the corner starts getting up.

He pauses, watching Ludovic do this with a wary eye and her mouth hanging open. Is that fellow getting up to go throw up, or to flatten him like a bug?

Which is why, unsurprisingly, he is TOTALLY UNPREPARED for Myrana's left hand slapping him out of his chair and onto the floor. Where she kicks him in the gut.

"What'd you say, assshole?" She bends over him as he coughs out a confused bleat, then kicks him again and spits on the floor next to his face. There's no doubt that if he had been expecting her at all, she wouldn't have been able to knock him down, or if he'd been sitting in the chair properly.

"Mind your manners!" She tells him. Then snatches one of the untouched croissants off of his plate with a humph and a casual kick at the basket of his sword, knocking it out of the sheath and skittering across the floor out of his reach.

Myrana turns around with the pastry halfway to her mouth, and sees the hulking, cloaked dude in the dark corner. And freezes where she is with eyes wide behind the halfmask and an expression of perfect, startled 'oh fuck me' writ large on her face.

Ludovic reaches his feet, rolls muscular shoulders and then takes a few steps towards Myrana. Theres a line between them though - the point where the deeply shadowed space where Ludovic is standing - and the lantern-lit space that Myrana occupies - that causes him to visibly recoil away and grunt with discomfort. A forearm is lifted to shade his eyes, heavily tilted to favor the one on the left over the one on the left, and he stares across at the space. "He's getting up." he manages to say in mostly unslurred common. "Gotta hit him harder than that."

Myra lowers the croissant away from the startled 'O' of her mouth and goes: "Dovic?"

Which is when Karma, as it always does, gets the forgotten young man behind her up onto his feet and lunging at her. He grabs the back of her hood and yanks on it, and so Myrana stumbles backwards out of her wooden patterns and grabs at his arm before he can rip it off her head, losing one of the over-shoes and stumbling with a yowled curse.

But on the way down, before she can crash through any furniture or fall flat on her back, she manages to get her claws into the sleeve of his doublet and pull her down with him.

Whence a kicking, yelling, spitting fight breaks out between the two of them, with elbows flying and legs kicking and a table getting knocked over as that poor Dandy now finds that he as a tiny but extremely irate Armaz trying to put her thumbs in his eyeballs out of sheer rage, and who isn't letting him scrabble to terrified freedom after the extreme and unforgivable indignity of having pulled her hair.

Ludovic is just about to answer when the catfight (literally in many ways) begins. For a moment he doesn't react at all and then he gives a low growl, strides across and physically hauls the man up and away from Myrana before thrusting him /hard/ at the nearby wall. He eyes Myrana briefly, flashing her a stay down kind of look, before folding his arms and turning a belligerent glare on the man in green. "Suggest you leave. Trust me." He's lost a lot of the drunken edge to his words. "It's not worth losing an eye over."

Myrana glowers up warily from the floor as the nobleman is hauled off of her, and as he's bounced up onto the wall by Ludovic. And she stays that way, blue eyes eerily lit in the white fluff of her mussed-up hair, till the young man scrambles down and runs out the door, collecting his sword and all but stumbling into the street.

"Hrmph!" she says up at Ludovic. Then sits up, and throws her other wooden pattern off. "I didn't expect to find you in here!"

Ludovic slowly turns his face until he's probably looking straight at Myrana. "Not exact'ly surprised to find you." he drawls out. "You always in trouble?"

Or, Myra tries to throw the other one off. A one kick! a two kick! A THR-oop, there it goes, CRASH into the underside of the table she'd half rolled under when Ludovic ripped the man off her, just as she had almost slapped her way in through his defenses to get to his stupid face.

THERE! She tosses the bangs from her masked face, causing one liripipe to flop, blowing a strand out of her mouth and swats the warmly petticoated skirts of her kirtle back down over her updrawn leg, covering up the very serious cable-knit brown stockings into which a copper knife is tucked.

"State secrets," she mutters to herself, and blows again at the white fluff in her face and mouth and UGH! She struggles up, grabbing the edge of the table before getting her bearings and her feet under her, shaking a little. Not from anger anymore; the dandy's run off, and out of sight, out of mind. But as tough as she is, and with the full Armaz temper and unwillingness to bear a slight, she's small, and a scuffle that proceeds to the ground gets rather serious from her perspective.

Then she's up on her feet, the little silver heart in the heel of one boot winking as she plants her feet better.

"Yes!" She answers, now that she's all set to rights again, brushing the earrings back from her shoulders and resettling her hood and mantle.

"There," she tosses a consideration to the owner of the place, a little sack that whips bright through the seedy bakery and into his hand like a magic trick. "My apologies, master."

Ludovic personally believes that he was rescuing the young man from the savagery of the littlest d'Armaz rather than the other way around. He half-flinches when the wooden pattern cracks against the table and makes another low grumbly growl under his breath at the fact he responded so strongly. "Finding it hard to believe you're not following me around." His words are all carefully spaced. "You got a heist planned? Something you need muscle for? That why you're here?"

"I was out looking for you. I just didn't expect to find you in here." She looks down at the scattered almond croissants, then picks up the chair she upsetted, and stoops for a cup. But its cracked. It goes on the table with an almost apologetic thump; her temper is spent.

Abandoning these guilty attempts at fixing the mess she made, she goes instead to Ludovic and siezes his sleeve, or tries to.

"Dovic, that poor man."

"Needed two things." Ludovic tells Myrana after a pause. "Needed the wash of pleasure in the background and drink and nobody familiar. Too likely to start a duel today." He reaches to take Myrana's hand and then heads out. Merely steering them both down the nearest throughfaire of no particular size until they are deep in secluded shadow. His eyes close for a moment and then he looks directly at her again. "What did he do to be found."

"Whup-" And Myra goes out the door with Ludovic, just sort of stunned at how easy it is to do this to a person, in theory. Maybe this is why Ravio is always saying things like 'Myra stop giving your hand to people'.

When her heels are settled again, the rabbit-hooded Armaz looks up at Ludovic from the dark pit of her hood, taking a shaky breath. But she's not about to cry again, or doesn't seem that way.

"I don't know," she says, shaking her head. "I didn't know he was a witch. I knew him, but I didn't see it." In those red kidskin gloves her hands crook into claws just once, reflexively. "M…maybe if I had looked among the vassals of Arran. I haven't… I haven't looked in my own."

It is definitely why you should never give your hand to a strange man. Although it is safe to say it is also entirely possible to escape through the judicious use of one of those blades about her person.

Ludovic just sort of looms over Myrana, supporting his body against the wall with a single hand and not thinking about how that might make the woman dumped in his shadow feel.

Myrana's words make him take a deep sigh. "Thats not good. I don't like that they can know that well.. and he sounded like he at least thought he was magic." He frowns. "Maybe.." "Maybe he confessed?"

Myrana isn't afraid of Ludovic, but the reminder sobers her after the adrenaline of the scuffle. If it weren't for the halfmask on her face, she'd wipe at her eyes. Instead she blinks, and looks down quickly to hide her face.

"I don't like putting spies out among the people," she whispers. "Not just to watch them. I didn't know he was in Lyionesse."

At his question she recalls the scrapes and the black eye, as if one cheek had been ground into a stone floor recently enough to leave a thin scab. Roughed up.

Myrana's faintly glowing eyes cloud over with thought. "I don't think he did. But… Gendiel is full of…" Her throat catches a little. "Little temples." This is in a very, very small voice. "They're broken. Mossy. But sometimes I think…"

She stops.

"Ramius got his name after our Cardinal," she says, quietly. "Baron Vargas made a gesture of fealty to the church, some suggest. He was not a subtle man. The Inquisition may already be in Gendiel, investigating me."

She takes a breath.

"Listen," she steps sideways into the little square of light falling at an angle under his arm and the wall, boots crunching in the snow of the alley. "You mean to build that place?"

Ludovic shifts his head to once again put her perfectly into his line of sight. "Wouldnt blame him if he had confessed. Not being able to confess has been ripping me apart for years." His cadence is that slow drawl of a tired drunk. "Its the first thing I'm gonna do when I get home. Go the old church where my father and my fathers fathers and my fathers fathers father is buried and confess everything. Every last improper thought. All the half truths and lies. Every. Little. Thing."

Again he lets his eyes sink closed for a moment before opening them half-way again. "I kinda like it here.." He stops as his brain catches up to the fact he was asked a serious question. "Build what place?"

For a while, Myra just listens, standing in the dark. Light just touches the edge of her skirts, and it's here that she rests her eyes. Ludovic's desire to confess is mirrored in her own heart, and the shared frustration is for a moment too sharp and ugly to be bourne. So she lets it ebb out of her, and falls quiet for a long time.

Only to be stirred back to awareness by his muddled question.

She looks back up and smiles wrily at him.

"Don't fall asleep, Grail," Myrana pats Ludovic's bearded face with gloved hands, pap-pap. "You'll get robbed. And wet."

Ludovic actually seems to miss the fact she just used another name on him. Maybe he'll notice in the morning. Instead he just gives a low chuckle. "Why do'you think I left everything valuable at home." Of course Ludovic's idea of valuable and the nearby peasants idea of valuable are worlds apart. His boots are probably pricey enough to support a family for quite a while.

He gives another of those slow blinks and then moves his head sharply enough that its likely he genuinely is on the verge of being too drunk and drowsy to function well. "Said about the ruins because one day you might have to run. Or me." He lets himself sink into a slump against the wall alongside Myrana. "Or you might know sorcerers who do." He blinks slowly again. "Dont matter now though. They broke it. Not Aequorian anymore." He grunts softly, jerking his head in that 'i must not falling asleep' fashion again. "Want to hire a room? Aint no-one who'll think to find us here."

"If you fall down, I'll rub gross snow in your mouth," says Myrana, and takes him by the arm, pulling him along and just seeming to assume he'll keep his feet. "I know a place to put you. Just don't fall down."

Leading him along, she seems to have a lighter step, ignoring the freezing soak of water creeping in through her boots. Down an alleyway, and in through a dark archway, into a silent, echoing marketplace.

But not the noisy one down the street. In the other direction, away from the lights, and into the dark, taking a narrow way into a covered market street left abandoned and dripping with moss. No shops are here now, or are shutterd up unfashionably at night. A canal splashes somewhere nearby, throwing its echoes everywhere.

"Not Aequoran anymore?" she stops at the mouth of a moonlight-striped corridor through which a freezing wind blows.

"Gross snow?" Ludovic asks as he placidly begins to follow along behind her. "Is that the worst you can threaten?"

He manages alright until they are in that market street filled with debris made difficult to judge thanks to theshifting light cast by the moonlight and shadows cast by various buildings and structures. Here though he starts to struggle, tripping twice with grunts of discomfort before actually going down to his knees and snarling out a complaint. "Dammit Myra. Slow down. I can't SEE." He starts to pull himself up on a nearby stall, his head turning as he tries to make out the full details of the surroundings. "Its really quiet."

He's still dusting the backside of his jerkin when Myrana asks him that more important question. "You heard him Myrana. We're criminals. All Aequor has for us is death."

Myrana has begun to suspect that she is lost, letting her friend's hand slip from hers heedlessly, and not thinking to look for him. Grail can see just fine, and the street is clean, the blue-tinted lanterns soft on the demilune windows. But she pads over a wine-bottle left in the street out of the hand of a worshipper's lax fingers, careful not to step on his clothes and covering her mouth at the smell.

"The dormitory is just past Scribe Arkus' offices. I can sneak you in."

She turns around though, confusued and squinting in the dark. "Or…" A beat. She touches her face.

"The king," she says, carefully.

"The king." Ludovic says with absolute bitterness. "Is going to ignore every. last. sacrifice. I ever made in his name. Every last one of my men. Every last member of my family. And why?" he tugs up his shirt enough to show the bottom of his mark. "Because of this." he slaps at the flesh of his abdomen but thankfully drops the cloth a moment later. "He's not my King anymore."

Myrana stares at Ludovic, face dipping into black shadow but for the nose of her halfmask, just poking into the edge of moonlight filtering in through the mishmash of rotten wooden awning supports and boards. Gathering her hands to her, she tugs off one of her gloves and looks down into the palm of her hand. The signet of the ring she wears around her thunb is invisible in the dark, but she feels it with curled fingers, breath pluming fog in the dark.

Panic brushes at her, fluttering around at her fingertips. She curls her hands in tight, and tries to ignore it. That isn't Grail. It is Ludovic. Drunk Ludovic.

"His Majesty spoke today on witches," she says, placing herself tenuously in the present, in what happened today. This today. "And… the Cardinal Ramius. But the Queen, I think she…" Myra takes a breath, stopping herself. Commenting on what she feels the Queen might have been thinking feels traitorous.

Ludovic moves to follow her but unlike Myrana he doesn't manage to stealthily step over the bottle and instead kicks it into a nearby support with what, at this time of night, feels like an ungodly racket. He winces and reaches out for the nearest upright structure. "What does it matter what the queen thought? Even if she wants to help. She can't." He rubs a hand across his brow with frustration. "Myra?" he asks. "Where's this dormitary? I'm tired and i'm getting upset and angry and I really. Really. Dont want to do something we both regret."

"It's…" Myra looks at the double doors of the old building. And moving forward, sets her hands on the rusted, broken lock. The door itself is hard to see in the dark, but a tile mosiac decorates the stoop, dirty white tile around a black crescent and worn-down old Imperial too faded to read.

Inside the air is stale and cold, but dry.

Myrana lifts her ungloved hand, and with a sizzling hum that fades into the background, her bones glow white hot through the skin. Soon that eerie glow evens out, and simply settles onto her hand in a faintly hissing, spitting aura, appearing to glow from her skin in a pale, wavering blue.

It lights the interior of the ruined place.

She walks past the empty registry desk and through the empty doorway into the hall of the dormitory, disturbing a bat.

Ludovic struggles along after her, still struggling on the treacherous surface without his aids of hound or czekan. He stops just inside the room, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell and turning his head as he starts to examine the interior. He flinches away when Myrana lights up her sorcery, wincing at the sudden light and then reaching out to grab her forearm. His fingers link and then he jerks away from the contact "Are you suicidal?" he hisses as he shakes his hand free of the minor shock. "Put that out!"

Myrana's hand winks out. A moment's inattention in the dark was all it took.

"I finished the manuscript," she says, voice smoky in the sudden blackness that follows. "Something happened. I was looking for a way to stop Darius from coming back again. And for something else, but I've forgotten."

Myrana takes a shaky breath. The sound comes from below and to the left of Ludovic's shoulder where she stood limned in that neon glare that temporarily lit the ruined and gutted dormitory like a bad dream. Broken pottery covers the floor, and other things. Dry leaves. Bones. Scraps of cloth. And painted on the wall facing them, over broken dormitory cots and mouldering remains of bedding:

P L A G U E

Burned into Ludovic's eye, like the afterimage of the sun or a lamp in the dark, the glowing bones of Myrana's left hand leave red shadows floating in the blackness, all the delicate little carpals and phalanges, bones of the wrist and hand, the stronger but still birdlike brands of ulna and radius only barely dimmed by flesh.

A soft sound; a glove being stripped off.

"There is no-one here," she says, finally. And her voice has moved, a little further away.

Eyes tearing in the aftershock of that blinding flash of light, Ludovic is forced to lift his own hand to press against his eye. Great. Now not only is his hand tingling away as if he'd grabbed the live end of a battery but he's also effectively blind and stuck in a weird abandoned building with a woman who keeps calling him Grail. Spending time with Myrana is always so reassuring.

"Thats good." He replies gruffly. "If there was anyone here they'd have seen your trick for sure." He tries to squint past the glare but, lets face it, a stone mage isnt exactly able to handle bright light at the best of time. "And we were wanting somewhere safe. So this works."

Again he tries to open his eye enough to squint at Myrana before deciding better of it. "The document that promised to show you how to find the eye?"

"The eye?" Myra's voice floats back to Ludovic, but it's no longer quite easy to tell where she is. A rustle to the left, a clink of pottery shard. Nothing.

"…I remember now."

Something about Myra's voice changes. Normally, even at the best of times, the young Armaz's voice is a smokey, throaty purr that often dips into reaches too low and growly to be heard clearly from terribly far away. Something at some point in the war damaged her throat and she's had a sultry rasp ever since.

It's still there, for her throat is the same, but it lilts now in a way it normally doesn't.

Over there, a door creaks open and shuts again.

"Myrana?" Ludovic's use of her name has an uncertain waver behind it. "I don't know where you went. Are you still there?"

Bip!

Something light pings off of Ludovic, more startling than painful.

"I'm here," she says, somewhere to the right. "Try to catch me."

Bip! Ludovic throws a hand up in an automatic brawling parry. Not that its going to do him any good after the items bounced off his head. "Myrana." he turns towards her voice, sounding irritated by the game. "Lets not play stupid games."

"You lost an eye," One misses him and skitters across the floor and hits the wall. "If I lured you here to kill you, what would you do?" PLAP! Her glove slaps into his face from somewhere, flapping off of one cheek and onto his shoulder. Or one assumes it's her glove.

"Find me," she says, voice diminishing ever so slightly. Myrana makes almost no sound, but now there's a crunch: a fragment of glass in the dark.

Ludovic jerks his jaw away from the light touch, his elbow going out sharply enough that his tormenter will suffer a serious bruise if she hasn't moved already. "Stop it." he growls. Sounding more and more annoyed by the minute but still not willingly taking a step in the debris strewn darkness.

He gives another low growl as she moves around until that telltale little crunch, gifted to him on purpose no doubt, makes him lunge over in her direction. Subtle he is not.

After that lunge though he actually follows through with a couple of steps over in her direction. His path changing just enough with her own motions that its obvious something is getting through beyond the sound of her moving. Admittedly he can see again now, as much as anyone can ever see in a dark building.

Ludovic's lunge catches a bump to the shin and an armful of nothing.

Bop! The other glove hits his back.

"You couldn't catch me in daylight, Grail."

Another crash to his left, this one more obviously something thrown at a wall in the dark. "Use the earth!"

He really couldn't catch her in daylight. Thats half the problem! Grinding his teeth Ludovic stops and starts turning on his heels, managing to keep her in the general direction of his front. "The. Earth." he mutters, still slowly turning and letting his eyes close again and his senses reach out. Theres the solidity of the ground. The walls. The pinpoint pricks of.. Ahhhh. Who would have thought that Myrana's penchant for jewelry would be so very useful.

He starts to move forward, his boot scuffing lightly against the ground and then thinks better of it. Torment him will she? Well two can play that game.

Again he tries to sink his senses back into the area around them, feeling the pattern of her motions until. There. His opportunity. Its just a small change. A little push of power and earth. But it leaves a step three inches high under a foot that just lifted.

Eyes open and he starts to stride towards the point where he's hoping she will fall. Boots kicking detritus away without a care for the fact she'll hear him coming.

Myrana gives a little scream of surprise as suddenly she's pitched onto her face, stumbling over the jut of earth underfoot. Ludovic's magic 'senses' feel it just as they picked up the footsteps of the young Armaz circling him, cat-footed and sly. But not sly enough; she hits the ground with a jingle of jewelry.

"Fbth…" she spits hair from her mouth and picks herself up onto her knees, sitting and rubbing at her sore face with bare hands. "Oww…"

Ludovic reaches a hand down to offer her a way up, a grin having replaced the frustration. "Did you hurt yourself?" As he picks her up he automatically reaches out to smooth away the evidence of his meddling. Still in that mindset that demands that everything should be hidden despite his earlier decision. "Serves you right for tormenting me."

A small hand fumbles around before it finds Ludovic and seizes a fistful of sleeve. She laughs, and makes a wet SNORRF sound before spitting off to the side, coughing. Gross.

"You did it! Hahaha! Good! Ow." She doesn't let go of his sleeve, but wipes at her face, snuffling and sniffing between little gasps. "Do you have a kerchief? Sorry. That was good. Don't be mad."

"I'm not mad." Ludovic gives her another grin. "Thats not. Actually. This is great." he slowly turns his head around the building almost as if he's seeing it all for the first time. "I feel like I could set up my whole castle so that I would know where everything is. So that all I'd have to do if I was ever attacked again would just be to get rid of the light. Hell. Why would I even need to risk the headaches that come with the light?" He turns his head until he's looking right at Myrana again. "Its the gemstones." He says this as if it should be some great discovery for her almost as much as him. "Even with the cutting. They still" he gestures. "Bah. I don't even know how to explain it. If I could really SEE them I'd say they were shining. But thats not right at all."

Myrana covers her mouth and nose with her hand, bowing her head over the floor between them. Blood soaks into her sleeve; Myrana is a stout little thing, for all that she's prone to accident and inherited the late Myriam al'Mordan's sparrow bones.

"I'm ruining my sleeve," she gives his arm a reminding wiggle, still holding onto his sleeve, but then releases it to fumble at the bunnyhood. "Buh! Where ib id? I know I brobb wun."

"What?" Ludovic squints at her in a way that suggests he has no idea what she is talking about until finally it clicks. "I'm sorry." He honestly guilty. "I've a kerchief about me I." He starts to pay down his clothes before remembering that instead of his typical kote and sash he is in fact wearing a plain old jerkin. Starting to feel kind of bad for the practical joke that so recently cheered him up he shifts from one foot to the other. "If you hold your nose closed and tip back your head it will stop by itself."

"GROff!" Myrana objects with extreme prejudice. "Ohp! Here ib id." And she stuffs a kerchief over her face from her capelet. What else is socked away in there? "Uhk! Haha, thab'v okay." And with another SNORFF!! and a peh!, she gets her nose under control.

"You did goob," she says, a little more clearly, keeping her nose covered and pinching the bridge. "I waff ffhinkink you woult, uh, FFROW ffomefink. But that iff better. You can ffee where I waff fftanding? Cauffe of ffe… Oopf," she laughs, and makes a yuck sound. "Foiled by ffaffuhn."

Ludovic listens to her barely decipherable words for a while. The grin sneaking back onto his face at least three times before being wiped out by an attempt to look remourseful. "Once I found you I could feel where you were standing." He puts a hand heavily on her shoulder. "But before then it was hard to pick out. You're really light on your feet you know? And this space" The hand is lifted away so that he can gesture instead. "is real big."

He looks down at her and then smiles appreciatively. "Thanks for cheering me up. You gonna tell me why you keep calling me Grail now?"

"It helpf," she admits to his compliment, blushing and rather glad he can't see her do so. She wipes the blood off of her face and gingerly fingers her upper lip and nose. She can't see his face at all, but can hear the smirk trying to reassert itself in his voice, and feels her ears turn red. "Of course. You're my friend, Dovic."

About to respond, she suddenly stops and holds her breath.

"I called you what?" she asks, nervously.

"Grail." Ludovic says. "A whole bunch of times. I dont mind." he asserts. "I kinda like it actually. But why?"

He goes quiet for a long moment and then he asks. "And what did you mean about Darius coming back again?"

"You…" Myrana falters, and drawing back a step trods on a crust of pottery with a dry crunch. "Reminded me of someone."

At last though she lifts her hand again and the bones of her fingers light, dimly. Barely brighter than a candle, but the total darkness makes her nervous. She can't see like Ludovic can. Not this far into the building. And for a moment she looks at the ruins of the dormitory, which under the constant light are revealed to be old. Very old indeed. Whatever sickness came here to this quarter, it came a hundred years ago, and has been abandoned ever since, left alone.

"Goddess Death and the Riverman," she says. "Gave me nightmares. I finished it," this she's already said, but she continues: "I'll be fine. I'll be myself, and you'll be Ludovic, and Sam is Sam, and my home is in Fiorello. But then, all at once, none of that is right; You were Grail, and I was…"

She flounders. "Whoever I used to be. I forgot most of it! But they're like memories. I remember this place. I was here."

"I was Grail?" Ludovic asks with an insouciant grin. "Was I as amazing then as I am now?"

His hand goes back to rest on her shoulder. "This place hasnt been occupied in forever. Theres a feel you know?" again he turns his head about the building. "A difference between a place thats been abandoned by its pixies and those that still have them. But this place feels like its been empty so long they've given up and gone." Back to the 'silly' superstitions of his homeland.

Silence settles until he says "You know i get uncomfortable any time you bring up these gods and goddesses?"

Myrana deflates a little, exhausted. Ludovic's hand settling onto her shoulder comes without the usual bite of electricity, despite how her hand glows out at her side, held in a wrist-cocked gesture like someone limply testing for rain out the sitting-room's window. Perhaps she's grown a little as well in her magics.

"Ramius thinks that they're memories, but not my own. Not exactly." She chews on the inside of her cheek. "I should have listened to Ivo when he told me to leave that manuscript alone."

"Yeah." Ludovic says "Probably. But then maybe not. I don't claim to know even the smallest bit about the stuff you're dealing with. Its why, when you mentioned it back at the manor, I just kinda tried to pretend it wasnt there." He lifts his hand away to rub tiredly at his eye before settling it back down. "Did you find what you were looking for at all?"

"Do you think the Imp…" Myra stops herself. About to ask Ludovic if he's ever heard about reincarnation from the Imperials, it hits her like shovel:

"…I have to speak to Darius," she breathes, like a curse.

"That should be easy enough to arrange." Ludovic tells Myrana. "But I reckon things might be a lil hectic for the next couple of weeks. Can you wait?"

"It might well wait forever," Myrana shakes her head. "Let's get out of here. I believe there's rats." She shudders, and going back towards the lobby, douses her hand and takes Ludovic's arm again, not wanting to run into a wall.

"I am not eager to go back to Paras, after all," she says, and tries to help them find their way back towards occupied parts of the old quarter.

"Of course there are rats." Ludovic responds unhelpfully. A quick flash of white declaring his smile. His other hand moved out a distance to try and minimise the bashing of knees and shins he asks. "You're going to stay loyal aren't you? Despite everything. You're going to pretend that the law against sorcery is just."

Myrana's silence answers for her, and the sick pitch in her heart that presses outward like the deck of a ship heaving down into a crevasse of waves.

"I'm going back to be with Ramius. And to speak to the heads of his houses."

"Lord D'Slegrias didn't choose to be a sorcerer," she murmurs. "None of you did."

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