as the wind fends off the waves, i count down the days

[spelleton]

Who: Miach Mihie, Ekkehardt Gehring
What: Bon..ding...?
Where: The ruins of a village somewhere in the mountains.
When: Mid-April.
Warnings: Nothing yet besides potential talk of rough backstories, subject to change if anything comes up. Miach is probably her own warning at this point


The easy part had been getting to the pass, what with the resources available to the Academy; the hard part was convincing their guides to let them walk the rest of the way by themselves into the Outlands.

Once that part is over with, the weather and terrain means it's a quiet, pleasant walk despite the morbidity of their destination. Ekkehardt is carrying a spear - more as a declaration of being suitably prepared than anything else - but other than that, he doesn't anticipate any trouble that his various skills can't handle.

He doesn't say anything, at first. He's content to let Miach talk and do nothing more than occasionally steering them back onto the right path if they happen to stray from it.

Comments

[imitationsoul]

[ Miach really loves the mountains. Even she herself is surprised by the ferocity with which this feeling rises in her chest. She hasn't been here in over 7 years. These sights have become unfamiliar... and yet, as her feet step over snow and she hears the crunch, as she sees the light reflect between the mountain-tops... the nostalgia puts a vice grip around her heart. She feels like skipping and running. She feels like laying down in the snow and letting it reclaim her. As only one of these is socially acceptable, she opts for the skipping and running part. She's ahead of Ekkehardt every once in a while, then twirls on her heels and waits again, looking like a child on a regular field trip.

That is until they make it to the village - if what's left of it deserves being given that name. It had been small and modest even in its prime. A few huts around a marketplace, a few fields for cattle. A peaceful people, living secluded and quietly. Now there is only ruins, barely identifiable under the snow. The roofs of most huts have collapsed and the foundations just form weirdly rectangular shapes in the snow.

Miach comes to a dead stop, taking it all in. ]

I wonder where I lived....

[ She doesn't remember. The mountains are familiar, but this place she's a stranger to. ]

[spelleton]

[ He notes how carefree she seems to be here, filing it away as one of many facts. It's at least nice to see her act with ordinary playfulness about something mundane, for once, instead of that serious and burdened intensity she seems to hold close to her heart. ]

If you like, we can search. Perhaps the ruins may jog memories if you spend more time among them.

[ He's not unused to hard labour, if it's needed. Which it may be; the snow has covered everything.

It was a quiet place, most likely. Now it's gone. He feels pity, for those that once lived here and were wiped out for some likely petty reason. ]

[imitationsoul]

I don't know how I'd feel if it doesn't.

[ The statement slips out before she can think better of it, but then... she is in her destroyed childhood home. It doesn't get more honest than that, in itself. This is one of the three places that made her, forged her, a most intimate corner of her soul that even she cannot access. ]

Of course, I know this is all gone. There is nothing quite like seeing the ruins and stepping on the bones to drive that home. [ Hopefully not stepping on them literally, but she knows it might well happen once they go further in. Bizarrely, almost hopes it does. ] Nothing can ever reclaim that gentle glow of my memories. These people... whoever they were and whoever I was among them... They're dead. Free from those who did this.

But if we comb through it all, house by house, and there's still nothing in me....

[ She trails off, shakes her head. ]

I should just stay Schrödinger's Cat for now, don't you think?

[spelleton]

Perfectly understandable. [ He, too, had encountered a similar dilemma. His previous memories simply didn't come to him, no matter how hard he tried; they had been swallowed up, entirely obliterated by that traumatic experience.

He'd been wracked with guilt for a long, long time. ] I can't say I don't understand that sentiment, myself.

[ He holds out a hand, a bandage flying out ahead of him and burning away to create a light that can melt the snow at the same time, making it a little easier to walk. ]

Lead the way, miss Miach. This is your territory, far more than mine. It seems apt you should be the one to decide what we look at first.

[imitationsoul]

How courteous.

[ A bit of her usual cadence enters her flat voice at that, but her steps are much more heavy and grounded as she moves along, into the village core, where there are no ghosts to greet her.

Where the snow melts, they can see a few household objects scattered aimlessly across the ground, likely having remained where they were dropped in a panic nearly 10 years ago. ]

They killed them all simply because they could. They had fun doing it. How's that for the nature of all living things? Those people certainly lived true to their desires. They took what they wanted and got rid of anything unneeded. A simple and honest way to live.

[ But there is definitely contempt just below the surface of her voice. ]

[spelleton]

It's certainly a way to live, at any rate. [ His own tone is one of distaste, as he kneels to inspect the objects unearthed from under the snow. What had survived in this cold place, he wonders. What had been taken, what had been left behind - someone's precious belongings scattered across the ground like so much rubbish? ]

Not a good or a particularly far-sighted way, in my opinion. But a way, nevertheless.

[imitationsoul]

It's one of two extremes. Between over-thinking your every move to the point where you supress your desires so much that they eat you up inside and this - letting them run wild, a monster eating everyone else. Eating these people, taking healthy bites out of me...

[ She sits next to him, picking up what looks like a frozen children's shoe and turning it in her fingers. When all this happened she was eight, so presumably she'd have outgrown this size of shoes... ]

I wonder what we lived like here. I don't recall anything but a feeling of peacefulness. I suppose there is not a lot to strife over when you don't even have many trade relations to other villages....

[spelleton]

[ He casts a more discerning eye over the scant objects, though he's no anthropologist. ]

Often, the best way to understand how others lived is to look to what they did for leisure, and as an expression of themselves. Toys, games, decorations...

[ Things preserve well here, in the cold. It makes such discernment easier.

He stirs the snow and produces what looks like a misshapen toy, probably dropped in the chaos. He can only guess that either the person who did this was a poor craftsman or a child, or potentially someone had stepped on it and crushed it out of shape. ]

Admittedly, it's difficult to tell what might have been a key building, given the circumstances. But all the same, it's a point to start. [ Whenever she's ready to move on, he'll ignite another flame and follow her. ]

[imitationsoul]

I've tried researching this place before. How could I not? There's barely any mention of it in accounts from the surrounding areas. We really lived secluded from the world, only surfacing for basic trade when absolutely necessary...

[ It's aesthetically pleasing to imagine a society this self-sufficient, that's for sure, but in trying to reconstruct a life, it's nothing but a roadblock. ]

I don't know if my people even had writing. How weird to think I could have grown up into a person who never read a single book.

[ She laughs at the thought. Reading is so integral to everything she is as a person. ]

Just goes to show how far I am from all of this. Do you have things like that? Ways you would have never been yourself.

[spelleton]

I can't imagine you not reading, I can say that much. [ The few times he's spotted Miach in passing, she seems to be reading. Her desire for knowledge lends itself well to that. Trying to picture what she might be like without it is odd. ]

Mm. As far as I can tell, my family chose not to interfere in others' affairs. They preferred to work on their own projects in seclusion. [ It feels odd to talk about them like this, like they still have any connection to him. It doesn't feel that way; though he still carries part of them with him, there's only so much he can do. ]

I doubt I would have gained many of the skills I'm known for now, if they had lived. My work is part of me, so I find it hard to imagine what I could be without it.

[imitationsoul]

That's another thing we have in common then. Funny that.

[ Miach had lived her life expecting to never find a kindred spirit anywhere. Who in this world could possibly relate to her, see things even a little like she did? There was no way that she could ever resonate with another being. She'd embraced that solitude, made it part of her self-image, nurtured it.

And then she came to Daybreak Academy. And while she still believes that full understanding among her and anybody else is impossible, somehow there are people who are getting closer. Approaching and approaching, unwaveringly. ]

The distance between us and them is so wide. If it means giving up books, I don't think I ever want to cross it. Everything that happened here and after.... it was painful. It was hurt beyond what I could ever relay to another being. It made me learn the meaning of hatred and dread, words I am sure I never knew before. And yet... isn't that where I was born, really born? The Miach that stands before you right now is forged here, not with the gentle hand of a mother, but with the steel of my kidnappers.

[spelleton]

[ It's a speech that he finds unexpectedly resonant. Part of him thinks that Miach has a skill for oratory, for describing what she feels with eloquence; something that could help or hinder her path in the future.

Much more of him feels simply sadness. Though the circumstances that parted them from the places of their birth are different, the pain - and the changes that pain wrought on them - are all too similar. It isn't something he'd wish on another person; to see it in someone so young is a terrible thing indeed.

Softness to steel. He can't say he doesn't understand that, intimately.

He lets little of that sadness show. He feels that he knows enough about the girl in front of him that she wouldn't appreciate it. ]

Given that you remember far more about that experience than your family, it seems as if that's yet another thing we share. [ His smile is faint and melancholy; odd to smile at such a thing, perhaps, but the edges of his pain have been worn down by time and distance. ] As you said, it's in your loss that the current you was born. Similarly, so was I.

It's a strange place to be in, isn't it? It's not an experience that was asked for or wanted, and yet it made itself such an irreversible, indispensable part of who I am in its doing - that the person I would be without it is simply gone. I can never return to who I was before that, at least not in the same way. Without that pain, I simply wouldn't exist.

It's an odd fact to live with, but there's something to be said about being able to live with it at all, I think. [ He wonders if this will help her process it, if she's even begun to do such a thing, or if this is her way of digesting it and making it part of herself, rather than a weight outside herself she's burdened or haunted by.

(It's odd to think of Miach as particularly burdened by anything; she seems to float on the surface of things, good and bad. But she wouldn't have agreed, if in some way she wasn't - at least, that's what he thinks.) ]