A woman out of time, deeply wronged by her coven, emerges 300 years later into the modern world. Her body is a vessel for a dark hex that replaces her ties with the natural spirits that drive her magic with a life-consuming seedling that curses any who prick themselves on its blood-thirsty thorns.
sought/current connects;
The Host: ( @declanofruin )
Ironwood's elders had tried to scrub Briar from history, but mortal men will always crave power, and so some foolish soul sought to keep the witch's grimoire rather than keep it. Thus it tumbled through time, a well kept secret, but not too well kept. Before it landed in its final resting place, enough of it's incomplete verses had been poorly copied to cause problems in the far flung future. Declan McCormick finds himself host to something akin to the Deathroot, and it links he and Briar inexorably.
The Link: (daniella domotor)
Briar's grimoire eventually came to rest with a vampire who had found her way into the good graces of Ironwood. This was one of the first people sought out on her arrival, and the two enjoy a, er... fraught relationbship.
The Old Blood: ( @sunshincwitch )
Briar left Ironwood long ago, but in he return to the world, she finds that not only has it survived the centuries, but that there is a new rift in the coven surrounding a young witch, Chamomile. Briar would use this young woman as an athame for her revenge, a keening blade with which to sunder Ironwood, root and all.
The New Blood: ( @estrideats )
Falling in with The Phial Coven, Briar plays at the potionmaker, offering draught and drug to those in the know for any and all applications one might ply from magic. She keeps a garden in her humble apartment; and sells her makings impromptu and under the table. Most are mundane, banal drugs that help with ache or worry. Others are more murky in their purpose, or outright bloody in intent.
Friends/Coworkers ( @lrivkin , @bloodshcd)
Briar is an odd duck to most, and splits her life between her witchly pursuits and evenings at The Satin Cabaret where she dances and plies her body in exchange for money and, secretly, as fuel for the seedling in her soul, blood that feeds the Death Root and provides the font for her magical power.
PROLOGUE IS PAST
Seventh daughter born to her mother, Drufilla was raised in an era where man commited some of his greatest sins in the name of rooting out the sins of others. Raised in Ironwood Coven, she became beholden to the prophecy that a Seventh Daughter born of a Seventh Daughter would yield unimaginable and unlimitless magical potency.
Drufila, however, had no designs on motherhood. No desire to sire anything, for her heart had been taken by another Ironwood Woman. The two of them desired little else than to live their time out together, but A Seventh Daughter is too precious of a thing, and Ironwood's jaws were as cold and hard as strong as their namesake. They didn't care who Drufila Loved, but they wanted their Seventh of Seventh.
What resulted was a bloody swathe of murder that resulted in near ruin. For Drufila herself, and for generations of the Coven's history.
Drufila and her lover were dragged back to Ironwood's clutches in those early days, and Drufila's attempt to salt the earth of her womb to render herself useless to Ironwood's plan was met with harsh retaliation; her lover's blood and life were used to draught a concoction that would leave her fallow once more. The loss of love and the injustice of the ritual drove Drufila mad, and so once more she escaped Ironwood and into the woods of the countryside surrounding the coven's patch, from where where visited her vengeance upon them. Ere long she found herself quickened with an unwanted first of seven, in her grief and agony and hatred she used that child's life as fuel for her revenge; a Hex that would destroy Ironwood.
Blood and dark magic and her own affinity for the roots and herbs and flowers that grow up out of the Earth resulted in the cultivation of a seedling; the Death Root, a plague of a magical plant; she swallowed this seed and let it take root in her very soul, and it sapped up all of the magic in her, offering it's own power in exchange for blood.
It started simply; crops would harrow and yield only morbid, bleeding, misshapen fruit, livestock would turn up dead, wasted into nothing, strange black briars erupting from their bellies and sprouting up as they screamed about the incessant wailing of phantom infants. Soon enough however it was children doing the same; and anybody who would so prick their finger on those strange black thorns and would soon find themselves rife with consumption, a new soil bed for that accursed plant. Drufilla, to Ironwood, became the Briar Witch, a title she wore proudly.
It wasn't long before the leaders of Ironwood realized what the source of this hex was, and they bound together to commit to the world a ritual that would rid them of it. By the end, Ironwood's number was decimated, but Drufila was spelled away, trapped in another world, doomed to live out the same cold, wintry day for the rest of eternity.
The sisters of Drufila Ironwood scrubbed the shame of her name from their record. Her grimoire, and thus the nature of Deathroot, was intended for destruction, but those who covet power instead hid it away, where it tumbled through time in secret, the only record of this bloody and sinful era of the coven's history.
PAST IS PROLOGUE
Drufila emerged from that world after reliving the same wintery day for centuries, maddened by the torturous cycle of repetition . Drawn out of that hexed prison in the space between one year and the next, on a night where the stars matched those of the night she'd vanished and the veil between worlds had weakened, she found herself completely adrift. The keystone that acted as the block-gate to her empty mirrorworld had come to rest in The Siltshore Mausoleum in Port Leiry, bloodied and resting in a corner of the grass after an Ironwood Witch had lost their life in a massacre while in the area searching for the wayward Chamomile Greensmith.
Briar finds now a world that is as alien to her as any fairy story of her childhood. Flameless lights. Carts without Horses. Magical mirrors that held all the world's knowledge in them.
In the woody dimensions of her purgatory, the Deathroot Seed had fallen into hibernation and powerless slumber. She found, however, that three-hundred years had done nothing to quell her thirst for red revenge, and so she set about learning how to live in this new world, to find her Grimoire, to requicken the Death Root, and to find and destroy Ironwood once and for all.
Mirror Lake
The Summer Solstice following An Encounter in the Woods
With the huntress, addled as she is, sent off with the single point of clarity that what has been given must be kept secret and kept safe, elsewise destroyed for the good of all, Briar turns from the edge of the wood to the gleaming, still edge of the lake.
She bids Daniella come with her, if this is her choice.
The space around them is clear of the impostor spirits, but as she steps out onto the gleaming surface of the water, Briar leaves a trail of dark brambles rooting from the ground in her wake, providing a path over the water for her fellow immortal.
She has never been one for chants, or for wriggling her fingers.
Briar has always been a witch who likes dirt beneath her nails, who cares a great deal for the sensation of tacky, greasy blood drying to her fingertips. This rite, it will be no different. She had planned to use it to rid the world of her coven, a group of evil souls who had walked the earth several centuries too long, angling the bodies of its women as anchors for power.
It will fall, Ironwood - this she knows - but she will not be here to see it, lamentable as that is.
No. There will be no rain of deathroot from the sky, plucking the health out of her enemies. The deathroot's font of magic is needed elsewhere. She weaves the missive in her thoughts as she kneels down, Daniella at her back. "I'll need you to put thy hands upon me, child."
She turns to Danilla. "It will not be painless, nor will it be over quickly."
But with the keystone on the outside, in the Halstead woman's care - it may not be their end.
Funny how a family of hunters have in the end become the thing that solidifies her willingness to put her self aside, she watches Annalise go, eyes trailing off even when she is out of sight. A deep unneeded breath taken to solidify her resolve. Her life hangs in the hands of this odd witch unmarred by the sands of time. This odd being who has entwined herself within her life.
When Briar beckons her to come she follows with no true hesitation. She is sure of this, of the impossible path that life has put in front of her. Steps are sure as she steps across this magic made bridge, eyes peering along the water on either side of them until they are in the middle of it all. She watches her kneel and at her words she braces herself.
She's endured pain, but has never been cocky enough to scoff at it. Her fingers flex at her sides before delicate fingers are wrapping around the witch's shoulders. "Much older than you." She tries to brush with a slight tease, before rolling her own shoulders.
"Whatever it takes. I'm ready."
Briar would never be so humble as to prostrate herself in a prayer to any God, let alone the God of her long-dead parents, but there is a mote of apprehension and wonderment in her thoughts at the notion of endlessness - if she would do better to simply break the barrier that locks these things off from the rest of the world so that she might make good her own escape; to scurry away from the tidal wave of their surge and find some isolated place in the world to live out rest of her days until death.
But that sounds dolorous and boring, and so the mote is crushed beneath the heel of hope that one day in the far flung future, Chamomile will find a way to pluck her out of nothing once more.
She places her hands against the pristine water, only to find them mirrored by hungry souls beneath, desperate to emerge and find those they are bound to. They realize, quickly, that she is not what they want, and the air fills with a shriek so baleful that she can feel her ears threaten to burst beneath it.
Outside this space, in the city, their brothers and sisters and minions here it like an alarum bell, and decide that the time for quiet endeavor is older.
The city descend into chaos, but here, te shriek ends, and it is replaced by the slamming sounds of a thousand thousand hands beneath the surface of the lake, hammering for escape.
Briar's eyes hollow, sinking into dark pits. Thorns burst from her skin, starting at the ends of her fingers, running up along her arms, and then her shoulders, where they pierce Daniella's hands, chaining the two of them together as the Deathroot begins to siphon its power from the both of them.
They won't die, Briar had assured her of that, it isn't something she is worried about. It's the unknown of it all, of where they end up, the prospect of being in timeless darkness much more brutal than the night in this waking world. The unknowing of things is something that has always plagued her. Unsure of her human life, torn from her. Her true age. What her family had looked like. Where she had truly come from. The magic that has so recently been lifted from her, and now the magic she will be so willingly be taking on.
Her hands tense against the shoulders they hold too as a piercing scream of so many things below the waters surface try to rally, try to break themselves free. Blood trickles from her ears, ringing, healing then bursting again with their sensitivity. And then altogether it ends and she knows not what that means.
She can't see Briar's face, but she does see the way thorns seem to break and wind their way up her hands, her arms, then belated stinging pain as they thrust themself through her own hands, she yelps at the pain, natural reaction telling her to pull away because it fucking hurts, easing in an anguished burning, she holds tight regardless of what her mind tells her. Of what her sense of survival screams for her to do.
She tightens her grip, driving the spines in deeper, gritting her teeth, she is sure the flesh beneath her grip is already giving, her hold near crushing and her eyes transfixed to where stolen blood oozes from the wounds. And then it feels as if something is feeding off of her, sucking from deep within.
The roots burst out of her skin, drinking the potency of a vampire into themselves. At the same time, they tear through the rest of her, snaking over the surface of the lake.. At the same time, it breaks through her back, growing in a twisting, gnarled stalk, up towards the sky.
The city bursts into conflict. Mankind rallies, ushering themselves into safe spaces. Not all will survive, but most will. Many will.
At the lake, the ice begins to crack and shatter under the strength of the vile Deathroot, and when it begins to crush its way through, the mercurial creatures begin to burst through, spidering around them on countless limbs - a thousand terrible reflections of a thousand nameless faces. They lurch and lunge, and the Deathroot, bolstered by its toxic magic, begins to weave a protective ring around the two of them, around it's black, skyward creeping stalk.
It seems like it takes ages. Hours, days, weeks, years. Time has become as murky and unknowable of the rest of the space within the ward.
Briar can feel her flesh withering under the influence of its magic - if not for the vampire at her back, feeding into her immortal undeath through the creeping vines, she would be little more now than dust and ash.
The roots fully burst through the ice, and the air around the lake fills with the warbling shrieks of monsters - high above, the Deathroot bursts into an enormous red bloom, channeling the magic of centuries of stolen life in a single ephemeral beam that seems to hone itself on an empty space of sky. Cracks form. Fissures run like red lightning from the sky.
Beyond the barrier, where the world has simply continued, it is as if nothing is happening, but inside, the sky cracks apart, revealing not night but the bright height of noon through the gaps in the darkness.
She begins to chant - the end of this rite nears. Two final pieces of a puzzle. The first is a whispering spell of transmuting magic - the illusory ward that has cut the world off from the city inverting, until its domereflects the world back, catching the glint of thousands of creatures in its reflection as that reflection begins to crack and shatter, forcing many of them into shrieking agony.
"Daniella!" She screams, the silvery creatures who've refused to look skyward seeping through their defense "I'm quite sorry, I think may've lied when I told you we'd live through this."
She can't even focus on what is happening around her so blinded by the pain coursing through her body, her knees weakening as more is pulled from her, life and energy feeding into the spell she can't even realize is growing, is pulsing.
Her eyes darken and flood red, fangs extending as she grits through the need to scream out in anguish. She knows her grip is crushing, that she can't be the only one in pain as she falls to her knees , pressing into the painful spikes burst from the witch and then the heat starts, everything brightening in a way she's never even fully remembered witnessing, her first time in the sun after centuries in darkness and it sets her skin in a fiery burn, she gasps out a cry and presses closer.
"At least I'll go out with a final glimpse of the sun. Can't say I thought it'd be the thing ending me." She yells out in pain as blisters start to form. "I don't think I'm going to last much longer."
The heat blossoms as Summer Sun punches through the dark, burning at the ward. It's light hits the ground and bounces back up, fills the dark with bright summerlight. In a though, Briar channels will into the stalk, and a wreath of twining brambles arch over the two of them, shielding them from the sun. Red leaves begin to bloom from it, expanding its shade. "Not yet, I fear. I need you for a bit more."
The roots hit the edge of the ward, and begins snaking over it, pushing against it and sucking the magic clean.
For an instant, all of Port Leiry and its surroundings are reflected in the sky, two worlds brought face to face.
The black vines of the Deathroot push and push and push, and then blossom with their blood-red leaves.
The ward itself, and its reflection of the city crack, swell, and then shatter.
It seems like snow at first, the glistening glimmer that falls from a no sunny sky. The creatures in the mirror lake scream and writhe as they begin to rot and burst and harden into shimmering dust.
All across the city, their unturned remnants do the same - only those already turned, or able to escape the sky are spared.
And then, blossomed, the Deathroot saps the final bit of energy from the witch bound to the vampire, wreathing them together into the trunk of a great dark tree in the center of the laker. The roots in the sky burst into flame, sizzling into nothing and dumping a snowfall of magical ash onto the city - ash that will soothe the memory of those who might rather go on believing in the mundane banality of the world.
The great vine dries too, crumbling and withering and disintegrating into the lake as The Deathroot too dies.
ā
What is left is a sunny day in June, the longest day of the year. What is left is the rapidly melting snow, leaving a city perplexed in the aftermath of a riotous, collective hallucination. The conspiracists will rail against any attempted explanation. The powers that be, human and othrwise, will be dogged in the who and the how of their silencing measures.
In the center of the Mirror Lake, now placid save for the gentle summer breeze drifting across its surface, sits a gnarled black tree with strange red leaves - singular among its peers in this tiny hidden forest. It stands there regardless, effecting the image of two women in embrace, should one stare at it just a touch too long.
And a thousand stories of that night float around - mouth to ear, in strange forums buried on the internet, or in the files of ancient guilds and clans of immortal creatures or stories told by packs around a campfire under a new moon. Stories of how, for a time, Port Leiry simply stopped for a while, held in place by a common enemy until even its greatest enemies had no choice but to save eachother.
And Somewhere, in keeping of an addled woman in a fur coat, a gemstone glows, holding in it a world of eternal ice and snow with only two souls inside to weather it.
But they will weather it - and as within, so without - so too will all.
It was assurance enough that Daniella had noticed, but the lack of response about others told her all that she needed to know.
There was a conversation she wasn't privy to, a plan she had no knowledge of and yet had been thrust into, and even in an altered state, she could tell that it was dire. Annalise knew something was wrong; her mind wasn't what it had been before, but she couldn'tĀ rememberĀ what it had been.
Fingers on her back were soothing and calming, and, what was more, she felt the changes within her. She no longer felt like her stomach was eating her from the inside out, or that her throat was going to close up from being so dry - it was enough to allow some concentration on what Briar was saying, enough to realise the seriousness of the situation.
"I... Yes, I can wear it, but what does it do? What do I have to do?" It had to be more than a simple necklace, something more than an accessory to wear. It seemed like the unspoken words were protect this with your life, but what were the consequences if something were to happen to it?
"What happens if it's taken or broken?" She wasn't sure she'd remember the answer, but it was better to hope that she would than her not know its importance. Brows furrowed, looking back to Ella, "Wait, why do I have to look after it? When are you coming back?" @blccmedrage
She listens too, her hands have fallen away from Annalise, something in her knowing this really was a good by, for how long she isn't sure. But she isn't naive enough to think this place they are going had the possibility of being permanent. That she will have to break her personal vow and take from Briar. It's unsettling, this unknown, but hadn't her whole life been filled with them.
Lis seems to be coming too more as Briar speaks, her own eyes are trained on the witch's profile. On the way she soothes the other. A sight she's never witnessed before. She wonders if this was something Ironwood had taken from her too.
At Lis' question of the necklace she gives a little 'Hm' curious herself about the trinket, fascinated by its gleam. Whatever it is, it is clearly a final key in this process. It's is like second nature when Annalise looks back to her and she looks back at her. She hopes her smile is reassuring, even if the look she is getting hurts a bit.
"Don't you worry about us, you need to go home. Find Reid, he'll keep you safe. Everything will be fine."
"Not to overisimplify, darling-heart, but you must simply keep it safe. Think of it as a key... to the door that will lock away all this awfulness. You wouldn't want all this to happen a third time, would you?" She considers, inwardly, that a third time might be fun in that mystically symmetrical way, but then she chocks that up to an intrusive thought best ignored. Her hand traces along the ground, planting a tiny vineling seed before refoucsing on the girl to help her fully to her feet. She questions further, and Briar, taken for a moment, is at a loss.
"-ehr... simply don't do either of those and we won't need to find out." With a nervous and manic smile, she pats the woman's shoulder, to gently solidify that as tantamount. A bold contingency, perhaps, but dire straits called for such dire plays.
Daniella reassures her friend, Briar looking between the two of them as they share, wordless or otherwise, their goodbyes. Between the three of them, at their feet, a small black vine blooms with red blossoms, and she kneels to whisper its instructions and then to Annalise she looks, suddenly serious.
"This little creeper will lead you to safety. It will know who and what to avoid. I do hate to cut this all short but time is of the essence."
And it's true; the cold has been growing, first week by week, then day by day, but now, hour by hour and minute by minute. If they are to save this city and keep safe everything outside of it, they must do as they must.
"Good-bye, Annalise," she says, and the little black vine begins to writhe its way back the way she and Daniella had come. "You've a few breaths, Ella. Make of them what you will, I've got to go... steel myself."
She jumps as the other takes her face in her hands, eyes frantic as she searches Daniella's for recognition - anything to tell her that she was real, that this was real, and she wasn't passed out somewhere about to die from the cold she could feel deep in her bones.
Annalise is thankful for the coat draped around her shoulders, pulling it tightly around her as teeth chattered, glancing between Ella and the woman she didn't recognise.
Briar.
The name wasn't familiar, should it be? Was this something else her hazy mind struggled to grasp, or information she never knew? Trying to remember caused her to squeeze her eyes tightly shut, whimpering at how out of place everything felt, how out of place she felt.
Hand on her breastbone now, the women touching her, grounding her, but it caused panic to rise. Something was going on, something big, and Lis had been caught in the middle of it. She remembers her own eyes staring back at her, ready to kill, before something stopped it. It couldn't do it, and Annalise didn't know why, but this was almost worse. She almost wished it had killed her.
"She's not a trollop." Lis growls, but she copies Briar's breathing, some warmth finally setting in, at least at the surface level.
"Did anyone notice? That I wasn't me?" She asked Daniella, though her eyes already betrayed that she knew the answer. Nobody was close enough to her anymore to notice; she had no one to put her first, no one to fall back on when the world went to shit.
Blinking away tears that threatened to freeze on her skin, her eyes diverted to Briar, "What can I do?" @blccmedrage
She looks so scared, Lis looking at her in search. It's enough to let her know she has to do this. That thing had found a weak spot and in doing so the other blonde could have died. Should have died. She barely registers Briar's insult, honestly used to it by now, it was just the witch's nature she's come to accept.
She glances over to said woman when she lays a hand on the Hunter's chest, glad for her assistance in calming her down. In warming her. Light eyes catch on the gem finally, eyebrows pinching for a moment before she smooths her features, acts like she knows exactly what it is as a way to hopefully comfort Lis further.
"It's fine, not the worst she's called me." She tries a soft smile, fingers of her left hand pushing back disheveled hair behind Annalise's ear. "I noticed." She assures her, honestly she's been so caught up in the slow unraveling of her thoughts and constant reading to really know if there had been anyone else having avoided most others.
She turns to Briar herself now, keeping her hands on the Hunter's skin in hopes of being calming for the other woman. "She isn't going to be hurt further is she? If so we need another."
There's a bit of a wider smile, at this stranger's protest of her roasting of the vampire - a bit of caretaker's glee - long fossilized bones of an apothecary and caretaker showing themselves at signs of life in the afflicted. "You're right, she's not," she says, in a tone that is reassuring, a rarity to cross Briar's lips.
"I'm sure you'll have much to explain when you've returned, child." Briar says, hand moving to the woman's back, clad in her offered coat now. "You may feel weak, but your presence here might be the sort of serendipity that saves lives." Souls, at least; lives are ephemeral and flesh is a mouldering trap after all, soft and squishy and meant to be used and discarded - it's the soul that's iron - well, not so much iron these days, she chides herself.
Briar's fingers and nails knead at the stranger's back, imparting unto her the barest sip of magic - enough to sate what is most like a starving belly, a dry throat - enough to solidify her resolve to ensure escape. "I will you keep this coat, Annalise. And here..." She draws a necklace from its depths, dangles it in front of her. "I'd planned for this to sink lost forever into the soil here, but in exchange for the way out, will you carry it with you? Keep it safe for us?"
Til the day you die, she does not say. Her answer will not change the outcome here, at this infernal lake, but it will become the hinge upon which her future and Daniella' swings between prospect and oblivion.
She hears voices and makes her way towards them, light that isn't the cave reflecting the cold at the end of the tunnel. If this is death, she welcomes it. Apsara had been right, she would freeze here if she didn't get out soon; she was already feeling warmer, which she was sure meant the end was coming.
The voice is closer now, addressing her, and Annalise is lost, confused, until eyes move past the person addressing her and find Daniella.
"Ella..." Lis whimpers, legs almost giving out from underneath her as tears brim in her eyes. "Dead. She's dead. I killed her. Brains and bone and blood... Everywhere." She looks down at her hands, covered in the blood of the imposter who had practically begged for her death. The last time this happened-- No, she couldn't think of the last time. What was the last time? Why couldn't she remember? Oh, she was gonna hurl.
"I don't know, yes? Yeah. Just help me, please. They trapped me. They- they kept me, couldn't kill me. Don't know why. Why didn't they kill me? I gotta warn them, I have to tell my parents." @blccmedrage
As the person emerging from the dark comes into view it makes her pause, the hand that had been holding Briar's own held limp in the air as pieces fit together, as a puzzle clicks into place. Annalise's odd behavior, at the out of place offer in a heated club. Of not right blood brushed off as medication used for her recovery. She had known it then in her bones that something had been off. She hadn't smelt quite right, was off in her movements. Daniella isn't completely certain in when she had began watching the youngest Halstead so closely, but seeing her here, covered in blood. Marked in confusion and distress, the vampire's name falling from her lips.
She looks scared and Ella takes a step closer and then another until she takes her face in her hands. "Breathe Lis, breathe." she murmurs, eyes locked with the younger blonde. She turns to look at Briar. " This is the nature of these creatures? To take and replace?" she finally understands. A creature she's never heard of in her long years upon this earth. And then light eyes are back on the Hunter.
"Briar and I are going to take care of these things, are you hurt at all?" Maybe not the time for such personal worry, but if she was going to be gone after this interaction she'd let herself indulge a moment.
The presence of a third, it sets gears rolling in her mind, and she fidgets with something in the pocket of her downy fur coat as she eyes the woman and then looks to Daniella as her resolve seems to, for whatever reason, momentarily crumple. There is an instant, she fears, where she wonders if she might have to subdue the both of them - if Daniella's connection with this poor sod is strong enough it might threaten to rob them both of her resolve.
It would be cruel perhaps, to kill the girl and dominate the vampire so quickly after unyoking her, but there can only be so many detours before saving anything becomes saving nothing.
Briar moves to the other side of the girl, Annalise, and pulls the heavy coat from her shoulders before draping it across her shivering shoulder, the cold biting into her almost immediately. To Daniella's question, she nods, as if she knows anything about anything, and then returns her attentions to the girl.
Her hand pulls then from the pocket a singular gem on a twinkling chain; the stone fashioned back together. It glimmers in the dim dark, as if a fire reflects in it nearby. A year and some months prior its fission had released her into the world - now resealed, she had wondered if it might play key again, but without a soul to carry it out, she had all but abandoned the idea. Now...
A warm hand goes to the girl's breastbone, and Briar breathes, trying to get her to match rhythm.. "You'll be safe, so long as you be calm, yes? Breathe, like this trollop tells you. You might yet be the one to save two lives."
"Well, hello, little lost sheepie," she says, moving towards a woman of young age and flaxen color.
Briar's hands remain raised as she steps past her vampire compatriot. The Deathroot inside her remains still; she can trust this one, at least insofar that she is not one of the strange colors out of space that constitute this place's gravest threat.
It is the endgame then, those who have escaped the pool of mercury a hundred yards behind them are all in the city, working to free their brethren. This calls for a cigarette, which she lights, the scent of hand-rolled cloves filling the space; while it calms its nerves, it also serves to further mask their presence, to buy them a few minutes.
"I am called Briar, and this is Daniella. Have you your wits, child?"
with @blccmedrage;
Near the edge of the strange wood that's been made of the city's outer bounds...
It had been a silent ride as they visited the rest of the points on the map. Five points outside, five inside, each deathroot seedling torn from the ground and absorbed back into her skin returning the ounces of power to the scion inside of her.
After pulling out the anchor root at the center of it all, Briar feels a surge of energy flowing inside her, and, casting her eyes skyward, watches the sun begin its early descent as her wayward children whisper what they've learned into her mind.
"I' am sorry, Daniella, to break your heart. But rest easy knowing we will both have our revenge."
She directs their commandeered chauffer to the entrance of some woods, and dismisses him. Here, at the fringes, as the moon rises and the hidden sun sinks, they stand at a bow in the line of trees at the highways edge. Her deathroot guides her towards the source of the spell that seals the city.
"We must find the center, you can ask any questions you might like as we go."
ā
Sheās sullen, eyes focused on the partition refusing to look at the witch. Perhaps it is childish, Briar hadnāt been the one to put her under this spell. Briar hadnāt been the deceiver. She wonders how many of her choices had been her own in her days amongst Ironwood, and how many had simply been a means to being their tool? How many times had her undead heart been forced to squeeze with something unnatural?
No, it isnāt Briar who had laid it, but is Briar who is aware of it and makes use. Sheāll sacrifice herself based off of someone elseās decision for her. She is trapped once again at the end of her long life, the way sheād been trapped at its start.
The drive takes what seems ages and then the witch is commanding the man up front once more. When they arrive at their final destination she leaves the journal sheās kept so close behind. If her heart didnāt ache, if she were more spiteful, she would spit on its cover.
Instead she follows after Briar, boots crunching in the snow as she comes to stand next to the shorter woman and follows her towards their goal. āHow long have you known? Have I been a puppet for your amusement this entire time?ā
ā
"A hunch, really," she says as they go. "A hunch, and then trial and error - you can't stand me, and yet you give in on arguments quickly - or well, you couldn't stand me. But, well. Look at us now."
She sighs, tromping through the snow in suede boots that only look like they can withstand the cold. The temperature drops, deeper and deeper - she wonders if Daniella can feel it.
"I tested small demands first, then larger ones. Until I was sure something was afoot. Again. Ironwood is insidious - your Emily might have done it to protect you in some roundabout way, who knows? You ended up here, anyways - far away from any Ironwood power - may not be coincidence." She shrugs.
"We all do terrible things for stupid reasons sometimes - she is not here to ask, so it is left to you to imagine the why."
ā
She listens, and it is true. She hadnāt been able to stand the strange little witch in the beginning. Her harsh words and accusations. It had been tiring and tedious to deal with her. But the grimoire, she remembers, Briarās, the one sheād been sworn to protect. She had handed it to the owner with a mere few proddingās. And she does like to think their companionship isnāt fully based on a lie. She wants to believe her ties to Emily hadnāt been either. That her friendship to young Chamomile held just as real despite what name is there.
āShe wrote a lot in her journal about being fifth and the disappointment that came with it. Sheād say things about it occasionally but never divulge why it mattered.ā She sighs.
āI donāt want to think ill of you, of Cham. But I questioned how much of my love is truly my own.ā She truly shivers the closer they get, joints feeling almost brittle with cold that seeps in, she knows what it is only because sheās heard it described before and her hands slip into her pockets uselessly.
āMy task was to keep your grimoire from the rest. To run until it was not being threatened. Thatās the last thing she told me.ā She shakes her head. āYou wish to sacrifice me, what does that entail? Because as of right now I think Iām freezing. It at least feels like what Iāve heard.ā
ā
Briar's breath curls off her tonuge, whisps of dragon-steam in the dark. Daniella's lament though, eventually pries a groan from her, and a sardonic eyeroll.
"I'm not sacrificing you, you pillock," she laughs. "I was being dramatic to show you you'll agree to anything, so long as I or Chamomile or any other Ironwood is the one to say it."
"- But you are going to make a sacrifice - I am, as well." She fishes her book out, no new magic has been scriven there since her imprisonment, only a record of her time locked away. "Endless cold, a world stuck in time, every way in but no way out? I've been here before. Not here, but thisā¦ strangeness. It's a buffer world, a pocket of space meant to contain something. In other wordsā¦"
They mount a hill and look down into a valley. "That."
A lake, pristine and still, sits amid a clearing, a lone cabin sitting ark on its other side. Despite the icy cold, its placid surface sits, unfrozen.
ā
The groan is enough to still her and her tongue, the insult enough to cause a huff of annoyance. āAlways so damn rude.ā she grumbles, a sacrifice, not death. That was at least something.
āDoes Cham know?ā she asks curiously about this infliction upon her, she supposes if a coven dark enough to kill their own has her under their control she has lucked out quite well with only Briar and Chamomile having entered her life recently.
She looks out into the valley, at the lake. Putting together the pieces before she speaks. āYou and I are going to trade ourselves for the city, arenāt we?ā She finally asks, eyes still focused on the cabin and taking in a deep breath. āIn this bubble of a world, do you feel hunger?ā She glances to Briar knowing that sheāll understand the true question
ā
"I've left my sister-in-time a letter, explaining all which needs explained." She says, coldly. Ironwood. The Deathroot. Daniella, her hex, and instructions to live well and carry on the work. "I don't think she did, for what it's worth. She's the one good sprog that coven's ever blessed the Earth with. Had she known, she'd have likely thrown herself stupid trying to undo it."
She turns back to Daniella. "Good for us she missed it. You're a useful tool here."
She starts down the hill. "I'll channel my being into this ward - change it's makeup. Somebody botched it - made it cast a wider net. i'll shrink it to a mote, and plant my seed in it - all inside will die, and you and I will be left to tend what's left. But yes," she says. "we will trade ourselves for the city."
She stops at the bottom.
"Yes, but it's a shallow hunger - it won't kill, justā¦ wither. You have noticed it, haven't you? The city's descended into chaos, and everybody's simplyā¦ gone along with it, waiting for their turn to be picked off? These things breed complacency and the reap it like rows of maize. The lucky will die first, or be taken. The hardier ones next - the magically inclined, the wolves. The vampires, I suppose, will make it the longest - hardy as they are, but these things are not only immortal, butā¦ unbeing. They areā¦ light out of place. They'll win."
ā
She knows it's true, Cham wouldn't have let her stay this way if she knew. Chamomile had never asked much of her aside from friendship. She gives a nod in acknowledgement even if she hates the way her ailment is being used for the other's benefit. She knows though, somewhere deep that Briar does not mean it in such a way. Or maybe she is misreading it and she does. She follows along, listening.
"If I had known what you'd be having me do I'd have at least said good-bye to a few. But I suppose it is too late for that now." She may not fully be doing this of her complete will, but she's already coming to accept it for what it was. Life was never predictable, and hardly ever had a fairness about it. One could only move forward. Embrace what came to them in stride.
Once she reaches the bottom of the hill and is standing back by the witch's side she works her jaw. She has noticed it. Things had stopped being predictable. People had stopped being predictable. A hand raises, fingers running through blonde locks.
"You know, if you had explained to me what everything meant before you asked, I might have agreed before you need command." She tells her honestly. "I've noticed it though, the way the world has become ā othered. Not quite right. Nothing is quite right. I think a part of me began to change. Losing track of feeding. Losing track of time in a way I normally wouldn't. I don't even remember when the snow started. It doesn't matter, just, lead the way."
ā
"Well, I know now." She says, flippant. It won't do to dwell on if what she is doing is good or evil - two immortals need be here for this. The magic inherent in them will act as renewable fuel, so that this might not happen again.
As they walk, she ponders on Daniella's words. She had not gotten to say goodbye either - not to anyone. Not to who was taken from her, not to who she was taken from. This is the way of the world, she has always reckoned. Justice is an unnatural artifact. The harsh lack of it is the world's natural state.
They walk the lake, and then, at a cabin, Briar touches her hands to the ground, black roots threading out of her skin and feathering along the snowy floor. She follows their movements until she finds it tracing a path, and standing uses it as a dowsing rod to guide their way.
The woods are deep, and grow dark enough that she needs to shiny a dull red glow from the vines pulling her hand like a lead, casting the woods in a strange coat of light. It goes like this until they hear footsteps, hurried and rumbling through the woods in their direction.
ā
She lets the quiet settle round them, though it isn't tense like it had been in the limo. Just a companionable thing, two women doing something to save a mass of people. Unlucky saviors. Even if the choice wasn't completely her own, Daniella hadn't been lying, she would have given herself for this cause. What was the loss of a few for the safety of more? Selfless, she thinks.
She watches, admittedly enraptured, at the vines that spring from Briar as if her very veins are cultivating themself within the earth. She's seen magic for centuries and yet every gift, every spell still brings forth complete fascination. She wonders if she'll have the chance to ask for more explanations and demonstration in this pocket they plan to trap themselves away within.
The darkness that presses round them even makes her keen eyes squint to attempt to make sight come but Briar remedies that as well. The sound of coming foot fall hits her first, the singing of blood pumping from a beating heart, a second. Without question she moves closer to Briar, not knowing how far the witch can extend herself with the magic she is already using. Not knowing what danger may be approaching. Whatever it may be, it is definitely mortal, or inclined to pretend as such.
ā
The footfalls seem to amplify, and then morph into something stretched and strange, echoing off the bare trees. Briar, nearly clung to by Daniella, traces the sound in reverse, until she sees a strange, dark void between a set of snow-rimed boulders that set sunken into the ground.
"Thereā¦" She says, tugging the vampire along with her for a few steps. Her stomach lurches, the first bit of fear she has felt in centuries, and, looking back to Daniella, she swallows thickly and turns to her fully.
"I intend to seal this place, to cut them off, first from the world, and then from existence entirely." Her speech is hurrried, and her hand snatches out to Daniella, thumbpint falling to the woman's forehead as she chants in some sort of language that makes little sense to the ear. It is a great expenditure of power - one she cannot afford, really, but if she is to die here, it will not be her last action to crawl into her grave perpetrating the same evil she's survived so long to destroy.
"Your hex is broken," she says, pulling her hand free, leaving an ashy mark in the middle of Daniella's brow. "You're free to go, but with me or without me, you need to make your choice soon"
She leaves no space for further discussion, turning to the rushing footsteps coming towards them from the depths of the cave.
ā
She shifts more to shield her companion as Briar huddles close as the noise stretches and pulses as if in surround sound. The gaping blackness they come upon brings a chill even to her, but she lets the witch take her closer to their destination.
Suddenly they are even closer, sheās confused by the press of thumb, doesnāt know if this is a part of the sealing, doesnāt know if these are her last moments in this place of frost and ice. But suddenly a weight she never realized existed shifts. Itās like they say a gasp of air after being held under water for far too long feels. Like her lungs are expanding, her heart thump after being compressed by a fist squeezing, all those silly sounding things humans say. She blinks down at the witch. This Ironwood woman who has given her a gift and it solidifies her resolve.
Her hand shifts, fingers threading with Briarās own. Thinking of the people back in town, thinking of the people sheās come to know and get close to. āWell this disaster of a city isnāt going to save itself, and Iām hardly letting you have all the fun. Letās get this over with. Together.ā
ā
There's a tender moment there, and Briar feels the vampire's fingers curl between her own - it's felt, if briefly in the black-beating lump of flesh in her chest that is wire-wrapped with poisonous bramble. A strange sisterhood with this outsider.
Can't have that.
Briar coarsely rips her hands from Daniella. "Enough of that soft nonsense, look alive."
She nods to the mouth of the cave, where footfalls have become loud to the point of being un-ignorable. Briar's skin blossoms with black snaking vines, but they fall like pine-needles to the snowy mud when what stumbles out of the cavern is just a woman... a haggard one, but the Deathroot does not quiver at her presence the way it does the denizens of this world.
"Well, hello, little lost sheepie," she says, moving towards a woman of young age and flaxen color.
She's still trying to process, but as Briar repeats herself the words stick this time, like the words being from this particular witch solidifies them. She feels unease. She feels sick. Emily wouldn't do that, she loved her, she wasn't like the others from the coven. She had promised to keep Daniella from their wickedness. Keep her from the darkness she had willingly become a part of for the way a single girl had made her heart sing. And here Briar was tarnishing that name.
"Emily wouldn't, she worked in greenery, not curse." She says as if it is the only truth that can exist. Like centuries of a solid word isn't shattering and crumbling away. Rejecting that another has used her for their gain. When the witch says she'll prove it she can prove it a protest is quick on her tongue, but it dies as Briar begins again. Sacrifice herself? For what? And why would she ever agree to such a thing? But her mouth moves before she can form the denial
"Of course not. I'd never make you do something like that alone. Are you sure I'm not enough?" Her face pulls in confusion and then falls. "Sheā¦" She takes a deep breath and looks away. The pull, to Briar. The urge to be near Chamomile. The sudden and unquestionable loyalty. It's fully on display. She shakes it away. "Do you mean your words? Is that what this is truly about?"
She doesn't protest, either, because an argument isn't what they need, it will simply cost time. The Solstice comes, and its celestial markers are likely the last chance this city will have to escape what she knows is poised to consume it.
Daniella sinks, and Briar's face shifts subtly into something apologetic. It is unfair, this she knows. But Daniella is convenient, and her immortality is useful. It will take two to keep death at bay.
"This curse that's fallen on this city is greater than you or I, but it is familiar. You've seen it, haven't you? How those in this town treat a thousand passing days of snow as if they are the same? As if nothing is out of place? We have descended into a space between spaces - and while people may drift in, eventually, this place will become little more than a twisted reflection of itself. I can't allow that to happen, because there is somebody in this city I need to make it out."
She commands the driver drive faster, and then turns once more to Daniella. "I'll explain further on the way," whispers Briar, and places a consoling hand on Daniella's shoulder. "I'm sorry, for what it's worth. But sometimes we don't get to choose. It's the way of the world."
As it always does, the mention of Emily's name causes a dull ache in her chest where she logically knows a heart once beat. An emptiness. A longing. It's something she never can quite remember if she's experienced before, perhaps for the old witch in the mountains, but even she pales in comparison to the one who had claimed her soul. Damned or otherwise.
She almost misses what Briar claims, a faint sound through a sudden low rumbling in her ears. A rushing as if underwater. If she wasn't looking at her, if she wasn't concentrating, she would have missed it. Her eyebrows pull together. The fogginess still clouding her mind as she tries to process what is being said. Trying to piece together something as it is already beginning to ebb away as if the thoughts were flowing from her completely.
"What?" She asks, and it's clear the confusion is real. Something in the source of magic she is unaware of draining the thought, but the curiousness of her tries to chase it. It's clear on her face as she keeps looking at Briar. "Sorryā¦I can'tā¦what did you say?"
Briar has never witnessed it from a vampire - what the kids these days refer to as a 'major crash-out'. But she can see - at least she believes she can see - the beginnings of it as Daniella seems to go slack and stupid at the mere mention of the name.
It would almost be comical were it not exactly placed in such a way as to prove the claim on its own.
Should Daniella attack her here, it will be for nothing, and so she tenses in her own way, banking on the residual energy of the curse in question (for, call it what it is, a stallion is a horse and a hex is a curse) to protect her.
"I said your Emily's hexed you - an Ironwood favorite, placing women under thumb - it's not novel or new, and while I've suspected for sometime, I've pinpointed what exactly it is that keeps pulling me into your direction. I've already a way to prove it;"
Without further prompt or explanation, she turns to squarely face Daniella. "You're going sacrifice yourself, along with me. Do you refuse?"
'Nine.' Busy indeed. She gives a nod, sets the book in her lap aside and gives Briar her full attention, something deeper is happening. She had known it when the witch had asked for her to come with her. When she had asked for a favor.
Briar very rarely asked for things, strong and capable, independent to a fault. It was endearing and respectful. And without hesitation the blonde had agreed, not that she wouldn't for anyone else. But Briar herself asking had brought no pause. Light eyes glance up to the partition between them and the driver and she lets out a hum.
"What this is really about?" She asks, gaze moving back to the witch. "You've found something and it involves my assistance more than just a parlor trick for a free ride, doesn't it?" It's more of an statement than a question, but nothing accusatory.
"It's actually about something else - well, sort've."
There is an ulterior motive to her asking Daniella to tag along, but that is a question for after this first important discussion. Communion with the deathroot is to sup on the dead memories of Ironwood, for it claims their dead souls for itself and thus their memories.
She turns to face the vampire. "Your Ironwood witch - the girl, Emily. The one you hold a candle for - she's hexed you, do you know this?"
She doesn't know what exactly they are doing as they drive from location to location, Briar had simply said that she was tying up her witchery and Daniella had taken it as explanation enough. A deep rooted trust in the witch she has come to consider a dear friend. The one she has made a promise to. And how odd when their first meeting had been such a memorable encounter. When something dear to her, something she had been entrusted to guard had been returned to an owner seemingly frozen in time.
Now she can't imagine a time that Briar hasn't been there, as if the grimoire the vampire had protected had imbued some form of connection. A kinship. Now she sits in the back of a limo, of course a limo was asked for their travels, the driver enchanted by her compulsion, he doesn't ask questions. Just drives when he is told to drive. She scrolls through her phone as she waits, and for once she doesn't feel like she has all the time in the world. For once she feels like perhaps she has an expiration date.
She sets the device aside as Briar returns, inquisitive eyes taking in her profile as she pours herself a drink and the vehicle starts to move again. "It can be rather helpful. How many more spots are there now?" She asks, settling back in a more comfortable position as she looks to the witch fully. She still feels hungry, still hasn't fed but sparingly. A quick sip from the driver up front, but nothing to fog his senses. "Because honestly it seems like you've been busier than I could have imagined." She rubs her eyes and then picks at the journal in her lap, the only thing she herself has thought to bring, nothing terribly useful, but the sentimentality of it had begged it of her.
"Nine," she says, looking at the window as their haunted chauffer hauls them back onto the road.
She looks back to Daniella, face a smug mask stretched tightly over her worry and misgiving. She has long mastered this sort of subterfuge - a smile bronzing her face to hide the miserable rumination of her mind as she nods. "Very busy."
The frosty haze passes by outside the car. "I've something to tell you, Daniella - something important."
Briar doesn't have a car - doesn't know a lick about how to properly run one of the things, but nevertheless, here she is on the edges of this berg, staring into and infinity of trees and cold wind and snow.
It's all a bit too familiar.
She digs. Digs into the snow until she finds it; dowsed by the anchoring leyline upon which she's planted it.
A little sapling, black of bark and red of leaf, buried in the snow, it's papery skin bulging with rot, infant thorns poking out. All around it, the earth is wet with mouldering decay - the winter cannot kill the Deathroot after all. This tiny sapling will suck the life out of everything. Eventually, should it be allowed, it will suck the life out of this very town.
Best laid plans though. Best laid plans.
Briar wraps a hand around the thing, and hisses as its barbs pierce her flesh. "Little imp," she says. Any other and it'd plant itself deep in her, rot her from the inside out - but this evil magic is her own magic, and so it only stings as she rips it, root and all, from the earth.
A tear rolls down her cheek. A child dead now - more to follow. It crumbles to dust in her hand.
She can not afford to split her magic like this. Not if what she desires is to come to pass. Briar cannot drive. And yet she is here.
And so is a car. And she makes it back to the road, out of the endless haze where whispers follow her.
"One down." She says, knocking snow from her hair as she sits in the rear passenger seat. "Onto the next."
She cranks the heat up to max, and rubs the chill out of her bones. The driver checks his maps and the car groans back to the road. Briar pours herself a drink in the back of the limousine.
Offering the bubbly to her blonde vampire ally, she smirks. "I always thought that compelly-welly magic you lot do was a neat trick."
"Not in a sense of that of the living, more so justā¦a feeling of overthinking I suppose is a good way of explaining it. The mind never refreshes when it is constantly running through. It is the thing that makes me partake in the sleeping drought for as long as it lasts in my system. I just haven't wanted to risk such things. Being prone that is. The upsurge in the disgusting filth that call themselves hunters have been far too prevalent." Her eyes shy away when Briar calls her out, like she knows.
"I'll be fine. I've gone much longer than this before." Not in centuries, not by her own hand. But she doesn't voice that. No need to prattle on about histories. At the offer of the witch's wrist her eyebrows raise and their gaze meets once more.
"I'd rather not. I've only had witch blood once, and swore I'd never be as desperate, or monstrous again." The old woman in the mountains. The last of a dying line. A place this journey had started. This never ending loop. With her hunger growing she isn't sure she could help herself, though her control is much stronger than it was then.
Daniella has a storm on her brow, and, were Briar nosier, she might inquire as to the direction of the winds, but she's little and less time for such self loathing talk - she's life to live.
Back to the windows and the notion that the ice and snow and bitter cold are keeping her from living anything beyond the life of a winter creature in hibernation; it's a familiar misery that has her teeth itching.
"Either way, I don't like this weather," she mutters. "Not only is it bringing your spiteful witchfinder types out, it's a little too different from last year. I will need to do some digging." It's near time to walk the magical anchorpoints again, to check her little vengeful seedlings. That might harbor new information.
"I'll keep you posted, if I find anything," she says, turning back to Daniella. "I'll ask you to do the same."
Georgia can count the number of people who dared to brave the cold weather to come out this way on both of her hands. Although Georgia doesn't really care about how slow things are as long as she gets the money in her checking account every two weeks, that is accurate. The other party says their name, prompting Georgia to nod to show she was listening.
āThere have been FIVE people today who have been dumb ... I mean brave enough to come out here today.ā Including you. Georgia is thankful that she at least made a poor attempt to cover up her insult. āSorry, I am just getting used to the idea that cold weather doesn't stop things in their tracks.ā
Briar notices Georgia's newness to town, which makes Georgia narrow her eyes at the other. Does everyone in this town know everyone, or is this person just that nosy? Either way, Georgia doesn't know how to respond at first. Georgia shakes her head as her face goes back to a rather neutral expression. āI'm new. Only been here about a month. Are you the town's census person, or does everyone around here just know everyone?ā
"I know you're new!" She reiterates. "Come here every few weeks - get my mail next door."
That's a lie, but she's not about to talk about the tiny, murderous seed she's planted in the duny sand, soaking in a place of power that sits on the narby strand of beachfront beneath the boardwalk.
"No need to sass a potential customer, anyways." Briar clicks her tongue, tut tut, and smirks with a smug countenance.
"Find chill?" Liam practically spat across the room, even though the door had shut part of the way. "Who the fuck talks like that?" He scoffed, mostly to himself. "Well, as I said before, I am using this room. So tell whoever sent you to do their fucking job better."
"I do." She says, under her breath and matter-of-fact.
His violence and vitriol makes an elden part of her bristle - she does not let many speak to her this way, least of all men. "You need a hobby, methinks, or perhaps a couch, not a cudgel, the anger goes into the room, not the other people. Missing the point a bit otherwise, no? If you ain't findin' a bit of calm. Sue me."
She moves to shut the door then, tempted to muck about with the lad for the sake of misery, but, she thinks to herself, best left well enough a lone, given the rumors that surround this heap.
She hums at the apology in acceptance, she doesn't mean to be so tight. So wound up, usually something of that nature would fall on amused ears. But with the lack of usefulness and an itch between her bones it isn't anyone's fault for her taking things too seriously.
"It wasn't you. I'm just restless and stressed there isn't more that I know on subjects like this." She shrugs a shoulder and runs her finger along the counter. "My thirst for knowledge is driving me a bit mad with the lack of solution. I haven't exactly been resting either." Or feeding goes unsaid. "I go home and read even more, and still nothing." She inhales, eyes flicking down at the journal again.
Glancing back up, she knows a thing or two about leylines, wonders what it feels like to connect to such a thing. To be attuned so closely to the earth. To feel the way magic bleeds out from it, the way it sings to the ones she's spent her unlife with. "From what I have heard from what people in my past have told me, nature hates when people abuse and warp her in unnatural ways. It wouldn't surprise me if something ancient was clawing its way to take back what the earth has lost. But that is just a theory based on a tired mind." A hungry mind, the consuming nature of this riddle making her focus on nothing else.
"I didn't know the undead could tire," Briar remarks absently, turning from where her pacing circles have carried her to narrow her eyes on Daniella.
"Don't live to eat, woman, but you must at least eat to live."
It's a dead-set clock of what little knowledge she has of the vampire - they require blood to continue, much as she requires life. They are similar in many ways, and different in just as many more, but it's a foundational truth the fuel makes fire.
"We can tarry on solving this frigid problem later - do I need to offer my wrist? Is this a crisis?"
Port Leiry felt like home in a way that Tombstone, Arizona, never did. Georgia won't admit it to herself just yet, as she allowed herself to mourn the loss of a place that she once felt comfortable in. Maybe not the home itself, but the places surrounding it. The only thing about this area that she now resided in was that it was too cold. It made her get a heavier coat that was now hanging over a chair in another room.
Georgia might find this place feels like home, but the job isn't. She misses doing things with cosmetology. The hair, the nails, the makeup. It was all home to her. It's where she belongs, but until she gets settled into town, this feels like the next best thing. āHello, I'm Georgia. How can I help you today?ā Georgia asked. A smile formed on her lips to replace the broad expression that she once had.
"Georgia - and I, Briar." She says, with a mock-curtsy that is as unintentionally ungraceful as it is meant to be silly.
She peacocks in, stomping sloshy snow free from her boots. "Not many places down here still open - surprised to see this one so alight. Traffic simply cannot be that high, no?"
There is a way about witches - they say - an inkling as to when one's been gifted with the touch, for lack of better phrasing. Briar, old soul that she is, senses the whimsy of the weird about this one, but she says nothing as she peruses the place, not even sure what sort of shop or business it even is. "But certainly new - I've not seen you in my wanderings."
