Muthologician

@muthologician

IT'S ROLEPLAY TIME

241 posts

A Chance Encounter

For once, Lockwood slept without dreaming. For so long now, his nights had been troubled, if just shy of being fitful as his unwaking mind was dogged by reminders of a war he had done his damndest to forget. There were some faces he would rather he never saw again, and some voices he preferred to remain forever silent– And for tonight, at least, these unwelcome memories were content to remain dormant.

A gentle blessing, the mercenary thought, and likely the only one he’d receive for some time.

Waking in dim tent without so much as a start, the Dog briefly wondered just how long he’d been out; the paltry glow of the fire still danced across the tent’s walls, though the warmth it offered against the bitter cold was found rather wanting. It was all the encouragment the sellsword needed to rouse himself and dress, the rattle of buckles cinched and armor donned likely all the notice his companion would require.

Pushing through the tent at a stoop, Lockwood paused at the mouth to stifle a yawn before moving to wordlessly take his place near the fire.

After a few hours spent at the fireside in the quiet night, Thel had taken to pacing through her thoughts. It’s only when she begun to hear Jerrad stir that she came to a stop, standing between the fire and the horses as he emerged. She paid him a soft grunt of acknowledgement and moved towards the tent to complete their trade-off.

Rustling herself out of armor and leather bracings, Thelinia groaned irritably. The Golden Dove had spoiled her sense of comfort, turning armor into the burden it was as a novice. While the leathers were well broken into, there would be no sleeping in it that night. Even the suede binding left beneath was an irksome thing to constrict where she had been free before.

With the most cumbersome attire removed, the ranger settled herself into her bedroll, watching the faint glow of the fire through the canvas as she relaxed into sleep.

Holding watch came as naturally as it ever had to Lockwood; settling into the rhythm of warming his hands near the fire, rising, tending to the horses, pacing out the camp’s perimeter where the edge of the firelight turned to inky darkness– It was second nature. Even the sharp chill in the air was familiar, burning his lungs with every breath. Holding watch was easy. A simple pleasure, in a profession that held precious few to begin with.

In due time, the sellsword found the need to pitch more wood on to the dimming fire. With a low grunt, Lockwood pushed himself to his feet and padded across the campsite to the pile of wood the two of them had hastily collected, stooping to inspect them for vermin before selecting a suitable log. As he did, his eye lingered on the tent where his companion had retired to, thoughts briefly returning to the time they’d spent together in Nimpeth.

Like a dream, he thought, frowning as his recollections turned back to his outbursts in town and the Dove. It wasn’t like him. Certainly, Raine knew that. Moreover, it was something else.

Weakness.

Anger churned the mercenary’s stomach as he turned from the woodpile and the tent, returning to the fire. Before he could excoriate himself further, however, Lockwood felt his body lurch to a halt, log still held loosely under his arm. Distantly, he felt an awareness of an electricity in his weary muscles. Increasingly wary, he tilted his head to one side then the other, listening with unwavering intent for something– Anything.

Then, distantly, he heard it. A snippet of speech, garbled and black like the speaker was half-choked with tar, or something equally vile. Even with the wind having picked up to an intermittent howl as it rushed through the trees, Lockwood recognized the tongue, though it was too distant to make anything out clearly.

“Goblins,” the sellsword grunted into the tent flap, scarcely a moment after the realization had hit him. Already, his knuckles were wrapped tight around the hilt of his sword. He muttered again, still listening to the woods around them for good measure, “Close.”

An unwelcomed sound roused the ranger from her near-sleep, the beginnings of a dream dissipated by her companion’s voice. In begrudging habit, she reached for her weapons even before lifting her head.

She donned her leather vest and peeked out the gap of the tent flap. Quiet and still, she waited.

Already taking his own cue to crouch low behind the brush near the tent, the Dog was silently thankful for the fire having burned itself low. Snuffing it would have been troublesome, and he didn’t fancy the idea of having to rekindle it from scratch.

As the two listened for further intrusion, the wind vacillated between fierce, whipping gusts and brief pauses of utter stillness. Then, before doubt could find it’s way into either of their hearts, the sound of faint chattering managed to carry itself to their ears. Only a sentence here and there, barely audible even when the air was still, but unmistakably inhuman.

Lockwood glanced off to where the kobolds still slept, relieved to see no signs of movement.

Over the next few minutes, the goblin voices alternate in intensity between distantly audible and dead silence. Wherever they were, it wasn’t close enough for them to have yet caught sight of the fire. After what might have seemed an age too long, the voices begin to recede, tracking across the treeline into the deeper woodlands beyond the road.

Subtly, Jerrad’s shoulders eased their tension, and he turned back to glance the tent without peering inside.

“Can’t hear anythin’.” He gruffed, as if to confirm with her.

Thelinia grunted, but held her position inside the tent. Only after several minutes of waiting out the quiet does she relax, alongside the Dog who had raised the alarm in the first place.

The hastily applied vest is eager removed, and everything is returned to where it was beforehand– the ranger included.

With his companion again retired for the night, Lockwood set back to tending the fire, settling heavily beside it. The goblin intrusion hadn't seemed to disturb the kobolds any, he noted, scanning the camp once over. Even having suffered through their ordeal at the hands of the orcs he and the Boar had dispatched, they were heavy sleepers.

Could be this was the first solid rest they'd had in ages, he reasoned.

Shrugging the thought off, the Dog paid a quiet prayer of thanks to Talos for bring only howling wind and not rain, then rose to pace out the camp's perimeter.

-----

As a creeping dawn breaks over the camp, Lockwood sits placidly atop a stump, looking less like a man and more like a bear woken too early from his winter sleep. The campfire still smolders, thin fingers of smoke and the telltale crackle of burning wood the only indicators that it yet lived. Already, the kobolds have begun to stir, though they remain reluctant to leave the relative security of their shelter at the camp's far side.

A low fog has settled across the forest, snaking it's way through the twisted boughs and branches in ponderous drifts. The air carries a mountainous chill, an effect enhanced by the damp fog clinging to anything it touches; the Dog in particular. He nurses a dwindling bottle of suzale on occasion, idly working his sword through a whetstone as he waits for the Boar to wake.

#rp post #jerrad #canon dog and boar #thel #wine and war

A Chance Encounter

For once, Lockwood slept without dreaming. For so long now, his nights had been troubled, if just shy of being fitful as his unwaking mind was dogged by reminders of a war he had done his damndest to forget. There were some faces he would rather he never saw again, and some voices he preferred to remain forever silent– And for tonight, at least, these unwelcome memories were content to remain dormant.

A gentle blessing, the mercenary thought, and likely the only one he’d receive for some time.

Waking in dim tent without so much as a start, the Dog briefly wondered just how long he’d been out; the paltry glow of the fire still danced across the tent’s walls, though the warmth it offered against the bitter cold was found rather wanting. It was all the encouragment the sellsword needed to rouse himself and dress, the rattle of buckles cinched and armor donned likely all the notice his companion would require.

Pushing through the tent at a stoop, Lockwood paused at the mouth to stifle a yawn before moving to wordlessly take his place near the fire.

After a few hours spent at the fireside in the quiet night, Thel had taken to pacing through her thoughts. It’s only when she begun to hear Jerrad stir that she came to a stop, standing between the fire and the horses as he emerged. She paid him a soft grunt of acknowledgement and moved towards the tent to complete their trade-off.

Rustling herself out of armor and leather bracings, Thelinia groaned irritably. The Golden Dove had spoiled her sense of comfort, turning armor into the burden it was as a novice. While the leathers were well broken into, there would be no sleeping in it that night. Even the suede binding left beneath was an irksome thing to constrict where she had been free before.

With the most cumbersome attire removed, the ranger settled herself into her bedroll, watching the faint glow of the fire through the canvas as she relaxed into sleep.

Holding watch came as naturally as it ever had to Lockwood; settling into the rhythm of warming his hands near the fire, rising, tending to the horses, pacing out the camp’s perimeter where the edge of the firelight turned to inky darkness– It was second nature. Even the sharp chill in the air was familiar, burning his lungs with every breath. Holding watch was easy. A simple pleasure, in a profession that held precious few to begin with.

In due time, the sellsword found the need to pitch more wood on to the dimming fire. With a low grunt, Lockwood pushed himself to his feet and padded across the campsite to the pile of wood the two of them had hastily collected, stooping to inspect them for vermin before selecting a suitable log. As he did, his eye lingered on the tent where his companion had retired to, thoughts briefly returning to the time they’d spent together in Nimpeth.

Like a dream, he thought, frowning as his recollections turned back to his outbursts in town and the Dove. It wasn’t like him. Certainly, Raine knew that. Moreover, it was something else.

Weakness.

Anger churned the mercenary’s stomach as he turned from the woodpile and the tent, returning to the fire. Before he could excoriate himself further, however, Lockwood felt his body lurch to a halt, log still held loosely under his arm. Distantly, he felt an awareness of an electricity in his weary muscles. Increasingly wary, he tilted his head to one side then the other, listening with unwavering intent for something– Anything.

Then, distantly, he heard it. A snippet of speech, garbled and black like the speaker was half-choked with tar, or something equally vile. Even with the wind having picked up to an intermittent howl as it rushed through the trees, Lockwood recognized the tongue, though it was too distant to make anything out clearly.

“Goblins,” the sellsword grunted into the tent flap, scarcely a moment after the realization had hit him. Already, his knuckles were wrapped tight around the hilt of his sword. He muttered again, still listening to the woods around them for good measure, “Close.”

An unwelcomed sound roused the ranger from her near-sleep, the beginnings of a dream dissipated by her companion’s voice. In begrudging habit, she reached for her weapons even before lifting her head.

She donned her leather vest and peeked out the gap of the tent flap. Quiet and still, she waited.

Already taking his own cue to crouch low behind the brush near the tent, the Dog was silently thankful for the fire having burned itself low. Snuffing it would have been troublesome, and he didn't fancy the idea of having to rekindle it from scratch.

As the two listened for further intrusion, the wind vacillated between fierce, whipping gusts and brief pauses of utter stillness. Then, before doubt could find it's way into either of their hearts, the sound of faint chattering managed to carry itself to their ears. Only a sentence here and there, barely audible even when the air was still, but unmistakably inhuman.

Lockwood glanced off to where the kobolds still slept, relieved to see no signs of movement.

Over the next few minutes, the goblin voices alternate in intensity between distantly audible and dead silence. Wherever they were, it wasn't close enough for them to have yet caught sight of the fire. After what might have seemed an age too long, the voices begin to recede, tracking across the treeline into the deeper woodlands beyond the road.

Subtly, Jerrad's shoulders eased their tension, and he turned back to glance the tent without peering inside.

"Can't hear anythin'." He gruffed, as if to confirm with her.

#rp post #canon dog and boar #jerrad #thel #wine and war

A Chance Encounter

For once, Lockwood slept without dreaming. For so long now, his nights had been troubled, if just shy of being fitful as his unwaking mind was dogged by reminders of a war he had done his damndest to forget. There were some faces he would rather he never saw again, and some voices he preferred to remain forever silent– And for tonight, at least, these unwelcome memories were content to remain dormant.

A gentle blessing, the mercenary thought, and likely the only one he’d receive for some time.

Waking in dim tent without so much as a start, the Dog briefly wondered just how long he’d been out; the paltry glow of the fire still danced across the tent’s walls, though the warmth it offered against the bitter cold was found rather wanting. It was all the encouragment the sellsword needed to rouse himself and dress, the rattle of buckles cinched and armor donned likely all the notice his companion would require.

Pushing through the tent at a stoop, Lockwood paused at the mouth to stifle a yawn before moving to wordlessly take his place near the fire.

After a few hours spent at the fireside in the quiet night, Thel had taken to pacing through her thoughts. It’s only when she begun to hear Jerrad stir that she came to a stop, standing between the fire and the horses as he emerged. She paid him a soft grunt of acknowledgement and moved towards the tent to complete their trade-off.

Rustling herself out of armor and leather bracings, Thelinia groaned irritably. The Golden Dove had spoiled her sense of comfort, turning armor into the burden it was as a novice. While the leathers were well broken into, there would be no sleeping in it that night. Even the suede binding left beneath was an irksome thing to constrict where she had been free before.

With the most cumbersome attire removed, the ranger settled herself into her bedroll, watching the faint glow of the fire through the canvas as she relaxed into sleep.

Holding watch came as naturally as it ever had to Lockwood; settling into the rhythm of warming his hands near the fire, rising, tending to the horses, pacing out the camp's perimeter where the edge of the firelight turned to inky darkness-- It was second nature. Even the sharp chill in the air was familiar, burning his lungs with every breath. Holding watch was easy. A simple pleasure, in a profession that held precious few to begin with.

In due time, the sellsword found the need to pitch more wood on to the dimming fire. With a low grunt, Lockwood pushed himself to his feet and padded across the campsite to the pile of wood the two of them had hastily collected, stooping to inspect them for vermin before selecting a suitable log. As he did, his eye lingered on the tent where his companion had retired to, thoughts briefly returning to the time they'd spent together in Nimpeth.

Like a dream, he thought, frowning as his recollections turned back to his outbursts in town and the Dove. It wasn't like him. Certainly, Raine knew that. Moreover, it was something else.

Weakness.

Anger churned the mercenary's stomach as he turned from the woodpile and the tent, returning to the fire. Before he could excoriate himself further, however, Lockwood felt his body lurch to a halt, log still held loosely under his arm. Distantly, he felt an awareness of an electricity in his weary muscles. Increasingly wary, he tilted his head to one side then the other, listening with unwavering intent for something-- Anything.

Then, distantly, he heard it. A snippet of speech, garbled and black like the speaker was half-choked with tar, or something equally vile. Even with the wind having picked up to an intermittent howl as it rushed through the trees, Lockwood recognized the tongue, though it was too distant to make anything out clearly.

"Goblins," the sellsword grunted into the tent flap, scarcely a moment after the realization had hit him. Already, his knuckles were wrapped tight around the hilt of his sword. He muttered again, still listening to the woods around them for good measure, "Close."

#dnd #dog and boar #thelinia raine #jerrad lockwood #wine and war

Wine and War Pt. 4

For once, Lockwood slept without dreaming. For so long now, his nights had been troubled, if just shy of being fitful as his unwaking mind was dogged by reminders of a war he had done his damndest to forget. There were some faces he would rather he never saw again, and some voices he preferred to remain forever silent-- And for tonight, at least, these unwelcome memories were content to remain dormant.

A gentle blessing, the mercenary thought, and likely the only one he'd receive for some time.

Waking in dim tent without so much as a start, the Dog briefly wondered just how long he'd been out; the paltry glow of the fire still danced across the tent's walls, though the warmth it offered against the bitter cold was found rather wanting. It was all the encouragment the sellsword needed to rouse himself and dress, the rattle of buckles cinched and armor donned likely all the notice his companion would require.

Pushing through the tent at a stoop, Lockwood paused at the mouth to stifle a yawn before moving to wordlessly take his place near the fire.

Iron and Silence

It had been very nearly a year since Arstus had been ushered onto the Tears of Sabbat, the whole of his person devoted towards reunification with his chapter. During those first few months, the Astarte had reflected in the silent, dark parts of the ship’s holds on just how long it had been since he had last held the company of another Lamenter.

At times, it was difficult to remember just how long ago Tranch had been. Often, when the Librarian stood alone in those darkened halls, he found it difficult to discern the difference between the settling groans of the ship around him and the abrupt staccato of bolter fire amid the clamoring gnash of a million hungering mouths.

Perhaps it was this failing of the senses that compelled him to join his presence with that of the many psykers held within the ship’s warded hold-cells, or perhaps it was as simple as a sense of obligation to offer comfort to those who could not yet know that their lives were now measured not in years, but in months. Whatever the cause, it was that decision which found him standing now amid what had been a cramped cell teeming with the unwashed and the dispossessed, it’s occupancy now whittled down to a scant dozen individuals by the brutality of sanctioning.

Arranged about him in what roughly amounted to a circle, the nascent psykers had proven the most potent among their lot, and had been spared further disabusement through his vouching. Though the Chapter Master would ultimately have the final say on whether they were fit to serve them as brothers, the spark of virtue he sensed in them was enough to earn his confidence.

To be fair, he would have interposed on their behalf regardless of whatever potential they possessed.

Though he had not moved from his position at the center of the prayer circle for the better part of two hours, the hem of his librarian’s robes billowed up around his feet in plumes of rich blue, held aloft by the pit’s fickle gravity.

“Remember,” He began abruptly, the thick baritone amplified and distorted by the vox in his helm. If the ragged hopefuls gathered about him were bothered by it any, they displayed it poorly. “Compassion is no sin to display. Remember that it is through the Emperor’s own act of compassion that mankind yet persists to this day. It is compassion which drives us onward. Compassion which lends us the strength to fight on, even as the shadows clutch around us, and darkness gathers. Hold compassion in your hearts, and the Emperor shall be with you, always.”

A spectre walked the halls of the lowermost decks, its shape a thinned glimpse of human form, its even steps near silent. The eyes stared cold as jade from sleepless sockets, framed by dark copper strands of hair. Still, it moved with purpose; a hollow creature stalking through a fog only it could perceive.

It comes to a stop before a stairway, which trailed along the wall down into the depths of the black ship. This would be the telepath’s first visit to the cavernous chamber, though she suspected it’d be no different than the ones before it. Even now she could feel the null field like grating metal in her mind. It would build itself into a deathly silence once she breached the threshold of its territory, but for now it would merely be a headache.

And she was thankful for it. Thankful for the dampening it’d serve on the nascent psykers, and herself. Thankful for its silent noise blocking the torment that rose from below. It was a guilty experience–however necessary–that they should suffer while she stood deafened to them. The memory of her own sanctioning was most vivid when exposed to the tithe, a dangerous distraction she couldn’t risk.

Before the diviner knew it, she was upon her destination. Her eerie form emerged from the darkness almost spiderlike in quality, unnaturally long limbs carrying her closer, skeletal fingers stretched around the bone of her cane like captured prey. The mournful whispers fall quiet after frightened gasps carries through them, and Rysari arrived before them with hard intent traced along her expression.

In a way, she was grateful for the reaction her appearance produced from the tithe. Their fear spared her lasting eye contact, allowing her to steel herself for the task ahead. They could not see her weakness. She held their lives in her hands, and her duty could not be jeopardized.

Which is why when the glint of sacred armor pulls her attention, the psyker abruptly begins her work with a harsh, vox-enchanced command.

“First forward.”

For all her will and years of discipline, the space marine’s presence was nerve-wracking. When she had first heard that a Librarian was aboard in transit, it had sped her heart with thanks that the ship would be so honored. And ever since their chance passing in the isolation cellblock, she felt the weight of her responsibility more keenly than ever. She could not let pressure influence that duty to the ship and its tithe. Wrapping herself in both her will and her work, Rysari blocked the Lamenter’s presence from her mind and begun the process of evaluation.

The Librarian made no motion to turn and greet the portcullis’ laboring hiss as it clunked and slid away into the recessed floor, nor did he offer the diviner a sign of physical acknowledgement. Though some (particularly an agent of the Inquisition) might have taken this as a sign of grave disrespect, the Lamenter was far and away more concerned with offering comfort to those gathered around him.

“Rise, and go gladly. I have touched upon the virtue that rests upon your souls. You have naught to fear.”

Though the encouragement he offered was sincere, Arstus wondered if perhaps the readiness with which the ragged congregation began to rise was borne more of fear. The diviner was a gaunt, spindly thing; a wraith that seemed to glide through these hallowed halls without sound or substance. They had whispered of her coming long before he had laid eyes upon her.

All the same, he had sensed no malice in her when they’d crossed paths before. He had instructed her that she would treat the denizens of this hold with dignity commensurate with their station as guests of his chapter’s hospitality.

She had merely watched him. Perhaps she had prayed, but he had quit her company too swiftly to be certain. There was a disquieting quality to the decks above, where their meeting had taken place, and the Librarian had found that he much preferred to sequester himself within the deadened silence of the warded holds. It was easier to blind himself to the suffering of countless hundreds there.

Still unmoved from his position as the last of the sanctionites passed to file into line, Arstus shut his eyes to the world, relishing the rare absence of the Warp’s clawing presence in his mind. With only the briefest of pauses afforded to this effort, he finally addressed the diviner personally,

“I would hear your judgement, when your efforts are concluded.”

The space marine’s instruction is acknowledged, however soundlessly and without gesture. Rysari’s attention was trained on the file of cowering bodies which tentatively approached from their hold. This cell would be her third since her last sleeping period; the tracking of time was beyond her needs, but the weariness in her bones warned she’d require rest soon. What mattered now was assigning the worthiness of these sanctionites for the Lamenters.

It was an exhausting business, determining the fate of so many individuals. Many she held her bony fingers over were only children, each worn face tear-streaked and eyes set wide over dark sleepless rings. They looked upon her with such apprehension that every breath drew a flinch from the sanctionites. The space marine’s words seemed to instill enough courage in them to hold them in place, however, if fear did not.

Were it not for her disciplined mind, she might have dwelled on the reflection she saw in each pair of frightened eyes. The image of a young voidborn, whimpering under the bellows of an Inquisitorial psyker. Just as they did now, and as they always had, countless times before them.

She would hold her voice firm, but spare the vox-enhancements as the ritual prayer is spoken for the first spread. The young psyker before her is made to kneel, so the telepath’s hand could grasp their head like talons over prey. The initial reading from this touch opened Rysari to the hoard of terror such a small creature managed to keep within itself, and it lashes out to strike at her presence, a horrific whirlwind of empathetic pain. It was a relief, in many ways, that this encounter should be so routine.

Without flinching, Rysari sets her eyes on the cards piled into her raised hand. The sanctionite’s rampaging emotions continued to echo in the back of her mind, but were ignored by her steeled consciousness. With her mind clear of all extraneous thought, she opens herself to the Tarot, and the immaterium answers.

An intangible breeze begins to lift the copper strands of her hair, and a careful eye might catch a glimmer of gold across her eyes as moves to sift through the cards. Some prayer falls from her lips as though she were unaware of it, her eyes focused solely on the cards her Sight pulls from the deck to hover before her.

“The Renegade is removed from purpose. The Officer is voiceless. The Martyr and Man have fallen.”

The diviner reminded herself what she did here for them would be nothing to what they’d receive on Holy Terra, should their journey be so blessed. It was a harrowing task to screen each for spiritual strength and faith, knowing that failure on her behalf was unacceptable.. And knowing the fate of those she, herself, was condemning.

Confused and frightened, the young psyker recoils from their divination. Though her voice had been devoid of judgement, some meaning of the reading must have registered with the child. They attempt to rend themselves from her hand, which releases them backwards with enough force to stumble the already weakened creature.

The cards return to her hand, and the air releases some of its static charge. Rysari stares down at the sanctionite with something dangerously close to pity, and must correct the mistake of eye contact immediately.

“Second forward.”

The ritual that he bore witness to now had always played out in precisely the same manner. Identities had never mattered much in regards to these things; there would always be those who waited, and those who stepped forward unto their fate.

All who walk the Hallowed Path tread in the steps of their forebears.

It was a phrase that his mentor had spoken to him during those early years, the sternness of his gaze and the uncompromisingly even-handed punishment doled out in even measure. Even years after Brother Pathiel had passed from this hellish world to the Emperor’s side, the wisdom he had imparted on his pupil lingered.

Foremost among his lessons had been that no matter the fate one was cast, he may forever strive against it. In this, Arstus had come to comprehend the value of prognostication. It was a measure of the virtue of man’s soul, to struggle against the will of what was already written.

And how these small souls before him would struggle, before all was still. Even now they did, wrenching away from the diviner even as she released them pre-emptively. There was a fire in them that would be his charge to kindle, and by his oaths he would see it be done.

When the last of the sanctionites dragged themselves to the shadows furthest from the spectre, the Librarian stepped forward with a sudden purpose, thundering strides devouring the distance between himself and the cullis. A curt wave of the hand roused the gate’s machine spirits to action, and with painful deliberation, the warded hatch began to grind away.

To the children who had become his wards, his voice carried over the terrible din, seeming far too bright for so dark a place,

“Put your fears to rest, young ones. These trials shall pass. Look to my return.”

To the woman who had pronounced their judgement, his thoughts cut through the fabric of the immaterium with the cold clarity of a gleaming knife.

We must speak.

Time had passed without notice. Determining the potential–and ultimately, the fate–of so many young lives was a draining experience, and the fatigue would read to anyone familiar with psychic exhaustion. Even as she stood tall at this place of authority, there was a subtle dampening to her aura; a dulling of its rigid shell above the fluctuations of her essence. But it would not be broken.

Her thoughts stand to meet his readily in the space they carved through the aether,

I hear you, my lord.

Despite that common thread of animosity between the factions they represented, the Inquisitorial agent retained an almost childlike admiration for his kind. Space marines were an apex of Man, the ultimate defenders of the Imperium and all its people. Such glory and valor warranted a respect that even the Inquisition hadn’t scrubbed from her mind. At least not yet.

Even at this distance, the psycurium and dampening fields tightened her ribs to her lungs, though she was thankful for its barrier as an exhausted empath. She wondered for a moment whether the Librarian could even feel its presence, or the tormented undercurrent of the hold’s occupants that wailed through the warp. He had spoken kindly to them, a surprise to be certain. But she could not trust herself in judging whether it was compassion in his vox-encoded speech.

Whatever the Astarte thought of the seer’s uncanny resilience, he remained aloof, reserving himself to navigating the black halls that crisscrossed the Sabbat’s cavernous underbelly. Though less perceptive individuals might have failed to take note, Arstus regarded the grey robed armsmen and ship hands who scurried from the space marine’s advance with a distant scrutiny. Quietly, he posited that perhaps the scene would have played out much the same, even without his presence at the diviner’s side.

When the Librarian finally brought himself to a halt, it was at the edge of a long gantry that overlooked the pits from which they’d departed. Somewhere in the miserable gloom below them, his chapter’s future huddled in shadows.

Silence rushed to fill the void left by the battle brother’s stilled feet, affording the diviner time enough to gather herself before he spoke. Quietly, Arstus admitted that the lull was useful in soothing his own psyche, bruised by the psycurium’s unforgiving touch.

When he finally elected to speak, the Librarian’s voice was notably softer than before, the earnestness of his concern blunting the vox’s hard edge.

“I would hear your counsel. I would hear what is to come of them.”

Death.

The concept crawled into her thoughts before being dispersed, and reformed as something untainted by the tormented wails assaulting her mind. It was a practiced task, however difficult or painful, made easier with the unexpected warmth that radiated from the space marine’s voice and captured her attention.

“Few possessed the faith and fortitude you would ask of them, my lord. Most will rejoin the others for Holy Terra.” She longed to look at him, wanting to identify the source of that warmth somehow beyond his helmet. Warmth was not often, nor rightly ever, found in the cold of space, and the last place one would look would be in the depths of a Black Ship. Its sudden presence, however scarce, or even imagined, was an impossibility in this place.

The diviner’s nerves held her stiff and still, better to conceal the insistent pumping of her heart beside this creature of the Emperor.

Like the cogs of a great machine, the Librarian’s thoughts churned with a measured slowness; implacable in their advance, if agonizing in their seemingly ponderous nature.

The admission she had given him was hardly beyond the realm of expectation. He only wished that it were not so. He wished that there were something more he could do to ease their pain.

He wished that it were not so familiar.

A flicker of immaterial force brought the fluttering of robes about his person to a stop, shrouding his armored form more fully in draped azure.

“The trials that forge an Astartes are perilous things. Fatal, even to those of iron will, of momentous strength.” Arstus paused his words long enough to turn his gaze upon the whisper of a woman beside him, casting her features in the pale light of consecrated witchlight.

“Do you know what it is, then, that sets apart those that ascend, and those that perish?”

She listens intently as they both watch the darkness of the holds below. Until instinctively, Rysari tilts her head to meet the gaze of the larger being, for the first time since their engagement. It’s an effort to hold her position, against the urge to spare his visor the disrespect of her eye contact. The unexpected lack of superiority in his demeanor, however, aided in this effort, and a measure of surprise might have visited her features at the uncommon comfort this brought.

It is almost reluctance she feels as she turns again to the hold, as though she divined the answer from the hundreds of psykers themselves.

“Their spirits are too broken by their fear, and they cannot find their purpose. Faith cannot reach them,” the diviner recites what she had learned with a dower expression, one that has seen too many of these fraying individuals damned, unable or unwilling to refine their fear with faith. The look in her eyes borders dangerously on pity, though her tone retains its clinical, vox-affected manner. “We teach them the path of salvation, yet many suffer a nature too corroded to mould. The shadows they cast are weak without the guiding Light, and they suffer too wholly under malignant designs of taint.”

It was an honor to serve in the role she had been assigned, especially under the purview of a Librarian. If even one of these tormented souls could trade their pain for such holy purpose, it would be worth all the agony carried in this ship’s great holds. This is what the psyker tells herself even as she stands beside the Astartes, enduring a heightened sense of self-awareness all the while.

Though conviction of faith was something that he rarely found to be lacking in those he met, the Brother-Librarian had come to find that it was those who suffered most in whom faith was strongest. So it was with the seer.

Concealed beneath his chapter’s gilded ceramite, luminous blue eyes departed from the woman’s withered features, back to the deck below. In truth, he held little sway as to their fate, despite his chapter’s clout. The delivery of souls to burn on the Emperor’s holy pyre was a sacrosanct trust, charged solely to the Black Fleet and her masters, and he was but one Astarte…

And yet, his sense of duty demanded he speak.

“Is a blade broken in battle yet not a blade still?” He questioned in the leading way of a teacher to a pupil.

“If it has the capacity, is it not fit to be reforged?” The Librarian allowed the question to hang in the thick air of the tortured hold, his robes resuming their earlier fluttering.

“If what you say is true, then I will trust your judgement. I only ask that you consider my words. The Lamenters stand perched on the edge of oblivion. These souls could prove our undoing.. Or they may yet be the salvation we have sought for so long.”

Bony knuckles tightened at the railing she rested them on, but are withdrawn to her side where they might reclaim their discipline. It was a pain previously unaddressed which his words unknowingly struck, one she had endured the subduing of every meditative cycle. It was true that it would still haunt her even against duress of prayer, but its cries always came from within and were therefore under her purview of control. Until now.

To hear it spoken aloud was jolting, to say the least. In all her months aboard the Ship, not a whisper of sympathy nor even pity was breathed for the nameless denizens of the holds below. Though she knew to follow her own duty in like step, unbidden feelings of empathy proved inescapable for the seer. Now they were vocalized, with a tongue she couldn’t fathom. Why would he, of all individuals, question this process as she dared not?

“I understand wholly, my lord,” she spoke, her voice quieted by a temporary stall in her vocal implants. “It is why I sought a higher perception of their capability. It would be inexcusable to offer you less than mandated.”

She wondered momentarily if this was a test he offered her. Perhaps he had detected her own questioning, and used it against her now. However, these thoughts were readily defeated by the genuine manner in which he spoke. And it was this earnest compassion that pried more from the warded lips of the seer.

“I thank you for entrusting their fates to my sight. Were it through sight alone that I might mold them for you, I would not hesitate.” An anxious beat in her breast pauses her, but she continues, “I did hope to find more opportunity in them, my lord. But my hope is nothing to the will of the Emperor. I could not disaffect my duty in deigning any one of them as more than what they are.”

After all, she should not despair; theirs was a sacred fate, immeasurably purposeful and deserving of her respect. And her resignation.

Were he a lesser man, the subtlety with which she clenched at the rail might have eluded him. For all her frailness, the woman carried herself with an air of absolute focus. What others might perhaps have mistaken for simple, inhuman detachment, the Astarte recognized for conviction. It was a familiar sort of determination that could only come from a particularly harrowing sanctioning.

Moving with the hurtling finesse that only a space marine could possess, Arstus swept his robes about him so that he might better face the seer, as though he sought to further tower over the human he already dwarfed. And then, with not a whisper of violence, he lowered himself to a kneel beside the withered diviner and looked into her eyes.

“Know that I seek not to steer you from your decision when I speak.” He began, two massive, ceramite-sheathed hands coming to rest atop his bent knee. “Is it your belief that I chose them for their strength of will? Or body? Or that I elected them for some percieved mightiness of conviction?”

There was palpable pause before his voice rumbled up through the grille of his helmet like a cloud of rolling smoke.

“It was for the pureness of conviction that I touched upon in them. There is an ember hope in all of us. In some, it is little more than a spark. But in them, it is a roaring flame. I sense it in you, too.”

Another sharp pause punctuated the air, before being swept away by his final words.

“Do you truly believe anyone is beyond salvation?”

A roaring flame, her mind echoed, awestruck by his blessing and proximity. It was unfathomable to consider which captivated her; the sudden question regarding her faith, or the unimaginable regard he paid her in asking it. Holding her eyes from his visor was no longer an option. Not while the Astarte commanded them.

An understated swallows remedies her dry mouth, her frozen stance preventing a show of cowardice. He commanded her truth.

“I believe in salvation, my lord, as I believe in sin.”

[His Light leads us all, and yet so many stray.]

The broadcast quandary played second to her answer, sent alongside with a respectful division. It came with the candor of a despairing student, thoughtful and determined to seek resolution. It would have shaken the veteran diviner to communicate so plainly with a space marine were it not for the benevolence he exuded– in such measure that it brought a touch of color to her pallor features.

“No man may evade both.”

Whatever reaction the Lamenter recieved the seer’s message with was hidden from view by the veil of bradden ceramite that shielded his features, the warp-echo of his mind conveying only stoic acknowledgement.

It was a fine answer, he considered agreeably, but one which he met with a faint disappointment all the same. The sin of failure stained all, it was true; the Lamenters knew this as well as any. Their shortcomings as a chapter were manifest, if not in the eyes of the Imperium’s people, then certainly in the cold regard paid by their peers. It was why they could never tire in their duty, held sacred above all else. It was why he trifled with the diviner as an equal, rather than as a kingly lord as another in his position might.

“And yet the sin of failure may be cleansed, as a flame scourges a wound.” Arstus offered, unmoving in the hold’s dim light.

[Hope is the flame we must carry, that it may embolden the soul. It is our task to enkindle it into something greater.]

“I ask that you afford me your grace in my endeavor, honored seer. Give me time to stoke the fire in their hearts, that they may forget their infirmity of spirit. Those that prove incapable shall pass to your care, as they must.” The marine’s gaze held fast to his fellow psyker’s, mindful of her reaction. “But there is something I sense in them that begs my intervention. I would shirk my duty to ignore it.”

Though brief, the very thought she might have impeded his undertaking wracked her mind with pain. But as soon as it came, the outburst was silenced, as her discipline returned in automated and wordless prayer.

Every sense the seer possessed was allowed then the captivity of reverence– an impossible gift beyond refusal. It was a blessing like none other, to be so confronted by the Astartes. Though her body stood still as death, the psyker’s mind emanated such reverence that would beg her to kneel. Yet within the anointed waves of his words both spoken and silent, she held herself to her full height, absorbing every ripple his voices bestowed.

With a mouth too dry to use, she offered acknowledgement and gratitude, undercut by repentance. She could dip her head at last.

"My Lord, you will have it. There would be no cause for your audience if it were not His Will.” She swallowed against the audacity of doubt, soothing her faith with its suffocation.

Relief washed over the Librarian at last, a measure of tension fading away into the silence of the black holds below the psykers’ shared perch. It was a perilous leap of faith he had taken, trusting that a warden of the Black Ships would not turn on him for an intercession that more than some might suspect of blasphemous intent. The shallow nod he afforded Rysari spoke a gratitude of respect well earned.

“You have my gratitude, then.” He appended, after a rare hesitance, “And that of the chapter, as well.”

Iron and Silence

It had been very nearly a year since Arstus had been ushered onto the Tears of Sabbat, the whole of his person devoted towards reunification with his chapter. During those first few months, the Astarte had reflected in the silent, dark parts of the ship’s holds on just how long it had been since he had last held the company of another Lamenter.

At times, it was difficult to remember just how long ago Tranch had been. Often, when the Librarian stood alone in those darkened halls, he found it difficult to discern the difference between the settling groans of the ship around him and the abrupt staccato of bolter fire amid the clamoring gnash of a million hungering mouths.

Perhaps it was this failing of the senses that compelled him to join his presence with that of the many psykers held within the ship’s warded hold-cells, or perhaps it was as simple as a sense of obligation to offer comfort to those who could not yet know that their lives were now measured not in years, but in months. Whatever the cause, it was that decision which found him standing now amid what had been a cramped cell teeming with the unwashed and the dispossessed, it’s occupancy now whittled down to a scant dozen individuals by the brutality of sanctioning.

Arranged about him in what roughly amounted to a circle, the nascent psykers had proven the most potent among their lot, and had been spared further disabusement through his vouching. Though the Chapter Master would ultimately have the final say on whether they were fit to serve them as brothers, the spark of virtue he sensed in them was enough to earn his confidence.

To be fair, he would have interposed on their behalf regardless of whatever potential they possessed.

Though he had not moved from his position at the center of the prayer circle for the better part of two hours, the hem of his librarian’s robes billowed up around his feet in plumes of rich blue, held aloft by the pit’s fickle gravity.

“Remember,” He began abruptly, the thick baritone amplified and distorted by the vox in his helm. If the ragged hopefuls gathered about him were bothered by it any, they displayed it poorly. “Compassion is no sin to display. Remember that it is through the Emperor’s own act of compassion that mankind yet persists to this day. It is compassion which drives us onward. Compassion which lends us the strength to fight on, even as the shadows clutch around us, and darkness gathers. Hold compassion in your hearts, and the Emperor shall be with you, always.”

A spectre walked the halls of the lowermost decks, its shape a thinned glimpse of human form, its even steps near silent. The eyes stared cold as jade from sleepless sockets, framed by dark copper strands of hair. Still, it moved with purpose; a hollow creature stalking through a fog only it could perceive.

It comes to a stop before a stairway, which trailed along the wall down into the depths of the black ship. This would be the telepath’s first visit to the cavernous chamber, though she suspected it’d be no different than the ones before it. Even now she could feel the null field like grating metal in her mind. It would build itself into a deathly silence once she breached the threshold of its territory, but for now it would merely be a headache.

And she was thankful for it. Thankful for the dampening it’d serve on the nascent psykers, and herself. Thankful for its silent noise blocking the torment that rose from below. It was a guilty experience–however necessary–that they should suffer while she stood deafened to them. The memory of her own sanctioning was most vivid when exposed to the tithe, a dangerous distraction she couldn’t risk.

Before the diviner knew it, she was upon her destination. Her eerie form emerged from the darkness almost spiderlike in quality, unnaturally long limbs carrying her closer, skeletal fingers stretched around the bone of her cane like captured prey. The mournful whispers fall quiet after frightened gasps carries through them, and Rysari arrived before them with hard intent traced along her expression.

In a way, she was grateful for the reaction her appearance produced from the tithe. Their fear spared her lasting eye contact, allowing her to steel herself for the task ahead. They could not see her weakness. She held their lives in her hands, and her duty could not be jeopardized.

Which is why when the glint of sacred armor pulls her attention, the psyker abruptly begins her work with a harsh, vox-enchanced command.

“First forward.”

For all her will and years of discipline, the space marine’s presence was nerve-wracking. When she had first heard that a Librarian was aboard in transit, it had sped her heart with thanks that the ship would be so honored. And ever since their chance passing in the isolation cellblock, she felt the weight of her responsibility more keenly than ever. She could not let pressure influence that duty to the ship and its tithe. Wrapping herself in both her will and her work, Rysari blocked the Lamenter’s presence from her mind and begun the process of evaluation.

The Librarian made no motion to turn and greet the portcullis’ laboring hiss as it clunked and slid away into the recessed floor, nor did he offer the diviner a sign of physical acknowledgement. Though some (particularly an agent of the Inquisition) might have taken this as a sign of grave disrespect, the Lamenter was far and away more concerned with offering comfort to those gathered around him.

“Rise, and go gladly. I have touched upon the virtue that rests upon your souls. You have naught to fear.”

Though the encouragement he offered was sincere, Arstus wondered if perhaps the readiness with which the ragged congregation began to rise was borne more of fear. The diviner was a gaunt, spindly thing; a wraith that seemed to glide through these hallowed halls without sound or substance. They had whispered of her coming long before he had laid eyes upon her.

All the same, he had sensed no malice in her when they’d crossed paths before. He had instructed her that she would treat the denizens of this hold with dignity commensurate with their station as guests of his chapter’s hospitality.

She had merely watched him. Perhaps she had prayed, but he had quit her company too swiftly to be certain. There was a disquieting quality to the decks above, where their meeting had taken place, and the Librarian had found that he much preferred to sequester himself within the deadened silence of the warded holds. It was easier to blind himself to the suffering of countless hundreds there.

Still unmoved from his position as the last of the sanctionites passed to file into line, Arstus shut his eyes to the world, relishing the rare absence of the Warp’s clawing presence in his mind. With only the briefest of pauses afforded to this effort, he finally addressed the diviner personally,

“I would hear your judgement, when your efforts are concluded.”

The space marine’s instruction is acknowledged, however soundlessly and without gesture. Rysari’s attention was trained on the file of cowering bodies which tentatively approached from their hold. This cell would be her third since her last sleeping period; the tracking of time was beyond her needs, but the weariness in her bones warned she’d require rest soon. What mattered now was assigning the worthiness of these sanctionites for the Lamenters.

It was an exhausting business, determining the fate of so many individuals. Many she held her bony fingers over were only children, each worn face tear-streaked and eyes set wide over dark sleepless rings. They looked upon her with such apprehension that every breath drew a flinch from the sanctionites. The space marine’s words seemed to instill enough courage in them to hold them in place, however, if fear did not.

Were it not for her disciplined mind, she might have dwelled on the reflection she saw in each pair of frightened eyes. The image of a young voidborn, whimpering under the bellows of an Inquisitorial psyker. Just as they did now, and as they always had, countless times before them.

She would hold her voice firm, but spare the vox-enhancements as the ritual prayer is spoken for the first spread. The young psyker before her is made to kneel, so the telepath’s hand could grasp their head like talons over prey. The initial reading from this touch opened Rysari to the hoard of terror such a small creature managed to keep within itself, and it lashes out to strike at her presence, a horrific whirlwind of empathetic pain. It was a relief, in many ways, that this encounter should be so routine.

Without flinching, Rysari sets her eyes on the cards piled into her raised hand. The sanctionite’s rampaging emotions continued to echo in the back of her mind, but were ignored by her steeled consciousness. With her mind clear of all extraneous thought, she opens herself to the Tarot, and the immaterium answers.

An intangible breeze begins to lift the copper strands of her hair, and a careful eye might catch a glimmer of gold across her eyes as moves to sift through the cards. Some prayer falls from her lips as though she were unaware of it, her eyes focused solely on the cards her Sight pulls from the deck to hover before her.

“The Renegade is removed from purpose. The Officer is voiceless. The Martyr and Man have fallen.”

The diviner reminded herself what she did here for them would be nothing to what they’d receive on Holy Terra, should their journey be so blessed. It was a harrowing task to screen each for spiritual strength and faith, knowing that failure on her behalf was unacceptable.. And knowing the fate of those she, herself, was condemning.

Confused and frightened, the young psyker recoils from their divination. Though her voice had been devoid of judgement, some meaning of the reading must have registered with the child. They attempt to rend themselves from her hand, which releases them backwards with enough force to stumble the already weakened creature.

The cards return to her hand, and the air releases some of its static charge. Rysari stares down at the sanctionite with something dangerously close to pity, and must correct the mistake of eye contact immediately.

“Second forward.”

The ritual that he bore witness to now had always played out in precisely the same manner. Identities had never mattered much in regards to these things; there would always be those who waited, and those who stepped forward unto their fate.

All who walk the Hallowed Path tread in the steps of their forebears.

It was a phrase that his mentor had spoken to him during those early years, the sternness of his gaze and the uncompromisingly even-handed punishment doled out in even measure. Even years after Brother Pathiel had passed from this hellish world to the Emperor’s side, the wisdom he had imparted on his pupil lingered.

Foremost among his lessons had been that no matter the fate one was cast, he may forever strive against it. In this, Arstus had come to comprehend the value of prognostication. It was a measure of the virtue of man’s soul, to struggle against the will of what was already written.

And how these small souls before him would struggle, before all was still. Even now they did, wrenching away from the diviner even as she released them pre-emptively. There was a fire in them that would be his charge to kindle, and by his oaths he would see it be done.

When the last of the sanctionites dragged themselves to the shadows furthest from the spectre, the Librarian stepped forward with a sudden purpose, thundering strides devouring the distance between himself and the cullis. A curt wave of the hand roused the gate’s machine spirits to action, and with painful deliberation, the warded hatch began to grind away.

To the children who had become his wards, his voice carried over the terrible din, seeming far too bright for so dark a place,

“Put your fears to rest, young ones. These trials shall pass. Look to my return.”

To the woman who had pronounced their judgement, his thoughts cut through the fabric of the immaterium with the cold clarity of a gleaming knife.

We must speak.

Time had passed without notice. Determining the potential–and ultimately, the fate–of so many young lives was a draining experience, and the fatigue would read to anyone familiar with psychic exhaustion. Even as she stood tall at this place of authority, there was a subtle dampening to her aura; a dulling of its rigid shell above the fluctuations of her essence. But it would not be broken.

Her thoughts stand to meet his readily in the space they carved through the aether,

I hear you, my lord.

Despite that common thread of animosity between the factions they represented, the Inquisitorial agent retained an almost childlike admiration for his kind. Space marines were an apex of Man, the ultimate defenders of the Imperium and all its people. Such glory and valor warranted a respect that even the Inquisition hadn’t scrubbed from her mind. At least not yet.

Even at this distance, the psycurium and dampening fields tightened her ribs to her lungs, though she was thankful for its barrier as an exhausted empath. She wondered for a moment whether the Librarian could even feel its presence, or the tormented undercurrent of the hold’s occupants that wailed through the warp. He had spoken kindly to them, a surprise to be certain. But she could not trust herself in judging whether it was compassion in his vox-encoded speech.

Whatever the Astarte thought of the seer’s uncanny resilience, he remained aloof, reserving himself to navigating the black halls that crisscrossed the Sabbat’s cavernous underbelly. Though less perceptive individuals might have failed to take note, Arstus regarded the grey robed armsmen and ship hands who scurried from the space marine’s advance with a distant scrutiny. Quietly, he posited that perhaps the scene would have played out much the same, even without his presence at the diviner’s side.

When the Librarian finally brought himself to a halt, it was at the edge of a long gantry that overlooked the pits from which they’d departed. Somewhere in the miserable gloom below them, his chapter’s future huddled in shadows.

Silence rushed to fill the void left by the battle brother’s stilled feet, affording the diviner time enough to gather herself before he spoke. Quietly, Arstus admitted that the lull was useful in soothing his own psyche, bruised by the psycurium’s unforgiving touch.

When he finally elected to speak, the Librarian’s voice was notably softer than before, the earnestness of his concern blunting the vox’s hard edge.

“I would hear your counsel. I would hear what is to come of them.”

Death.

The concept crawled into her thoughts before being dispersed, and reformed as something untainted by the tormented wails assaulting her mind. It was a practiced task, however difficult or painful, made easier with the unexpected warmth that radiated from the space marine’s voice and captured her attention.

“Few possessed the faith and fortitude you would ask of them, my lord. Most will rejoin the others for Holy Terra.” She longed to look at him, wanting to identify the source of that warmth somehow beyond his helmet. Warmth was not often, nor rightly ever, found in the cold of space, and the last place one would look would be in the depths of a Black Ship. Its sudden presence, however scarce, or even imagined, was an impossibility in this place.

The diviner’s nerves held her stiff and still, better to conceal the insistent pumping of her heart beside this creature of the Emperor.

Like the cogs of a great machine, the Librarian’s thoughts churned with a measured slowness; implacable in their advance, if agonizing in their seemingly ponderous nature.

The admission she had given him was hardly beyond the realm of expectation. He only wished that it were not so. He wished that there were something more he could do to ease their pain.

He wished that it were not so familiar.

A flicker of immaterial force brought the fluttering of robes about his person to a stop, shrouding his armored form more fully in draped azure.

“The trials that forge an Astartes are perilous things. Fatal, even to those of iron will, of momentous strength.” Arstus paused his words long enough to turn his gaze upon the whisper of a woman beside him, casting her features in the pale light of consecrated witchlight.

“Do you know what it is, then, that sets apart those that ascend, and those that perish?”

She listens intently as they both watch the darkness of the holds below. Until instinctively, Rysari tilts her head to meet the gaze of the larger being, for the first time since their engagement. It’s an effort to hold her position, against the urge to spare his visor the disrespect of her eye contact. The unexpected lack of superiority in his demeanor, however, aided in this effort, and a measure of surprise might have visited her features at the uncommon comfort this brought.

It is almost reluctance she feels as she turns again to the hold, as though she divined the answer from the hundreds of psykers themselves.

“Their spirits are too broken by their fear, and they cannot find their purpose. Faith cannot reach them,” the diviner recites what she had learned with a dower expression, one that has seen too many of these fraying individuals damned, unable or unwilling to refine their fear with faith. The look in her eyes borders dangerously on pity, though her tone retains its clinical, vox-affected manner. “We teach them the path of salvation, yet many suffer a nature too corroded to mould. The shadows they cast are weak without the guiding Light, and they suffer too wholly under malignant designs of taint.”

It was an honor to serve in the role she had been assigned, especially under the purview of a Librarian. If even one of these tormented souls could trade their pain for such holy purpose, it would be worth all the agony carried in this ship’s great holds. This is what the psyker tells herself even as she stands beside the Astartes, enduring a heightened sense of self-awareness all the while.

Though conviction of faith was something that he rarely found to be lacking in those he met, the Brother-Librarian had come to find that it was those who suffered most in whom faith was strongest. So it was with the seer.

Concealed beneath his chapter’s gilded ceramite, luminous blue eyes departed from the woman’s withered features, back to the deck below. In truth, he held little sway as to their fate, despite his chapter’s clout. The delivery of souls to burn on the Emperor’s holy pyre was a sacrosanct trust, charged solely to the Black Fleet and her masters, and he was but one Astarte…

And yet, his sense of duty demanded he speak.

“Is a blade broken in battle yet not a blade still?” He questioned in the leading way of a teacher to a pupil.

“If it has the capacity, is it not fit to be reforged?” The Librarian allowed the question to hang in the thick air of the tortured hold, his robes resuming their earlier fluttering.

“If what you say is true, then I will trust your judgement. I only ask that you consider my words. The Lamenters stand perched on the edge of oblivion. These souls could prove our undoing.. Or they may yet be the salvation we have sought for so long.”

Bony knuckles tightened at the railing she rested them on, but are withdrawn to her side where they might reclaim their discipline. It was a pain previously unaddressed which his words unknowingly struck, one she had endured the subduing of every meditative cycle. It was true that it would still haunt her even against duress of prayer, but its cries always came from within and were therefore under her purview of control. Until now.

To hear it spoken aloud was jolting, to say the least. In all her months aboard the Ship, not a whisper of sympathy nor even pity was breathed for the nameless denizens of the holds below. Though she knew to follow her own duty in like step, unbidden feelings of empathy proved inescapable for the seer. Now they were vocalized, with a tongue she couldn’t fathom. Why would he, of all individuals, question this process as she dared not?

“I understand wholly, my lord,” she spoke, her voice quieted by a temporary stall in her vocal implants. “It is why I sought a higher perception of their capability. It would be inexcusable to offer you less than mandated.”

She wondered momentarily if this was a test he offered her. Perhaps he had detected her own questioning, and used it against her now. However, these thoughts were readily defeated by the genuine manner in which he spoke. And it was this earnest compassion that pried more from the warded lips of the seer.

“I thank you for entrusting their fates to my sight. Were it through sight alone that I might mold them for you, I would not hesitate.” An anxious beat in her breast pauses her, but she continues, “I did hope to find more opportunity in them, my lord. But my hope is nothing to the will of the Emperor. I could not disaffect my duty in deigning any one of them as more than what they are.”

After all, she should not despair; theirs was a sacred fate, immeasurably purposeful and deserving of her respect. And her resignation.

Were he a lesser man, the subtlety with which she clenched at the rail might have eluded him. For all her frailness, the woman carried herself with an air of absolute focus. What others might perhaps have mistaken for simple, inhuman detachment, the Astarte recognized for conviction. It was a familiar sort of determination that could only come from a particularly harrowing sanctioning.

Moving with the hurtling finesse that only a space marine could possess, Arstus swept his robes about him so that he might better face the seer, as though he sought to further tower over the human he already dwarfed. And then, with not a whisper of violence, he lowered himself to a kneel beside the withered diviner and looked into her eyes.

“Know that I seek not to steer you from your decision when I speak.” He began, two massive, ceramite-sheathed hands coming to rest atop his bent knee. “Is it your belief that I chose them for their strength of will? Or body? Or that I elected them for some percieved mightiness of conviction?”

There was palpable pause before his voice rumbled up through the grille of his helmet like a cloud of rolling smoke.

“It was for the pureness of conviction that I touched upon in them. There is an ember hope in all of us. In some, it is little more than a spark. But in them, it is a roaring flame. I sense it in you, too.”

Another sharp pause punctuated the air, before being swept away by his final words.

“Do you truly believe anyone is beyond salvation?”

A roaring flame, her mind echoed, awestruck by his blessing and proximity. It was unfathomable to consider which captivated her; the sudden question regarding her faith, or the unimaginable regard he paid her in asking it. Holding her eyes from his visor was no longer an option. Not while the Astarte commanded them.

An understated swallows remedies her dry mouth, her frozen stance preventing a show of cowardice. He commanded her truth.

"I believe in salvation, my lord, as I believe in sin.”

[His Light leads us all, and yet so many stray.]

The broadcast quandary played second to her answer, sent alongside with a respectful division. It came with the candor of a despairing student, thoughtful and determined to seek resolution. It would have shaken the veteran diviner to communicate so plainly with a space marine were it not for the benevolence he exuded– in such measure that it brought a touch of color to her pallor features.

“No man may evade both.”

Whatever reaction the Lamenter recieved the seer's message with was hidden from view by the veil of bradden ceramite that shielded his features, the warp-echo of his mind conveying only stoic acknowledgement.

It was a fine answer, he considered agreeably, but one which he met with a faint disappointment all the same. The sin of failure stained all, it was true; the Lamenters knew this as well as any. Their shortcomings as a chapter were manifest, if not in the eyes of the Imperium's people, then certainly in the cold regard paid by their peers. It was why they could never tire in their duty, held sacred above all else. It was why he trifled with the diviner as an equal, rather than as a kingly lord as another in his position might.

"And yet the sin of failure may be cleansed, as a flame scourges a wound." Arstus offered, unmoving in the hold's dim light.

[Hope is the flame we must carry, that it may embolden the soul. It is our task to enkindle it into something greater.]

"I ask that you afford me your grace in my endeavor, honored seer. Give me time to stoke the fire in their hearts, that they may forget their infirmity of spirit. Those that prove incapable shall pass to your care, as they must." The marine's gaze held fast to his fellow psyker's, mindful of her reaction. "But there is something I sense in them that begs my intervention. I would shirk my duty to ignore it."

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream, prt II

{part 1}

[[ Completely 100% unanticipated surprise 18+ nsfw erp content how’d that happen ]]

Kezza followed his guidance, finding herself perched above him with a hand at his ear and a leg between his. Her ears curled at the almost unanticipated implication, the dream conveying her response with a light ripple of welcomed surprise. Though he may have been a step or two ahead of her, the mesmer couldn’t argue that his interpretation was wholly inaccurate.

But the dream shuddered in the distant background of the scene when he spoke– a vague discomfort crawling in from the imagined walls. While it could be more difficult for the distracted Disaggregator to recognize, Kezza felt it clearly.

As she looked down at the asura beneath her, there was a brief moment where he seemed absent. In his place was another echo, this time almost audible; A feminine voice, with the impression of his own words spoken as one sound.

Unaware that Gerik may have heard it, she snaps herself from the dream’s instability, restoring the integrity of the inn room. Embarrassment folds her ears, though they keep their curled tips in a bashful expression. She nuzzles at the wrist that reaches her hair, easily resuming the indulgence of his company.

“Ger..” Kezza leans to bring her forehead to his, a warm gratitude brought through the touch. “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

It wasn’t terribly difficult for the Magistrix to lighten her subordinate’s mood even in the worst of times, but even so, Gerik was almost taken aback by the warmth that his friend’s words gifted him with. Already flushed by the closeness they shared, the Disaggregator’s blush spread to his cheeks from his ears, a demure smile spreading easily across his features.

“I don’t want to know..” His words came out slow, half-sung through the hazy dream world around them. It was all so idyllic.

And yet, something seemed off. Perhaps a bit slower to catch onto the distant shift that rippled beneath the dream’s surface, Gerik’s ears nonetheless were lent a slight curl that spoke his alarm. His eyes drifted lazily despite the jarring sensation, scanning the edges of his vision for anything out of the ordinary only to come away with nothing. It couldn’t be anything worth worrying about, certainly.

Returning his attention to the asura above him, the Disaggregator seemed to forget his concerns quickly enough, his teeth finding a place to nip along the base of Kezza’s ear, a light growl accompanying the motion as it turned to a more insistent nuzzle.

“Whatever time we have here, it’s enough for me, Kez.”

A lilting coo answers the teeth at her ear, not unlike a gentle purr. Kezza shifts to return the favor with eager nips, bringing their chests to meet. The brief flurry ends with grateful nuzzles below his ear and cheek, and a hand slides from his shoulder to his waist.

Though her motion is seamless in the dream, it seems required that she adjust the knee set between his legs. The contact is little more than a soft nudge, though the dream offers no tells of its innocence.

Kezza places a kiss at his neck. “Me too.”

Breathless, Gerik lets his claws trace a path down the small of her back, both to further soothe her and in a bid to keep her close. He finally reclaims his composure enough for a light sigh to issue forth, increasingly fervent nuzzles paid to her neck and collar.

Pulling away only enough to allow himself the room to maneuver, the Disaggregator hooks a claw under his scarf and pulls it away, failing to notice when the discarded garment dissolves into the dreamy ether. Unburdened by the fine silk that had concealed it, his neck and collar lay exposed before the Magistrix, an unintended growl entreating her to take advantage of the vulnerability.

Kezza wastes no time bringing soft attention down his neck, delivering a light nip at the collar. Delicate claws draw across his breastplate, but she soon takes them to its fastenings to cut it loose in the short order only a dream could permit. The armor joins his scarf in the forgotten corners of lucidity, allowing access beneath his coat where her claws can slide across his chest in earnest. A sigh escapes her without thinking, and she rests her head against him with a coo.

Freed from the burden of his armor, Gerik is allowed greater leeway to reciprocate his friend’s advances. So encouraged, he feels another cooing sigh drift past his lips as Kezza’s teeth meet his neck, spurring his hands to wander to the hem of her shirt where it might be tugged up enough to allow them access to her chest. Once located, his claws drag themselves gingerly across the soft of her belly, snout buried in the gentle brown locks at her head to sigh encouragement– Though an indiscreet buck of the hips is perhaps more telling of that goading than anything else.

Coaxed into action, Kezza is convinced to lift herself only enough to set his legs between hers, and assign him another kiss to reciprocate. Breathless despite the dream state, she finds herself whispering a different iteration of longing.

“I’ve missed you,” the words come only partially from her lips, as their sentiment fills the imagined air around them. The hand beneath his coat now brushes it aside, no less tenderly than the soft nuzzles at his snout.

The Magistrix’s words coil about Gerik on the very air, encouraging him to relax further into the bedding beneath him with a soundless sigh. With the space the motion affords him, a long kiss is snatched from Kezza’s lips before he withdraws to work her shirt free, discarded just as his own garments had been. With her chest bared, he finds himself caught lingering in a haze as he takes in the sight, awed.

Regaining himself just enough, Gerik leans back up to trail affection along Kezza’s abdomen, working his way up until the tips of his teeth find purchase again at her neck. Without burdening his lips with the duty of movement, his thoughts manifest themselves around the two of them on a current of loving warmth, “I love you, Kez.”.

Under his half-lidded gaze, a telling curl slowly lifts her ears with an even more telling blush. The scar marring her chest and shoulder still appears, dark and jagged, unforgotten by the once-Magistrix even in the midst of a dream. The minor lull in the atmosphere is banished, however, by Gerik’s touch, and Kezza sighs through the ripple of solace he provides. That memory would not find purchase here.

A short pulse of excitement crosses the dreamscape for each kiss he places on his way to her neck, which is offered freely and welcomed with a yearning coo.

It’s only at his words that something seems amiss somewhere in the vaguities of their imagined world. It swims through the background of her mind, gentle as a leaf on the breeze, even as its influence whispers uncertainty and contrition.

Before it might be cause for discomfort, Kezza closes her eyes to the unseen shift in thoughts, and guides them gently back to silence. They were memories once resolved, stirred by the feelings Gerik again inspired, but there was no place for them here.

Not while she had longed for this comfort through all of her treacherous exile.

Soothing herself with the reminder of Vinn’s kind understanding, a small wave of her partner’s warmth washes across them, and the dream is relieved fully of anxiety.. Forgiving only a moment’s jolt of an unrelated remorse.

Reassuring nuzzles are paid to his ear before she might see his notice of the small disruption. They are followed by a nip at the top, her teeth held suggestively longer than before.

The undercurrent of distress that worms it's way through the dream fails to strike the Disaggregator-- at least at first. Too engrossed in putting his words to action, Gerik lets his claws draw long, swooping lines across the Magistrix's bared back, gently rising sentiments of contentment emanating from his person.

It's not until his eyes chance to fall on the scar across Kezza's chest that he feels a twinge of remorse, opening him to the larger shadow cast by his wayward friend's own reservations. Something began to stir in his heart, dark and wounded, but with Kezza's renewed affection, he feels it cast off and his senses immersed again in a protective warmth.

Pinching a gasp between his lips at the insistent teeth nipping his ear, Gerik reciprocates with a kiss at her jaw as he departs his hands to draw the hem of her pants down over her hips.

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream, prt II

{part 1}

[[ Completely 100% unanticipated surprise 18+ nsfw erp content how’d that happen ]]

Kezza followed his guidance, finding herself perched above him with a hand at his ear and a leg between his. Her ears curled at the almost unanticipated implication, the dream conveying her response with a light ripple of welcomed surprise. Though he may have been a step or two ahead of her, the mesmer couldn’t argue that his interpretation was wholly inaccurate.

But the dream shuddered in the distant background of the scene when he spoke– a vague discomfort crawling in from the imagined walls. While it could be more difficult for the distracted Disaggregator to recognize, Kezza felt it clearly.

As she looked down at the asura beneath her, there was a brief moment where he seemed absent. In his place was another echo, this time almost audible; A feminine voice, with the impression of his own words spoken as one sound.

Unaware that Gerik may have heard it, she snaps herself from the dream’s instability, restoring the integrity of the inn room. Embarrassment folds her ears, though they keep their curled tips in a bashful expression. She nuzzles at the wrist that reaches her hair, easily resuming the indulgence of his company.

“Ger..” Kezza leans to bring her forehead to his, a warm gratitude brought through the touch. “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

It wasn’t terribly difficult for the Magistrix to lighten her subordinate’s mood even in the worst of times, but even so, Gerik was almost taken aback by the warmth that his friend’s words gifted him with. Already flushed by the closeness they shared, the Disaggregator’s blush spread to his cheeks from his ears, a demure smile spreading easily across his features.

“I don’t want to know..” His words came out slow, half-sung through the hazy dream world around them. It was all so idyllic.

And yet, something seemed off. Perhaps a bit slower to catch onto the distant shift that rippled beneath the dream’s surface, Gerik’s ears nonetheless were lent a slight curl that spoke his alarm. His eyes drifted lazily despite the jarring sensation, scanning the edges of his vision for anything out of the ordinary only to come away with nothing. It couldn’t be anything worth worrying about, certainly.

Returning his attention to the asura above him, the Disaggregator seemed to forget his concerns quickly enough, his teeth finding a place to nip along the base of Kezza’s ear, a light growl accompanying the motion as it turned to a more insistent nuzzle.

“Whatever time we have here, it’s enough for me, Kez.”

A lilting coo answers the teeth at her ear, not unlike a gentle purr. Kezza shifts to return the favor with eager nips, bringing their chests to meet. The brief flurry ends with grateful nuzzles below his ear and cheek, and a hand slides from his shoulder to his waist.

Though her motion is seamless in the dream, it seems required that she adjust the knee set between his legs. The contact is little more than a soft nudge, though the dream offers no tells of its innocence.

Kezza places a kiss at his neck. “Me too.”

Breathless, Gerik lets his claws trace a path down the small of her back, both to further soothe her and in a bid to keep her close. He finally reclaims his composure enough for a light sigh to issue forth, increasingly fervent nuzzles paid to her neck and collar.

Pulling away only enough to allow himself the room to maneuver, the Disaggregator hooks a claw under his scarf and pulls it away, failing to notice when the discarded garment dissolves into the dreamy ether. Unburdened by the fine silk that had concealed it, his neck and collar lay exposed before the Magistrix, an unintended growl entreating her to take advantage of the vulnerability.

Kezza wastes no time bringing soft attention down his neck, delivering a light nip at the collar. Delicate claws draw across his breastplate, but she soon takes them to its fastenings to cut it loose in the short order only a dream could permit. The armor joins his scarf in the forgotten corners of lucidity, allowing access beneath his coat where her claws can slide across his chest in earnest. A sigh escapes her without thinking, and she rests her head against him with a coo.

Freed from the burden of his armor, Gerik is allowed greater leeway to reciprocate his friend’s advances. So encouraged, he feels another cooing sigh drift past his lips as Kezza’s teeth meet his neck, spurring his hands to wander to the hem of her shirt where it might be tugged up enough to allow them access to her chest. Once located, his claws drag themselves gingerly across the soft of her belly, snout buried in the gentle brown locks at her head to sigh encouragement– Though an indiscreet buck of the hips is perhaps more telling of that goading than anything else.

Coaxed into action, Kezza is convinced to lift herself only enough to set his legs between hers, and assign him another kiss to reciprocate. Breathless despite the dream state, she finds herself whispering a different iteration of longing.

“I’ve missed you,” the words come only partially from her lips, as their sentiment fills the imagined air around them. The hand beneath his coat now brushes it aside, no less tenderly than the soft nuzzles at his snout.

The Magistrix’s words coil about Gerik on the very air, encouraging him to relax further into the bedding beneath him with a soundless sigh. With the space the motion affords him, a long kiss is snatched from Kezza’s lips before he withdraws to work her shirt free, discarded just as his own garments had been. With her chest bared, he finds himself caught lingering in a haze as he takes in the sight, awed.

Regaining himself just enough, Gerik leans back up to trail affection along Kezza’s abdomen, working his way up until the tips of his teeth find purchase again at her neck. Without burdening his lips with the duty of movement, his thoughts manifest themselves around the two of them on a current of loving warmth, “I love you, Kez.”.

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream, prt II

{part 1}

[[ Completely 100% unanticipated surprise 18+ nsfw erp content how’d that happen ]]

Kezza followed his guidance, finding herself perched above him with a hand at his ear and a leg between his. Her ears curled at the almost unanticipated implication, the dream conveying her response with a light ripple of welcomed surprise. Though he may have been a step or two ahead of her, the mesmer couldn’t argue that his interpretation was wholly inaccurate.

But the dream shuddered in the distant background of the scene when he spoke– a vague discomfort crawling in from the imagined walls. While it could be more difficult for the distracted Disaggregator to recognize, Kezza felt it clearly.

As she looked down at the asura beneath her, there was a brief moment where he seemed absent. In his place was another echo, this time almost audible; A feminine voice, with the impression of his own words spoken as one sound.

Unaware that Gerik may have heard it, she snaps herself from the dream’s instability, restoring the integrity of the inn room. Embarrassment folds her ears, though they keep their curled tips in a bashful expression. She nuzzles at the wrist that reaches her hair, easily resuming the indulgence of his company.

“Ger..” Kezza leans to bring her forehead to his, a warm gratitude brought through the touch. “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

It wasn’t terribly difficult for the Magistrix to lighten her subordinate’s mood even in the worst of times, but even so, Gerik was almost taken aback by the warmth that his friend’s words gifted him with. Already flushed by the closeness they shared, the Disaggregator’s blush spread to his cheeks from his ears, a demure smile spreading easily across his features.

“I don’t want to know..” His words came out slow, half-sung through the hazy dream world around them. It was all so idyllic.

And yet, something seemed off. Perhaps a bit slower to catch onto the distant shift that rippled beneath the dream’s surface, Gerik’s ears nonetheless were lent a slight curl that spoke his alarm. His eyes drifted lazily despite the jarring sensation, scanning the edges of his vision for anything out of the ordinary only to come away with nothing. It couldn’t be anything worth worrying about, certainly.

Returning his attention to the asura above him, the Disaggregator seemed to forget his concerns quickly enough, his teeth finding a place to nip along the base of Kezza’s ear, a light growl accompanying the motion as it turned to a more insistent nuzzle.

“Whatever time we have here, it’s enough for me, Kez.”

A lilting coo answers the teeth at her ear, not unlike a gentle purr. Kezza shifts to return the favor with eager nips, bringing their chests to meet. The brief flurry ends with grateful nuzzles below his ear and cheek, and a hand slides from his shoulder to his waist.

Though her motion is seamless in the dream, it seems required that she adjust the knee set between his legs. The contact is little more than a soft nudge, though the dream offers no tells of its innocence.

Kezza places a kiss at his neck. “Me too.”

Breathless, Gerik lets his claws trace a path down the small of her back, both to further soothe her and in a bid to keep her close. He finally reclaims his composure enough for a light sigh to issue forth, increasingly fervent nuzzles paid to her neck and collar.

Pulling away only enough to allow himself the room to maneuver, the Disaggregator hooks a claw under his scarf and pulls it away, failing to notice when the discarded garment dissolves into the dreamy ether. Unburdened by the fine silk that had concealed it, his neck and collar lay exposed before the Magistrix, an unintended growl entreating her to take advantage of the vulnerability.

Kezza wastes no time bringing soft attention down his neck, delivering a light nip at the collar. Delicate claws draw across his breastplate, but she soon takes them to its fastenings to cut it loose in the short order only a dream could permit. The armor joins his scarf in the forgotten corners of lucidity, allowing access beneath his coat where her claws can slide across his chest in earnest. A sigh escapes her without thinking, and she rests her head against him with a coo.

Freed from the burden of his armor, Gerik is allowed greater leeway to reciprocate his friend's advances. So encouraged, he feels another cooing sigh drift past his lips as Kezza's teeth meet his neck, spurring his hands to wander to the hem of her shirt where it might be tugged up enough to allow them access to her chest. Once located, his claws drag themselves gingerly across the soft of her belly, snout buried in the gentle brown locks at her head to sigh encouragement-- Though an indiscreet buck of the hips is perhaps more telling of that goading than anything else.

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream, prt II

{part 1}

[[ Completely 100% unanticipated surprise 18+ nsfw erp content how’d that happen ]]

Kezza followed his guidance, finding herself perched above him with a hand at his ear and a leg between his. Her ears curled at the almost unanticipated implication, the dream conveying her response with a light ripple of welcomed surprise. Though he may have been a step or two ahead of her, the mesmer couldn’t argue that his interpretation was wholly inaccurate.

But the dream shuddered in the distant background of the scene when he spoke– a vague discomfort crawling in from the imagined walls. While it could be more difficult for the distracted Disaggregator to recognize, Kezza felt it clearly.

As she looked down at the asura beneath her, there was a brief moment where he seemed absent. In his place was another echo, this time almost audible; A feminine voice, with the impression of his own words spoken as one sound.

Unaware that Gerik may have heard it, she snaps herself from the dream’s instability, restoring the integrity of the inn room. Embarrassment folds her ears, though they keep their curled tips in a bashful expression. She nuzzles at the wrist that reaches her hair, easily resuming the indulgence of his company.

“Ger..” Kezza leans to bring her forehead to his, a warm gratitude brought through the touch. “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

It wasn’t terribly difficult for the Magistrix to lighten her subordinate’s mood even in the worst of times, but even so, Gerik was almost taken aback by the warmth that his friend’s words gifted him with. Already flushed by the closeness they shared, the Disaggregator’s blush spread to his cheeks from his ears, a demure smile spreading easily across his features.

“I don’t want to know..” His words came out slow, half-sung through the hazy dream world around them. It was all so idyllic.

And yet, something seemed off. Perhaps a bit slower to catch onto the distant shift that rippled beneath the dream’s surface, Gerik’s ears nonetheless were lent a slight curl that spoke his alarm. His eyes drifted lazily despite the jarring sensation, scanning the edges of his vision for anything out of the ordinary only to come away with nothing. It couldn’t be anything worth worrying about, certainly.

Returning his attention to the asura above him, the Disaggregator seemed to forget his concerns quickly enough, his teeth finding a place to nip along the base of Kezza’s ear, a light growl accompanying the motion as it turned to a more insistent nuzzle.

“Whatever time we have here, it’s enough for me, Kez.”

A lilting coo answers the teeth at her ear, not unlike a gentle purr. Kezza shifts to return the favor with eager nips, bringing their chests to meet. The brief flurry ends with grateful nuzzles below his ear and cheek, and a hand slides from his shoulder to his waist.

Though her motion is seamless in the dream, it seems required that she adjust the knee set between his legs. The contact is little more than a soft nudge, though the dream offers no tells of its innocence.

Kezza places a kiss at his neck. “Me too.”

Breathless, Gerik lets his claws trace a path down the small of her back, both to further soothe her and in a bid to keep her close. He finally reclaims his composure enough for a light sigh to issue forth, increasingly fervent nuzzles paid to her neck and collar.

Pulling away only enough to allow himself the room to maneuver, the Disaggregator hooks a claw under his scarf and pulls it away, failing to notice when the discarded garment dissolves into the dreamy ether. Unburdened by the fine silk that had concealed it, his neck and collar lay exposed before the Magistrix, an unintended growl entreating her to take advantage of the vulnerability.

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream, prt II

{part 1}

[[ Completely 100% unanticipated surprise 18+ nsfw erp content how’d that happen ]]

Kezza followed his guidance, finding herself perched above him with a hand at his ear and a leg between his. Her ears curled at the almost unanticipated implication, the dream conveying her response with a light ripple of welcomed surprise. Though he may have been a step or two ahead of her, the mesmer couldn’t argue that his interpretation was wholly inaccurate.

But the dream shuddered in the distant background of the scene when he spoke– a vague discomfort crawling in from the imagined walls. While it could be more difficult for the distracted Disaggregator to recognize, Kezza felt it clearly.

As she looked down at the asura beneath her, there was a brief moment where he seemed absent. In his place was another echo, this time almost audible; A feminine voice, with the impression of his own words spoken as one sound.

Unaware that Gerik may have heard it, she snaps herself from the dream’s instability, restoring the integrity of the inn room. Embarrassment folds her ears, though they keep their curled tips in a bashful expression. She nuzzles at the wrist that reaches her hair, easily resuming the indulgence of his company.

“Ger..” Kezza leans to bring her forehead to his, a warm gratitude brought through the touch. “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

It wasn't terribly difficult for the Magistrix to lighten her subordinate's mood even in the worst of times, but even so, Gerik was almost taken aback by the warmth that his friend's words gifted him with. Already flushed by the closeness they shared, the Disaggregator's blush spread to his cheeks from his ears, a demure smile spreading easily across his features.

"I don't want to know.." His words came out slow, half-sung through the hazy dream world around them. It was all so idyllic.

And yet, something seemed off. Perhaps a bit slower to catch onto the distant shift that rippled beneath the dream's surface, Gerik's ears nonetheless were lent a slight curl that spoke his alarm. His eyes drifted lazily despite the jarring sensation, scanning the edges of his vision for anything out of the ordinary only to come away with nothing. It couldn't be anything worth worrying about, certainly.

Returning his attention to the asura above him, the Disaggregator seemed to forget his concerns quickly enough, his teeth finding a place to nip along the base of Kezza's ear, a light growl accompanying the motion as it turned to a more insistent nuzzle.

"Whatever time we have here, it's enough for me, Kez."

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream (RP)

Another long pull from her wine glass, and another sigh following it. It was a routine she’d long since fallen into– were she not so dedicated to regular visits with her family, she could fall harder into such a habit. What else would keep her going, after losing everything? Without Vinn and her precious Pwitt, the once-Magistrix was an asura without purpose. And she knew it.

Kezza gripped the bridge of her snout over the mask– perhaps the last trapping of the glory days which still served her. Alchemy knew her krewe didn’t. And the masks would grant her protection from that very same krewe, provided the assassins they sent were unfamiliar with her old practice. It seemed unlikely, but so far.. so good.

An emptied flagon crashed beside her, thrown against the bar behind the order of the bookah wielding it. The crude and surly thing demanded a refreshed glass, by Kezza’s count, her fifth. How this repulsive cretin could stomach that much swill in so short a time was a curiosity worth research, but the asura only gave the specimen a dull stare. Seemingly incensed by the look, the human growled at her and muttered something incomprehensible.

One of the most regrettable aspects of her exile was the safety protocol she’d assigned herself: Never be alone outside of her hideout. Even if it meant the company of bookah. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but solitude took its toll between risked visits with Vinn and Pwitt.

Acceptance became easier to grasp, but..

It never got less depressing.

At least in Divinity’s Reach, there was wine. A guilty pleasure, she admitted, but one made forgivable with the reminder of its discovery. Pained now as it was, the memory could still warm her where the wine couldn’t. She had been reluctant to indulge her friend’s incessant push for the outing, reminding him of every unpleasantry the city held.

But as always, Gerik had a way of swaying her. The absence of his whimsy made her stay in the city much less amicable, even as she recalled his more obnoxious tendencies. She’d trade every glass of fermented grape to hear just one of his annoying quips.

Kezza brought a hand to her forehead, unable and unwilling to acknowledge the irate female next her. The bottle of wine she’d ingested was nothing to the horrid lead weight in her stomach, a nausea she’d never once shaken in the past months. There was no way to know for certain whether or not the Disaggregator had succeeded his escape, and it was an anxiety that overwhelmed her thoughts when her guard grew weak. Relief only hinted itself in the determined hope that he was as capable as she’d always known him to be.

–

The journey back to her hideaway through the foreign city was mercifully uneventful under the cover of mesmeric subterfuge. Despite the sore arm she’d acquired during the inevitable altercation with the bookah woman, the cause of her fatigue was far less tangible. These days were exhausting in their boredom, and the nights restless with angst.

Yet for once, perhaps by the grace of that bookah’s dirty tricks, Kezza found her makeshift cot an almost welcome sight, and sleep came before it could be questioned.

The Disaggregator was no stranger to ritual. Binding a spirit, for instance, was a process with which he and any other Inquest agent worth their datastacks were intimately familiar. Though the exact methods and preferred location differred from the habits of the pedestrian lab jockey or floundering bookah, the curvature of the binding lines and the crumbled reagents, the powdered bone and muttered incantations were all the same. It was a similar experience to any other ritual of a like magic.

This, though. This was different. Certainly, the chalk lines had been drawn up and the candles had been lit; surely, he’d canted the sacred words, written in times long passed into antiquity as proscribed by the simian gods– But it was different. This time, there had been no bundled sticks to burn, or dried rat bones to break over consecrated water.

This time, there had only been an overwhelming consumption of junk food. As much as he disdained the stuff, he’d eaten the first bag of grub chips quickly enough. By the fifth container of Planthopper Pasties, however, the Disaggregator was beginning to feel the strain. By the tenth, he was unconscious, face down in a circle of chalk.

When he entered the dream world, it took a moment for the asura to reacquaint himself with his own consciousness– Or subconsciousness. He couldn’t be certain which was which. Everything around him was smoke and sunlight, the moon wreathed in dust, a rippling veil of ephemeral mist. If he had the time, he might spend a while grappling with the nature of his newfound lucidity. As it was, the task at hand demanded too much focus, lending his form a hard edge in the soft, blooming murk of dreamlight.

Impelling himself forward, it was a long, sometimes harrowing while before he touched on a dream sphere that might read as anything resembling familiar, but when he did, the sensation was unmistakable. Careening around the edge of the crystalline orb, Gerik allowed a dragged claw to maintain contact and prevent him from losing hold as he peered within from without.

What he saw skipped his heart a beat. There, mere meters beneath him, was the Magistrix– Long-sought and wrapped in the fitful turnings of an anxious sleep. He began to tap at the surface.

The ragged asura tosses and turns under the coat she’s reassigned as a blanket. Her limp ears flick now and then, until her subconscious detects something which rouses them.

While not dreamless, the restless sleep is occupied by a general malaise, manifested in her mind as a dark and chaotic haze. Images of familiar places– her office, her domicile, the Magistracy lobby– form and fade before any of them can stick. The most stable of environments is her office, a dim place lit with more crimson than its reality ever held. It isn’t much longer before it wins out against the grey and busy void, adhering itself to her subconscious enough that Kezza finds herself standing in its altered form; The ceiling warped, too low at her desk and stretched beyond the confines of its tangible twin in a way which mirrored the Magistracy’s halls. Databanks and furniture are likewise discordant, and perhaps curiously, lacking doors. The entry to her private washroom seems the most realistic, though its interior is starker than it ought to be.

Kezza stands in the middle of the scene, dully awakening to the dream. Without lucidity, she starts for her desk, and seats herself in her chair which is too large for her person. Noise, indecipherable, clouds the air, and Kezza feels herself begin to panic under the sudden stress her dream generates.

From the noise, however, comes a rhythmic tapping. Somehow, she finds it overcome the chaos, and it permits her focus enough that a presence is felt. The outer rim of her dream becomes permeable, allowing the interloper to phase into the dream freely.

Peering through the hazy sphere’s surface, there’s little else the Disaggregator can make of the scene within beyond the vaguely feminine form inside. If it weren’t for the whisper of a unknowingly shared memory to draw him in, he might well have passed it by entirely. Thankfully, he hadn’t– And more fortuitously still, the sphere’s occupant took note enough of his harassment that the barrier between void and dream became porous, allowing him to pass.

Not risking a moment to the capricious nature of the dreamscape, Gerik pushed himself beyond the threshold and into darkness. It was then that he realized his mistake. In his haste, the ever keen Disaggregator had failed to think through his manner of entry; a blundering that left him suspended in the air above the room’s center for a moment before the idea of gravity asserted itself and sent him hurtling to the floor with a yelp.

“HWUUAA–OORRMF!”

Already in distress, the cry of a familiar voice spurs a shriek from Kezza, who shrinks back into the chair as though shielding herself from something terrible.

After a few moments of cowering, she pries apart the fingers she’d thrown across her face, and looks ahead at where the vivid sound came from. After another pause, the unaware Kezza swallows, “Who are you? G-Gerik..?”

It took a moment for the Disaggregator to realize that he was being addressed, and longer still for his body to register that it had no cause to be in pain. This was, after all, only a dream. Willing his supposed injuries mended, the asura picks himself up and dusts himself off, paying particular attention to the straightening of his collar before he can find it in himself to respond to the Magistrix,

“Affimative, Kezza, it is I; the great and powerful Disaggregator! I have transcended the barrier between the waking world and the dreaming to.. To, uh..” Gerik felt a stirring in his chest that stayed what would have been a typically grandstanding entrance as he finally looked upon his estranged friend. Perhaps it was a machination of the Magistrix’s fabricated dream world that lent her appearance a hint of unfamiliarity about it. After all, one’s dream self was often the ideal, or most dreaded version of the real self.

But, it had been so long since he’d laid eyes upon her in either setting. The dawning uncertainty brought a tickling wetness to the corner of his eyes that no force of will could banish, and his voice broke earnestly when he spoke again, “I-I’ve missed you so much, Kez.”

The Kezza who regards him from behind the desk is someone different than probably expected. Whether due to the oversized chair or the dream’s own design, she seems smaller, and is dressed in the first uniform he would have ever seen her wear. Her hair also harkens back to years past, where she wore it long without adornments. All that seems missing is a mask, though the hands still tentatively hiding her features might suffice.

Worried skepticism follows his approach, his bold and vivid form in noticeable contrast to the grim surroundings. It’s enough to give her a distraction from the dream’s manufactured anguish, which is forced to abate as her mind finds something new to focus on. Kezza watches him with growing disbelief, eventually shifting her hands enough that he might finally see her face.

“Ge-Gerik.. what are you doing here?”

The environment appears to bolster itself despite the meek and befuddled question– The walls of the office straighten themselves to realistic proportions, finding their symmetry once abandoning the extraneous length which resembled the Magistracy’s halls. While Gerik’s presence solidified the setting, however, it did little for Kezza’s lucidity. The mesmer had yet to realize her own dream-state, let alone the truth of her friend’s presence.

Reclaiming his usual blustering composure was not an easy feat when confronted by what he now saw before him: the Magistrix as she was before there was even a Magistracy. It was certainly a dream, then. He hadn’t seen her hair down and unadorned in ages..

But he knew that there was no time to waste when there was no telling how long the ritual would maintain his link with her dreaming mind. Swiping the collected moisture from the corner of his eyes, Gerik started forward a step, humming.

“I’ve established a link with your dreaming mind, Kezza. You’re asleep. I am too. I needed to contact you.”

“Dreaming..”

The notion shudders the dream world, a likely uncomfortable sensation for the interloper as consciousness challenges the subconscious. Kezza places a palm against her temple, eyes scanning her desk with purpose as the fabricated reality shifts incomprehensively. The glyphs of her datawork were wholly illegible, which warranted another test she learned as a budding synergist. The environment begins to stabilize, with a much less tenuous grasp of its own form.

Taking her hands in front of her, Kezza brings them to manifest an orange flame– something impossible in her reality, where mesmeric ability long since displaced her want for an elementalist’s prowess. The fire closes in on itself, liquefying into a glob of water.

Her expression slowly lifts with the realization, though when she looks up, there is a distinct alteration of her features. Without transition, her hair now passes her shoulders in a dull and ragged state, and the wear of long-term stress is clear across her face. Her uniform, too, is supplanted by a contemporary outfit of asuran dress, lacking any implication of her krewe allegiance.

“Ger..!”

Gerik would have only a moment to process the change, however, as he’d find Kezza’s arms embracing him without having witnessed her approach.

Doubt, however, brings her to lift her head from its place at his chest. “But, how? How do I know you’re not a figment?”

With as much as he’d longed for the Magistrix’s embrace, Gerik found himself woefully unprepared for the suddenness with which her arms enircled him, still not entirely acclimated to the whimsy of dream. Nearly stumbling a step, the Disaggregator recovers quickly against the smaller asura’s weight and brings his arms to match her own, the side of his face nuzzling against her neck almost without bidding.

He never wanted it to end. But it had to.

Feeling her head lift from his person, his eyes flicked down to meet Kezza’s gaze, willing away a wetness that might have been telling were it not so readily disposed of. He huffed,

“I can’t imagine any figment you’d dream up could ever match the magnificence of the genuine article. I mean, really Kez. The gall of the thought!”

Though the snooty imperiousness in his tone was entirely real, it did not come without an undercurrent of good nature. He smirked.

“It was a trying endeavor. I’ve spent a small fortune on scented candles and.. Junk food. Euugh.”

It was that touch of derision in his voice and ready wit, which allowed her face to brighten with an irresistible smile. He was right; The times he’d been replicated by her sleeping mind never presented the nuance of this obnoxious charm– it was either one, or the other.

The way his snout wrinkled with mock outrage was also a dead giveaway.

“Candles and junk food?” She echoes with bewildered skepticism, having never seen him partake of the latter. It was an unusual combination. “Just what did you do?”

With as much effort as he put into playing the part of the snide villain, Gerik’s faux superiority was easily broken by the softness of the Magistrix’s smile. Feeling the corners of his mouth tug into a like expression, the Disaggregator nursed the side of Kezza’s neck with a nuzzle, pulling out of it with a chuckle.

“Nothing I’m proud of.” He admitted, already wary of the consequences when he returned to the waking world. “I made use of some of Vinn’s notes on ethereal somnambulance. The ritual that allowed this meeting neccessitated.. Unsavory reagents. I expect the results of this endeavor will greet me poorly when I wake.”

The attention paid to her neck earns him a happy coo, which remains as a smile even as he explains his less than ideal situation.

Even with allowing a breathable space between them, Kezza doesn’t dare release him fully. She reaches up to nuzzle at his cheek with both sympathy, and longing.

“I’ve missed you, so much.”

The admission is all it takes to swall Gerik’s heart fully, a familiar warmth lending his features a subtle hue beneath the thin fuzz coating his cheeks. Cooing softly, he leans in to lay a light kiss on Kezza’s lips, cradling the smaller asura’s weight in his arms.

With his eyes shut, he sighs his response,

“And I, you.”

Some of the weariness across Kezza’s face seems to evaporate, the dream lightened by their reunion. She nuzzles his other cheek, planting another kiss there.

“I thought I might have lost you,” she whispers, the hands at his back shifting to hold him in a warmer embrace.

Sighing his relief at the long-delayed reuinion, Kezza’s weight is accepted at his shoulder with a thoughtful hum.

“Nothing could take me from you, Kez.” Gerik paid her waist a light squeeze, cracking a grin after a fashion. “Excepting a transdimensional enfolding of a cataclysmic scope. But I’m not sure even that would take.”

A while is spent paying soft nuzzles to his neck, unaware (and likely uncaring) that there could be a greater purpose to this visitation.

His response brings a grin against the soft fuzz she attends to, prompting a short coo before she parts from him again.

“What about the rest of the krewe?”

The attentions at his neck are recieved with another light sigh that turns to a coo, the hands at the Magistrix’s waist sliding up to rest between her shoulders.

Even with the mention of the krewe to attempt at souring his mood, Gerik manages to keep his good nature.

“They’re well enough. Well, save Teokkin.” He hums again, this time with a dubious ring to his tone. “He’s at wit’s end, I believe. I didn’t even have to run interference.”

Teokkin’s mention is finally enough to temper Kezza’s heartened spirit. Still, some bright spark in her eyes holds fast, even as the relief she sighs is undercut by lingering concern.

“How severely has he compromised the Magistracy?”

The worry in his friend’s voice is mirrored in Gerik’s own heart, though he masks it with a brush of the snout at Kezza’s collar, a softened smile lifted to greet her as he pulls away.

“It’s holding together. Funding is tight, but he is unable to make any headway no matter how great the lengths he goes to in curtailing spending.”

Despite the good nature engendered by the closeness he’d longed for, the reminder of the necessity for his visitation steals some of the warmth from his expression. “That is.. Why I’ve been able to contact you with confidence, finally. He wants to return ownership of the Magistracy to you.”

Her newly folded ears rise upright, disbelieving, before they fall flat and stiff with a bitter vindication.

“That datawipe had no idea what he was getting involved with,” her resentment reads through, though it fades almost immediately. “But.. he was right. He was right about, everything.”

With as detestable as the subject matter is, Gerik can’t help but let a smirk worm it’s way onto his features at the familiar tells in the curl of the Magistrix’s ears that spoke her indignation.

“He’s wrong, Kez. He admitted it himself. The Magistracy needs you to head it, and no one else. There’s no other asura who could possibly fill the role. I’m certain.”

Kezza’s gaze cast apart from his, she shakes her head with wilting ears.

“No.. Gerik, I saw it. I saw his audience with Administration,” she speaks the confession with such melancholy, it summons a faint graying haze to the ethereal Magistracy office.

“They had every intention to terminate the department.. and us with it, if Teokkin failed to amend our shortcomings.”

Her admission was not quite so surprising as it was a grim confirmation of the fears Gerik had harbored since the beginning of the whole ordeal. It shouldn’t come as any grand revelation to him that Administration had found cause to liquidate them after so many blunders.

But, those hadn’t been their fault! Not any if his– And certainly not Kezza’s.

Moved by the effect his friend’s shift in demeanor had on the room around them and by the reminder that his time was short, the Disaggregator brought a feather light touch to Kezza’s jaw, guiding her gaze up to meet his own.

“Kezza,” His eyes glimmered an amber more brilliant than they should have, a caring insistence lingering behind them. “Whatever you saw, I fully believe it to be true. But the circumstance has changed. Teokkin needs you. The krewe needs you. And.. I need you. He’s provided the legal documentation that will assure your safety, as well as that of your family unit’s.”

Gerik paused at that, recalling the threat he’d left hanging over the Magistrate’s head. A small victory, if it paid out. “I had leverage to negotiate it. Anything to ensure your safety. Your happiness.”

While the warm glow of his eyes arrest her attention, disbelief risks doubt when all he says sounds too good to be true. The memory was as clear in her mind as the one she’d taken it from; Teokkin had been made to negotiate their preservation, even at his own risk. There was no room for misunderstanding in the exchange, and she hadn’t dared hoped for leniency in the face of their condemnation.

The continued decline of the Magistracy didn’t bode well, either. She and Gerik were as good as dead– as well as Teokkin, if its current state was as Gerik reported. So how could it possibly be that he managed to secure their safety?

Unless, he hadn’t. Unless Teokkin had somehow been that very leverage– a sacrifice, to spare herself and the loyal friend who’d do anything for her.

A slow, vague ripple is felt as guilt quietly seeps into the dreamscape. It carries with it the concept of Teokkin, and betrayal– this time a reversal, however marred by the lingering resentment she still carried for the krewemate. It is unclear whether or not Kezza notes the shift in her dream’s tangible mood, as she seeks more pressing answers with growing uncertainty.

“How can we be certain of the document’s legitimacy? Even if it is authentic, how can we know that Administration won’t invalidate it on my return?”

Unsettled by the metamorphosis the dream around them underwent, Gerik kept himself steady by occupying his attention with the asura in front of him– Though that was perhaps not as effective as he might have hoped, given the clear concern she wore on her features.

He hummed thoughtfully, hoping to assuage her worries,

“I have examined it, cross-referenced with no less than four examples of similar litigation. The document is legitimate. I wouldn’t have agreed to make contact with you if it wasn’t.” The corner of Gerik’s mouth twisted at the thought of a lurking betrayal, uncertain exactly what Teokkin might have in store for the both of them if Kezza returned.

“I believe that if it were his intention to liquidate us, he would have attempted to eliminate me at least once already. His efforts to ‘fix’ the Magistracy have seemed earnest enough. More so than anything else he’s ever done.”

The statement warranted a smirk, even if it was a short-lived one. Tilting his head down with a returned seriousness, the Disaggregator held the gaze between the two of them, voice lowered,

“You belong in Rata Sum, Kez. If working with him to earn our old positions back is the only means to ensure you and your family unit’s safe return, then I believe it is a worthy endeavor.”

Despite his reassurances, Kezza’s reservation is still evident. The mention of liquidation folded her ears with agitated concern, and would have been followed by a reminder of Teokkin’s previous attempt, were it not for the small shift in Gerik’s demeanor.

She allows his reasoning a moment of consideration, gaze leaving his to sift through her doubts. As much as she trusted his litigatory aptitude, there was lacking certainty in how far Administration would go. Every datum of the Magistracy’s databanks had at one point crossed her desk, ensuring even the most sensitive material was paid her scrutiny. If she was indeed no longer worthy of that data, there were only a few ways the Inquest could redact it.

It wasn’t a risk to take lightly, when one had a partner and progeny to think of.

Her ears slacken. Danger aside, was she even worthy of her old position? The charges brought against them in Teokkin’s memory had haunted her over the months. Once the crimes had been brought to light, she could only deny them for so long. The krewe had no cause to give her the benefit of the doubt, any more now as they did then.

After all, she was a deserter now.

“I.. I don’t know, Gerik,” her voice pensive, but not despairing. “Even if Teokkin rescinds, the Administrative council has no rationale for restoring my status.. in any capacity.”

Though the Disaggregator was never one to show weakness in the face of adversity, it was no small effort to conceal the reservations Kezza’s uncertainty engendered in him. Who was he to put her through such duress? To cause such delicate ears to curl with anxiety? Certainly no one good.

Seeking to ease her mind, Gerik’s claws traced a delicate line along the small of her back, lips set in a like comiseration.

“Any endeavor has it’s less desireable potentialities.. But if we don’t take action now, we may never be reinstated. You could be on the run for the rest of your life, and I.. I don’t believe I could handle that, Kezza.”

His frown deepened at the thought of being cut off from her forever; with Srazz gone, he’d have no one left– And Kezza’s family would be in more peril than either of them. It was an eventuality he could not allow to come to pass.

“What if we organized a meeting on neutral ground? Depending on the venue, you might not even need to be physically present.”

Even with wilting ears, the touch at her back is repaid with a kind press at his, a hand set between his shoulders and one at his waist. The sympathetic look she gives him is one of comiseration, held until an ear flicks at his suggestion.

“I concur,” she replies softly, “Somewhere in Kryta, perhaps. Where would you say is safest..?”

The question posed was a good one; where could a meeting be organized that would best minimize the threat to their persons, without being so impersonal as to provide no evidence of Teokkin’s intent? Certainly, meeting in Rata Sum was out of the question. But then, where? Mrot Boru? One of the Brisban facilities?

The touch at his back urged him to coo sweetly, an idle nuzzle paid to her neck before the idea struck him.

“Perhaps.. Something could be worked out with Moto? He does possess the technology to facilitate such a meeting..”

The suggestion takes her aback by some small degree, “Moto? But in that case, I would have to return to Rata Sum..”

Her ears droop again at the impossibility, reminded of her longing for home. The reality of the dream shudders with a ripple of homesickness, and the asura places her worry with a chin at his shoulder.

When she speaks again, it is quiet enough to be almost inaudible, were it not for the mechanics of the dreamstate conveying the meaning through sensation alone.

“I can’t even be certain this is real.”

While the necessity of remaining focused on the task at hand gnawed at the back of his mind, Gerik found himself admittedly lost amid the doubt that trailed the Magistrix’s statement– And in the familiar softness of her eyes, gentle lilac hues arrested his gaze.

Taking the smaller asura’s hand in a palm nicked and bitten by scars, he leaned in almost unconsciously bringing their foreheads to meet.

“Let me assure you then.” He murmured, leaning forward to join his lips to hers.

The touch at her hand was enough to bring her to face him again, a light hue brought to her cheeks as he brought his head against hers. His bid to assuage her doubt is accepted with a readiness that may have surprised her, were it not for the knowledge that this was not their waking reality.

With doubt lurking in the shadows of the dream, Kezza’s arms enclose more firmly around him, willing that figment or not– he stay.

Real or not, Gerik felt a curious kind of elation at the contact that might have been shameful if he had not long ago accepted his feelings for his one-time colleague and long-term friend. Reciprocating her arms movements without a hint of reservation, the larger asura’s arms draw Kezza against him with a sigh between joined lips, eye fluttering shut as the peaking emotions color him in a soft magenta hue.

Before their embrace can engross him fully, Gerik has presence of mind enough to speak between the kiss, hushed and breathy,

“Will you afford me this chance? To make things right?”

Though they still embraced so closely, the scarce distance he affords himself must be compensated for with a nuzzle at his cheek. If this was all indeed a dream, it was the most real she’d ever had.

“It isn’t yours to make right,” she answers in a voice softened by intimacy, “But I trust you, Ger.”

While neither asura may be wholly aware of it, the office around them recedes ever so slightly– as though everything were shrouded in a faint fog, save for them.

With her confirmation staying his worries, Gerik gives an affectionate sigh.

“I’ll dispatch a golem with the details,” He breathed, fighting the inclination to swoon at her touch, “We’ll fix this. I promise.”

It wasn’t much, but it was all he could think to say. For as effectively as their differences encouraged his mind to broaden it’s approach to the world, Kezza’s presence seemed to make higher thought a difficulty for the Disaggregator at times. Thankfully, this particular juncture was anything but inopportune. He let another sigh tumble from his lips as he relaxed into the Magistrix’s embrace.

“I’ll maintain my proximity to Divinity’s Reach,” she assures, a soft nuzzle paid to his jaw, “And I’ll find a disguise.”

A slight jolt crosses the scenery around them at the mention of the city, accompanied by a shift to her inn-room’s likeness and general sense of anxiety. She seems unaware that her ears curl with the change.

Yet regardless, her nuzzle offers a light kiss with it, and she would continue to hold him unless deterred.

“I’ll contact you as soon as the arrangements are made. Just be safe.” He murmurs, returning the nuzzle in kind, a light nip at her ear paid as the scene around them shifts.

Though he notes the change in his periphery, it means little to the Disaggregator when Kezza was present to occupy so much of his attention. Driven by a desire to prolong their continued closeness, Gerik lifts her body up against his own, that he might better pay his attentions at her neck.

Almost surprised, Kezza’s coo is a little louder than she’d intended as her feet leave the imagined ground. Content to open her neck to him while her arms adjust at his shoulders, she readily resumes nuzzling at his ear.

“I’ve missed you so much,” her whisper reiterates after a light nip.

The environment shivers around them, her office again replicating itself– though now with a quarter of her inn room, including a bed, and the desk directly behind her.

Whether by his own volition or fortunate happenstance, Kezza’s reciprocation encourages Gerik to move the both of them to the desk’s edge. Allowing her to rest against it, Gerik parts the Magistrix’s collar with a thumb to better allow his affections to reach her.

Between kisses, he leans up to nuzzle at her ear, a hand sliding down along her side,

“You won’t have to much longer, Kez. I promise.”

The dream answers with another warm ripple, its epicenter at the fluttering heart of Kezza’s dreamt self. His attentions are enough to redden her cheeks and take the anxious curl from her ears, especially as she recognizes the familiarities of their position.

After another short while spent indulging in each other’s tenderness, Kezza’s hands rest between his shoulders and at his chest, and she nudges an ear with her short snout. Whether spoken or expressed by the dream itself, she whispers, “I don’t want to wake up.”

The waves of empathic warmth that ripple through the dreamscape wash over Gerik and urge a small sigh from his lips, eyes half-lidded.

“Neither do I. Not yet.” He whispers back.

With another kiss, longer than before, Kezza is eased back onto the desk, where he joins beside her with a light coo at her neck.

“Ger..” His name comes in a contented sigh, as the desk warps beneath them to cushion their weight. The impression of an inn room settles around them, even while the scene only partially resembled one.

The room they shared touring the Queensdale vineyards fades in and out of dominance over the Magistracy office, neither so obscured by the other as to be forgotten. Still, an unfamiliar element lingered in the air, whispering allusions Gerik wouldn’t place.

While the scene dimmed again to emulate that lavish Krytan room, there was an almost candle-lit warmth held around them. Her friend’s cooing is answered with slow, affectionate kisses at his ear, while a hand slipped behind his neck to brush the ends of his hair.

With the seamless presence of the dreamily soft mattress under them, Kezza draws Gerik closer to nuzzle at his neck again.

((sry this post is unusually garbage tier even for me))

Even as the world shifts around them, Gerik’s attention remains focused on tending to the asura beside him. Nuzzling his blunted snout into the side of her neck, he gives a hum of contentment as the desk beneath them becomes a familiar bed in a familiar inn room, though it perhaps lacks the scent of spiced wine to complete the illusion.

Lifting his arm from Kezza’s side, Gerik draws a claw along her exposed collar, tugging himself close against her with his other hand. It was all too surreal, even as far as dreams went– But not so much that he would question whether there was any other asura he would rather spend his time with. Again, he kissed her neck before moving on to the base of her ear.

“I’ve never dared to dream like this.”

The implication sees that the light blush on Kezza’s cheeks would remain, while her own hands explore the contours of his shoulders and side. His words created shorter ripples of a warmth somewhat different than before, each echoed by a sense of reciprocation, and she answers them herself with another nip at his ear.

Something in his words, however, seems to trigger another change in the surreal environment; A voice without sound, speaking of a presence so quietly it seems unheard by the dreamer herself.

She pulls herself against him, a hand wrapped about his waist. Kezza’s collar, having given way more easily than it might have in waking reality, is loosed enough to allow his touch as far as her shoulder without stretching the fabric. The dream’s machinations allow this without threatening the illusion of realism, and the mesmer seems either unknowing or uncaring of the difference.

“I’ve been afraid,” she whispers, her cheeks still flushed, “That I’d never have another chance to.”

As hard as he tried to maintain his awareness of the the border between dream and lucidity, Gerik found himself drawn deeper into the illusion by the subtle machinations of Kezza's subconscious. Shuddering against her, the larger asura stills himself with a thought before diverting his affections from her neck to the shoulder exposed by her parted collar, a telling heat lending his ears a rosy hue that would otherwise be far too saturated to exist in the waking world.

"We have a chance now, don't we..?" He nearly muttered, breathless. Reacting in kind to her pull, Gerik shifts to allow her weight to roll atop him without sacrificing her proximity to wasted space, his hand departed from her shoulder to run polished claws through her hair.

"You're exquisite."

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream (RP)

Another long pull from her wine glass, and another sigh following it. It was a routine she’d long since fallen into– were she not so dedicated to regular visits with her family, she could fall harder into such a habit. What else would keep her going, after losing everything? Without Vinn and her precious Pwitt, the once-Magistrix was an asura without purpose. And she knew it.

Kezza gripped the bridge of her snout over the mask– perhaps the last trapping of the glory days which still served her. Alchemy knew her krewe didn’t. And the masks would grant her protection from that very same krewe, provided the assassins they sent were unfamiliar with her old practice. It seemed unlikely, but so far.. so good.

An emptied flagon crashed beside her, thrown against the bar behind the order of the bookah wielding it. The crude and surly thing demanded a refreshed glass, by Kezza’s count, her fifth. How this repulsive cretin could stomach that much swill in so short a time was a curiosity worth research, but the asura only gave the specimen a dull stare. Seemingly incensed by the look, the human growled at her and muttered something incomprehensible.

One of the most regrettable aspects of her exile was the safety protocol she’d assigned herself: Never be alone outside of her hideout. Even if it meant the company of bookah. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but solitude took its toll between risked visits with Vinn and Pwitt.

Acceptance became easier to grasp, but..

It never got less depressing.

At least in Divinity’s Reach, there was wine. A guilty pleasure, she admitted, but one made forgivable with the reminder of its discovery. Pained now as it was, the memory could still warm her where the wine couldn’t. She had been reluctant to indulge her friend’s incessant push for the outing, reminding him of every unpleasantry the city held.

But as always, Gerik had a way of swaying her. The absence of his whimsy made her stay in the city much less amicable, even as she recalled his more obnoxious tendencies. She’d trade every glass of fermented grape to hear just one of his annoying quips.

Kezza brought a hand to her forehead, unable and unwilling to acknowledge the irate female next her. The bottle of wine she’d ingested was nothing to the horrid lead weight in her stomach, a nausea she’d never once shaken in the past months. There was no way to know for certain whether or not the Disaggregator had succeeded his escape, and it was an anxiety that overwhelmed her thoughts when her guard grew weak. Relief only hinted itself in the determined hope that he was as capable as she’d always known him to be.

–

The journey back to her hideaway through the foreign city was mercifully uneventful under the cover of mesmeric subterfuge. Despite the sore arm she’d acquired during the inevitable altercation with the bookah woman, the cause of her fatigue was far less tangible. These days were exhausting in their boredom, and the nights restless with angst.

Yet for once, perhaps by the grace of that bookah’s dirty tricks, Kezza found her makeshift cot an almost welcome sight, and sleep came before it could be questioned.

The Disaggregator was no stranger to ritual. Binding a spirit, for instance, was a process with which he and any other Inquest agent worth their datastacks were intimately familiar. Though the exact methods and preferred location differred from the habits of the pedestrian lab jockey or floundering bookah, the curvature of the binding lines and the crumbled reagents, the powdered bone and muttered incantations were all the same. It was a similar experience to any other ritual of a like magic.

This, though. This was different. Certainly, the chalk lines had been drawn up and the candles had been lit; surely, he’d canted the sacred words, written in times long passed into antiquity as proscribed by the simian gods– But it was different. This time, there had been no bundled sticks to burn, or dried rat bones to break over consecrated water.

This time, there had only been an overwhelming consumption of junk food. As much as he disdained the stuff, he’d eaten the first bag of grub chips quickly enough. By the fifth container of Planthopper Pasties, however, the Disaggregator was beginning to feel the strain. By the tenth, he was unconscious, face down in a circle of chalk.

When he entered the dream world, it took a moment for the asura to reacquaint himself with his own consciousness– Or subconsciousness. He couldn’t be certain which was which. Everything around him was smoke and sunlight, the moon wreathed in dust, a rippling veil of ephemeral mist. If he had the time, he might spend a while grappling with the nature of his newfound lucidity. As it was, the task at hand demanded too much focus, lending his form a hard edge in the soft, blooming murk of dreamlight.

Impelling himself forward, it was a long, sometimes harrowing while before he touched on a dream sphere that might read as anything resembling familiar, but when he did, the sensation was unmistakable. Careening around the edge of the crystalline orb, Gerik allowed a dragged claw to maintain contact and prevent him from losing hold as he peered within from without.

What he saw skipped his heart a beat. There, mere meters beneath him, was the Magistrix– Long-sought and wrapped in the fitful turnings of an anxious sleep. He began to tap at the surface.

The ragged asura tosses and turns under the coat she’s reassigned as a blanket. Her limp ears flick now and then, until her subconscious detects something which rouses them.

While not dreamless, the restless sleep is occupied by a general malaise, manifested in her mind as a dark and chaotic haze. Images of familiar places– her office, her domicile, the Magistracy lobby– form and fade before any of them can stick. The most stable of environments is her office, a dim place lit with more crimson than its reality ever held. It isn’t much longer before it wins out against the grey and busy void, adhering itself to her subconscious enough that Kezza finds herself standing in its altered form; The ceiling warped, too low at her desk and stretched beyond the confines of its tangible twin in a way which mirrored the Magistracy’s halls. Databanks and furniture are likewise discordant, and perhaps curiously, lacking doors. The entry to her private washroom seems the most realistic, though its interior is starker than it ought to be.

Kezza stands in the middle of the scene, dully awakening to the dream. Without lucidity, she starts for her desk, and seats herself in her chair which is too large for her person. Noise, indecipherable, clouds the air, and Kezza feels herself begin to panic under the sudden stress her dream generates.

From the noise, however, comes a rhythmic tapping. Somehow, she finds it overcome the chaos, and it permits her focus enough that a presence is felt. The outer rim of her dream becomes permeable, allowing the interloper to phase into the dream freely.

Peering through the hazy sphere’s surface, there’s little else the Disaggregator can make of the scene within beyond the vaguely feminine form inside. If it weren’t for the whisper of a unknowingly shared memory to draw him in, he might well have passed it by entirely. Thankfully, he hadn’t– And more fortuitously still, the sphere’s occupant took note enough of his harassment that the barrier between void and dream became porous, allowing him to pass.

Not risking a moment to the capricious nature of the dreamscape, Gerik pushed himself beyond the threshold and into darkness. It was then that he realized his mistake. In his haste, the ever keen Disaggregator had failed to think through his manner of entry; a blundering that left him suspended in the air above the room’s center for a moment before the idea of gravity asserted itself and sent him hurtling to the floor with a yelp.

“HWUUAA–OORRMF!”

Already in distress, the cry of a familiar voice spurs a shriek from Kezza, who shrinks back into the chair as though shielding herself from something terrible.

After a few moments of cowering, she pries apart the fingers she’d thrown across her face, and looks ahead at where the vivid sound came from. After another pause, the unaware Kezza swallows, “Who are you? G-Gerik..?”

It took a moment for the Disaggregator to realize that he was being addressed, and longer still for his body to register that it had no cause to be in pain. This was, after all, only a dream. Willing his supposed injuries mended, the asura picks himself up and dusts himself off, paying particular attention to the straightening of his collar before he can find it in himself to respond to the Magistrix,

“Affimative, Kezza, it is I; the great and powerful Disaggregator! I have transcended the barrier between the waking world and the dreaming to.. To, uh..” Gerik felt a stirring in his chest that stayed what would have been a typically grandstanding entrance as he finally looked upon his estranged friend. Perhaps it was a machination of the Magistrix’s fabricated dream world that lent her appearance a hint of unfamiliarity about it. After all, one’s dream self was often the ideal, or most dreaded version of the real self.

But, it had been so long since he’d laid eyes upon her in either setting. The dawning uncertainty brought a tickling wetness to the corner of his eyes that no force of will could banish, and his voice broke earnestly when he spoke again, “I-I’ve missed you so much, Kez.”

The Kezza who regards him from behind the desk is someone different than probably expected. Whether due to the oversized chair or the dream’s own design, she seems smaller, and is dressed in the first uniform he would have ever seen her wear. Her hair also harkens back to years past, where she wore it long without adornments. All that seems missing is a mask, though the hands still tentatively hiding her features might suffice.

Worried skepticism follows his approach, his bold and vivid form in noticeable contrast to the grim surroundings. It’s enough to give her a distraction from the dream’s manufactured anguish, which is forced to abate as her mind finds something new to focus on. Kezza watches him with growing disbelief, eventually shifting her hands enough that he might finally see her face.

“Ge-Gerik.. what are you doing here?”

The environment appears to bolster itself despite the meek and befuddled question– The walls of the office straighten themselves to realistic proportions, finding their symmetry once abandoning the extraneous length which resembled the Magistracy’s halls. While Gerik’s presence solidified the setting, however, it did little for Kezza’s lucidity. The mesmer had yet to realize her own dream-state, let alone the truth of her friend’s presence.

Reclaiming his usual blustering composure was not an easy feat when confronted by what he now saw before him: the Magistrix as she was before there was even a Magistracy. It was certainly a dream, then. He hadn’t seen her hair down and unadorned in ages..

But he knew that there was no time to waste when there was no telling how long the ritual would maintain his link with her dreaming mind. Swiping the collected moisture from the corner of his eyes, Gerik started forward a step, humming.

“I’ve established a link with your dreaming mind, Kezza. You’re asleep. I am too. I needed to contact you.”

“Dreaming..”

The notion shudders the dream world, a likely uncomfortable sensation for the interloper as consciousness challenges the subconscious. Kezza places a palm against her temple, eyes scanning her desk with purpose as the fabricated reality shifts incomprehensively. The glyphs of her datawork were wholly illegible, which warranted another test she learned as a budding synergist. The environment begins to stabilize, with a much less tenuous grasp of its own form.

Taking her hands in front of her, Kezza brings them to manifest an orange flame– something impossible in her reality, where mesmeric ability long since displaced her want for an elementalist’s prowess. The fire closes in on itself, liquefying into a glob of water.

Her expression slowly lifts with the realization, though when she looks up, there is a distinct alteration of her features. Without transition, her hair now passes her shoulders in a dull and ragged state, and the wear of long-term stress is clear across her face. Her uniform, too, is supplanted by a contemporary outfit of asuran dress, lacking any implication of her krewe allegiance.

“Ger..!”

Gerik would have only a moment to process the change, however, as he’d find Kezza’s arms embracing him without having witnessed her approach.

Doubt, however, brings her to lift her head from its place at his chest. “But, how? How do I know you’re not a figment?”

With as much as he’d longed for the Magistrix’s embrace, Gerik found himself woefully unprepared for the suddenness with which her arms enircled him, still not entirely acclimated to the whimsy of dream. Nearly stumbling a step, the Disaggregator recovers quickly against the smaller asura’s weight and brings his arms to match her own, the side of his face nuzzling against her neck almost without bidding.

He never wanted it to end. But it had to.

Feeling her head lift from his person, his eyes flicked down to meet Kezza’s gaze, willing away a wetness that might have been telling were it not so readily disposed of. He huffed,

“I can’t imagine any figment you’d dream up could ever match the magnificence of the genuine article. I mean, really Kez. The gall of the thought!”

Though the snooty imperiousness in his tone was entirely real, it did not come without an undercurrent of good nature. He smirked.

“It was a trying endeavor. I’ve spent a small fortune on scented candles and.. Junk food. Euugh.”

It was that touch of derision in his voice and ready wit, which allowed her face to brighten with an irresistible smile. He was right; The times he’d been replicated by her sleeping mind never presented the nuance of this obnoxious charm– it was either one, or the other.

The way his snout wrinkled with mock outrage was also a dead giveaway.

“Candles and junk food?” She echoes with bewildered skepticism, having never seen him partake of the latter. It was an unusual combination. “Just what did you do?”

With as much effort as he put into playing the part of the snide villain, Gerik’s faux superiority was easily broken by the softness of the Magistrix’s smile. Feeling the corners of his mouth tug into a like expression, the Disaggregator nursed the side of Kezza’s neck with a nuzzle, pulling out of it with a chuckle.

“Nothing I’m proud of.” He admitted, already wary of the consequences when he returned to the waking world. “I made use of some of Vinn’s notes on ethereal somnambulance. The ritual that allowed this meeting neccessitated.. Unsavory reagents. I expect the results of this endeavor will greet me poorly when I wake.”

The attention paid to her neck earns him a happy coo, which remains as a smile even as he explains his less than ideal situation.

Even with allowing a breathable space between them, Kezza doesn’t dare release him fully. She reaches up to nuzzle at his cheek with both sympathy, and longing.

“I’ve missed you, so much.”

The admission is all it takes to swall Gerik’s heart fully, a familiar warmth lending his features a subtle hue beneath the thin fuzz coating his cheeks. Cooing softly, he leans in to lay a light kiss on Kezza’s lips, cradling the smaller asura’s weight in his arms.

With his eyes shut, he sighs his response,

“And I, you.”

Some of the weariness across Kezza’s face seems to evaporate, the dream lightened by their reunion. She nuzzles his other cheek, planting another kiss there.

“I thought I might have lost you,” she whispers, the hands at his back shifting to hold him in a warmer embrace.

Sighing his relief at the long-delayed reuinion, Kezza’s weight is accepted at his shoulder with a thoughtful hum.

“Nothing could take me from you, Kez.” Gerik paid her waist a light squeeze, cracking a grin after a fashion. “Excepting a transdimensional enfolding of a cataclysmic scope. But I’m not sure even that would take.”

A while is spent paying soft nuzzles to his neck, unaware (and likely uncaring) that there could be a greater purpose to this visitation.

His response brings a grin against the soft fuzz she attends to, prompting a short coo before she parts from him again.

“What about the rest of the krewe?”

The attentions at his neck are recieved with another light sigh that turns to a coo, the hands at the Magistrix’s waist sliding up to rest between her shoulders.

Even with the mention of the krewe to attempt at souring his mood, Gerik manages to keep his good nature.

“They’re well enough. Well, save Teokkin.” He hums again, this time with a dubious ring to his tone. “He’s at wit’s end, I believe. I didn’t even have to run interference.”

Teokkin’s mention is finally enough to temper Kezza’s heartened spirit. Still, some bright spark in her eyes holds fast, even as the relief she sighs is undercut by lingering concern.

“How severely has he compromised the Magistracy?”

The worry in his friend’s voice is mirrored in Gerik’s own heart, though he masks it with a brush of the snout at Kezza’s collar, a softened smile lifted to greet her as he pulls away.

“It’s holding together. Funding is tight, but he is unable to make any headway no matter how great the lengths he goes to in curtailing spending.”

Despite the good nature engendered by the closeness he’d longed for, the reminder of the necessity for his visitation steals some of the warmth from his expression. “That is.. Why I’ve been able to contact you with confidence, finally. He wants to return ownership of the Magistracy to you.”

Her newly folded ears rise upright, disbelieving, before they fall flat and stiff with a bitter vindication.

“That datawipe had no idea what he was getting involved with,” her resentment reads through, though it fades almost immediately. “But.. he was right. He was right about, everything.”

With as detestable as the subject matter is, Gerik can’t help but let a smirk worm it’s way onto his features at the familiar tells in the curl of the Magistrix’s ears that spoke her indignation.

“He’s wrong, Kez. He admitted it himself. The Magistracy needs you to head it, and no one else. There’s no other asura who could possibly fill the role. I’m certain.”

Kezza’s gaze cast apart from his, she shakes her head with wilting ears.

“No.. Gerik, I saw it. I saw his audience with Administration,” she speaks the confession with such melancholy, it summons a faint graying haze to the ethereal Magistracy office.

“They had every intention to terminate the department.. and us with it, if Teokkin failed to amend our shortcomings.”

Her admission was not quite so surprising as it was a grim confirmation of the fears Gerik had harbored since the beginning of the whole ordeal. It shouldn’t come as any grand revelation to him that Administration had found cause to liquidate them after so many blunders.

But, those hadn’t been their fault! Not any if his– And certainly not Kezza’s.

Moved by the effect his friend’s shift in demeanor had on the room around them and by the reminder that his time was short, the Disaggregator brought a feather light touch to Kezza’s jaw, guiding her gaze up to meet his own.

“Kezza,” His eyes glimmered an amber more brilliant than they should have, a caring insistence lingering behind them. “Whatever you saw, I fully believe it to be true. But the circumstance has changed. Teokkin needs you. The krewe needs you. And.. I need you. He’s provided the legal documentation that will assure your safety, as well as that of your family unit’s.”

Gerik paused at that, recalling the threat he’d left hanging over the Magistrate’s head. A small victory, if it paid out. “I had leverage to negotiate it. Anything to ensure your safety. Your happiness.”

While the warm glow of his eyes arrest her attention, disbelief risks doubt when all he says sounds too good to be true. The memory was as clear in her mind as the one she’d taken it from; Teokkin had been made to negotiate their preservation, even at his own risk. There was no room for misunderstanding in the exchange, and she hadn’t dared hoped for leniency in the face of their condemnation.

The continued decline of the Magistracy didn’t bode well, either. She and Gerik were as good as dead– as well as Teokkin, if its current state was as Gerik reported. So how could it possibly be that he managed to secure their safety?

Unless, he hadn’t. Unless Teokkin had somehow been that very leverage– a sacrifice, to spare herself and the loyal friend who’d do anything for her.

A slow, vague ripple is felt as guilt quietly seeps into the dreamscape. It carries with it the concept of Teokkin, and betrayal– this time a reversal, however marred by the lingering resentment she still carried for the krewemate. It is unclear whether or not Kezza notes the shift in her dream’s tangible mood, as she seeks more pressing answers with growing uncertainty.

“How can we be certain of the document’s legitimacy? Even if it is authentic, how can we know that Administration won’t invalidate it on my return?”

Unsettled by the metamorphosis the dream around them underwent, Gerik kept himself steady by occupying his attention with the asura in front of him– Though that was perhaps not as effective as he might have hoped, given the clear concern she wore on her features.

He hummed thoughtfully, hoping to assuage her worries,

“I have examined it, cross-referenced with no less than four examples of similar litigation. The document is legitimate. I wouldn’t have agreed to make contact with you if it wasn’t.” The corner of Gerik’s mouth twisted at the thought of a lurking betrayal, uncertain exactly what Teokkin might have in store for the both of them if Kezza returned.

“I believe that if it were his intention to liquidate us, he would have attempted to eliminate me at least once already. His efforts to ‘fix’ the Magistracy have seemed earnest enough. More so than anything else he’s ever done.”

The statement warranted a smirk, even if it was a short-lived one. Tilting his head down with a returned seriousness, the Disaggregator held the gaze between the two of them, voice lowered,

“You belong in Rata Sum, Kez. If working with him to earn our old positions back is the only means to ensure you and your family unit’s safe return, then I believe it is a worthy endeavor.”

Despite his reassurances, Kezza’s reservation is still evident. The mention of liquidation folded her ears with agitated concern, and would have been followed by a reminder of Teokkin’s previous attempt, were it not for the small shift in Gerik’s demeanor.

She allows his reasoning a moment of consideration, gaze leaving his to sift through her doubts. As much as she trusted his litigatory aptitude, there was lacking certainty in how far Administration would go. Every datum of the Magistracy’s databanks had at one point crossed her desk, ensuring even the most sensitive material was paid her scrutiny. If she was indeed no longer worthy of that data, there were only a few ways the Inquest could redact it.

It wasn’t a risk to take lightly, when one had a partner and progeny to think of.

Her ears slacken. Danger aside, was she even worthy of her old position? The charges brought against them in Teokkin’s memory had haunted her over the months. Once the crimes had been brought to light, she could only deny them for so long. The krewe had no cause to give her the benefit of the doubt, any more now as they did then.

After all, she was a deserter now.

“I.. I don’t know, Gerik,” her voice pensive, but not despairing. “Even if Teokkin rescinds, the Administrative council has no rationale for restoring my status.. in any capacity.”

Though the Disaggregator was never one to show weakness in the face of adversity, it was no small effort to conceal the reservations Kezza’s uncertainty engendered in him. Who was he to put her through such duress? To cause such delicate ears to curl with anxiety? Certainly no one good.

Seeking to ease her mind, Gerik’s claws traced a delicate line along the small of her back, lips set in a like comiseration.

“Any endeavor has it’s less desireable potentialities.. But if we don’t take action now, we may never be reinstated. You could be on the run for the rest of your life, and I.. I don’t believe I could handle that, Kezza.”

His frown deepened at the thought of being cut off from her forever; with Srazz gone, he’d have no one left– And Kezza’s family would be in more peril than either of them. It was an eventuality he could not allow to come to pass.

“What if we organized a meeting on neutral ground? Depending on the venue, you might not even need to be physically present.”

Even with wilting ears, the touch at her back is repaid with a kind press at his, a hand set between his shoulders and one at his waist. The sympathetic look she gives him is one of comiseration, held until an ear flicks at his suggestion.

“I concur,” she replies softly, “Somewhere in Kryta, perhaps. Where would you say is safest..?”

The question posed was a good one; where could a meeting be organized that would best minimize the threat to their persons, without being so impersonal as to provide no evidence of Teokkin’s intent? Certainly, meeting in Rata Sum was out of the question. But then, where? Mrot Boru? One of the Brisban facilities?

The touch at his back urged him to coo sweetly, an idle nuzzle paid to her neck before the idea struck him.

“Perhaps.. Something could be worked out with Moto? He does possess the technology to facilitate such a meeting..”

The suggestion takes her aback by some small degree, “Moto? But in that case, I would have to return to Rata Sum..”

Her ears droop again at the impossibility, reminded of her longing for home. The reality of the dream shudders with a ripple of homesickness, and the asura places her worry with a chin at his shoulder.

When she speaks again, it is quiet enough to be almost inaudible, were it not for the mechanics of the dreamstate conveying the meaning through sensation alone.

“I can’t even be certain this is real.”

While the necessity of remaining focused on the task at hand gnawed at the back of his mind, Gerik found himself admittedly lost amid the doubt that trailed the Magistrix’s statement– And in the familiar softness of her eyes, gentle lilac hues arrested his gaze.

Taking the smaller asura’s hand in a palm nicked and bitten by scars, he leaned in almost unconsciously bringing their foreheads to meet.

“Let me assure you then.” He murmured, leaning forward to join his lips to hers.

The touch at her hand was enough to bring her to face him again, a light hue brought to her cheeks as he brought his head against hers. His bid to assuage her doubt is accepted with a readiness that may have surprised her, were it not for the knowledge that this was not their waking reality.

With doubt lurking in the shadows of the dream, Kezza’s arms enclose more firmly around him, willing that figment or not– he stay.

Real or not, Gerik felt a curious kind of elation at the contact that might have been shameful if he had not long ago accepted his feelings for his one-time colleague and long-term friend. Reciprocating her arms movements without a hint of reservation, the larger asura’s arms draw Kezza against him with a sigh between joined lips, eye fluttering shut as the peaking emotions color him in a soft magenta hue.

Before their embrace can engross him fully, Gerik has presence of mind enough to speak between the kiss, hushed and breathy,

“Will you afford me this chance? To make things right?”

Though they still embraced so closely, the scarce distance he affords himself must be compensated for with a nuzzle at his cheek. If this was all indeed a dream, it was the most real she’d ever had.

“It isn’t yours to make right,” she answers in a voice softened by intimacy, “But I trust you, Ger.”

While neither asura may be wholly aware of it, the office around them recedes ever so slightly– as though everything were shrouded in a faint fog, save for them.

With her confirmation staying his worries, Gerik gives an affectionate sigh.

“I’ll dispatch a golem with the details,” He breathed, fighting the inclination to swoon at her touch, “We’ll fix this. I promise.”

It wasn’t much, but it was all he could think to say. For as effectively as their differences encouraged his mind to broaden it’s approach to the world, Kezza’s presence seemed to make higher thought a difficulty for the Disaggregator at times. Thankfully, this particular juncture was anything but inopportune. He let another sigh tumble from his lips as he relaxed into the Magistrix’s embrace.

“I’ll maintain my proximity to Divinity’s Reach,” she assures, a soft nuzzle paid to his jaw, “And I’ll find a disguise.”

A slight jolt crosses the scenery around them at the mention of the city, accompanied by a shift to her inn-room’s likeness and general sense of anxiety. She seems unaware that her ears curl with the change.

Yet regardless, her nuzzle offers a light kiss with it, and she would continue to hold him unless deterred.

“I’ll contact you as soon as the arrangements are made. Just be safe.” He murmurs, returning the nuzzle in kind, a light nip at her ear paid as the scene around them shifts.

Though he notes the change in his periphery, it means little to the Disaggregator when Kezza was present to occupy so much of his attention. Driven by a desire to prolong their continued closeness, Gerik lifts her body up against his own, that he might better pay his attentions at her neck.

Almost surprised, Kezza’s coo is a little louder than she’d intended as her feet leave the imagined ground. Content to open her neck to him while her arms adjust at his shoulders, she readily resumes nuzzling at his ear.

“I’ve missed you so much,” her whisper reiterates after a light nip.

The environment shivers around them, her office again replicating itself– though now with a quarter of her inn room, including a bed, and the desk directly behind her.

Whether by his own volition or fortunate happenstance, Kezza’s reciprocation encourages Gerik to move the both of them to the desk’s edge. Allowing her to rest against it, Gerik parts the Magistrix’s collar with a thumb to better allow his affections to reach her.

Between kisses, he leans up to nuzzle at her ear, a hand sliding down along her side,

“You won’t have to much longer, Kez. I promise.”

The dream answers with another warm ripple, its epicenter at the fluttering heart of Kezza’s dreamt self. His attentions are enough to redden her cheeks and take the anxious curl from her ears, especially as she recognizes the familiarities of their position.

After another short while spent indulging in each other’s tenderness, Kezza’s hands rest between his shoulders and at his chest, and she nudges an ear with her short snout. Whether spoken or expressed by the dream itself, she whispers, “I don’t want to wake up.”

The waves of empathic warmth that ripple through the dreamscape wash over Gerik and urge a small sigh from his lips, eyes half-lidded.

“Neither do I. Not yet.” He whispers back.

With another kiss, longer than before, Kezza is eased back onto the desk, where he joins beside her with a light coo at her neck.

“Ger..” His name comes in a contented sigh, as the desk warps beneath them to cushion their weight. The impression of an inn room settles around them, even while the scene only partially resembled one.

The room they shared touring the Queensdale vineyards fades in and out of dominance over the Magistracy office, neither so obscured by the other as to be forgotten. Still, an unfamiliar element lingered in the air, whispering allusions Gerik wouldn’t place.

While the scene dimmed again to emulate that lavish Krytan room, there was an almost candle-lit warmth held around them. Her friend’s cooing is answered with slow, affectionate kisses at his ear, while a hand slipped behind his neck to brush the ends of his hair.

With the seamless presence of the dreamily soft mattress under them, Kezza draws Gerik closer to nuzzle at his neck again.

((sry this post is unusually garbage tier even for me))

Even as the world shifts around them, Gerik's attention remains focused on tending to the asura beside him. Nuzzling his blunted snout into the side of her neck, he gives a hum of contentment as the desk beneath them becomes a familiar bed in a familiar inn room, though it perhaps lacks the scent of spiced wine to complete the illusion.

Lifting his arm from Kezza's side, Gerik draws a claw along her exposed collar, tugging himself close against her with his other hand. It was all too surreal, even as far as dreams went-- But not so much that he would question whether there was any other asura he would rather spend his time with. Again, he kissed her neck before moving on to the base of her ear.

"I've never dared to dream like this."

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream (RP)

Another long pull from her wine glass, and another sigh following it. It was a routine she’d long since fallen into– were she not so dedicated to regular visits with her family, she could fall harder into such a habit. What else would keep her going, after losing everything? Without Vinn and her precious Pwitt, the once-Magistrix was an asura without purpose. And she knew it.

Kezza gripped the bridge of her snout over the mask– perhaps the last trapping of the glory days which still served her. Alchemy knew her krewe didn’t. And the masks would grant her protection from that very same krewe, provided the assassins they sent were unfamiliar with her old practice. It seemed unlikely, but so far.. so good.

An emptied flagon crashed beside her, thrown against the bar behind the order of the bookah wielding it. The crude and surly thing demanded a refreshed glass, by Kezza’s count, her fifth. How this repulsive cretin could stomach that much swill in so short a time was a curiosity worth research, but the asura only gave the specimen a dull stare. Seemingly incensed by the look, the human growled at her and muttered something incomprehensible.

One of the most regrettable aspects of her exile was the safety protocol she’d assigned herself: Never be alone outside of her hideout. Even if it meant the company of bookah. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but solitude took its toll between risked visits with Vinn and Pwitt.

Acceptance became easier to grasp, but..

It never got less depressing.

At least in Divinity’s Reach, there was wine. A guilty pleasure, she admitted, but one made forgivable with the reminder of its discovery. Pained now as it was, the memory could still warm her where the wine couldn’t. She had been reluctant to indulge her friend’s incessant push for the outing, reminding him of every unpleasantry the city held.

But as always, Gerik had a way of swaying her. The absence of his whimsy made her stay in the city much less amicable, even as she recalled his more obnoxious tendencies. She’d trade every glass of fermented grape to hear just one of his annoying quips.

Kezza brought a hand to her forehead, unable and unwilling to acknowledge the irate female next her. The bottle of wine she’d ingested was nothing to the horrid lead weight in her stomach, a nausea she’d never once shaken in the past months. There was no way to know for certain whether or not the Disaggregator had succeeded his escape, and it was an anxiety that overwhelmed her thoughts when her guard grew weak. Relief only hinted itself in the determined hope that he was as capable as she’d always known him to be.

–

The journey back to her hideaway through the foreign city was mercifully uneventful under the cover of mesmeric subterfuge. Despite the sore arm she’d acquired during the inevitable altercation with the bookah woman, the cause of her fatigue was far less tangible. These days were exhausting in their boredom, and the nights restless with angst.

Yet for once, perhaps by the grace of that bookah’s dirty tricks, Kezza found her makeshift cot an almost welcome sight, and sleep came before it could be questioned.

The Disaggregator was no stranger to ritual. Binding a spirit, for instance, was a process with which he and any other Inquest agent worth their datastacks were intimately familiar. Though the exact methods and preferred location differred from the habits of the pedestrian lab jockey or floundering bookah, the curvature of the binding lines and the crumbled reagents, the powdered bone and muttered incantations were all the same. It was a similar experience to any other ritual of a like magic.

This, though. This was different. Certainly, the chalk lines had been drawn up and the candles had been lit; surely, he’d canted the sacred words, written in times long passed into antiquity as proscribed by the simian gods– But it was different. This time, there had been no bundled sticks to burn, or dried rat bones to break over consecrated water.

This time, there had only been an overwhelming consumption of junk food. As much as he disdained the stuff, he’d eaten the first bag of grub chips quickly enough. By the fifth container of Planthopper Pasties, however, the Disaggregator was beginning to feel the strain. By the tenth, he was unconscious, face down in a circle of chalk.

When he entered the dream world, it took a moment for the asura to reacquaint himself with his own consciousness– Or subconsciousness. He couldn’t be certain which was which. Everything around him was smoke and sunlight, the moon wreathed in dust, a rippling veil of ephemeral mist. If he had the time, he might spend a while grappling with the nature of his newfound lucidity. As it was, the task at hand demanded too much focus, lending his form a hard edge in the soft, blooming murk of dreamlight.

Impelling himself forward, it was a long, sometimes harrowing while before he touched on a dream sphere that might read as anything resembling familiar, but when he did, the sensation was unmistakable. Careening around the edge of the crystalline orb, Gerik allowed a dragged claw to maintain contact and prevent him from losing hold as he peered within from without.

What he saw skipped his heart a beat. There, mere meters beneath him, was the Magistrix– Long-sought and wrapped in the fitful turnings of an anxious sleep. He began to tap at the surface.

The ragged asura tosses and turns under the coat she’s reassigned as a blanket. Her limp ears flick now and then, until her subconscious detects something which rouses them.

While not dreamless, the restless sleep is occupied by a general malaise, manifested in her mind as a dark and chaotic haze. Images of familiar places– her office, her domicile, the Magistracy lobby– form and fade before any of them can stick. The most stable of environments is her office, a dim place lit with more crimson than its reality ever held. It isn’t much longer before it wins out against the grey and busy void, adhering itself to her subconscious enough that Kezza finds herself standing in its altered form; The ceiling warped, too low at her desk and stretched beyond the confines of its tangible twin in a way which mirrored the Magistracy’s halls. Databanks and furniture are likewise discordant, and perhaps curiously, lacking doors. The entry to her private washroom seems the most realistic, though its interior is starker than it ought to be.

Kezza stands in the middle of the scene, dully awakening to the dream. Without lucidity, she starts for her desk, and seats herself in her chair which is too large for her person. Noise, indecipherable, clouds the air, and Kezza feels herself begin to panic under the sudden stress her dream generates.

From the noise, however, comes a rhythmic tapping. Somehow, she finds it overcome the chaos, and it permits her focus enough that a presence is felt. The outer rim of her dream becomes permeable, allowing the interloper to phase into the dream freely.

Peering through the hazy sphere’s surface, there’s little else the Disaggregator can make of the scene within beyond the vaguely feminine form inside. If it weren’t for the whisper of a unknowingly shared memory to draw him in, he might well have passed it by entirely. Thankfully, he hadn’t– And more fortuitously still, the sphere’s occupant took note enough of his harassment that the barrier between void and dream became porous, allowing him to pass.

Not risking a moment to the capricious nature of the dreamscape, Gerik pushed himself beyond the threshold and into darkness. It was then that he realized his mistake. In his haste, the ever keen Disaggregator had failed to think through his manner of entry; a blundering that left him suspended in the air above the room’s center for a moment before the idea of gravity asserted itself and sent him hurtling to the floor with a yelp.

“HWUUAA–OORRMF!”

Already in distress, the cry of a familiar voice spurs a shriek from Kezza, who shrinks back into the chair as though shielding herself from something terrible.

After a few moments of cowering, she pries apart the fingers she’d thrown across her face, and looks ahead at where the vivid sound came from. After another pause, the unaware Kezza swallows, “Who are you? G-Gerik..?”

It took a moment for the Disaggregator to realize that he was being addressed, and longer still for his body to register that it had no cause to be in pain. This was, after all, only a dream. Willing his supposed injuries mended, the asura picks himself up and dusts himself off, paying particular attention to the straightening of his collar before he can find it in himself to respond to the Magistrix,

“Affimative, Kezza, it is I; the great and powerful Disaggregator! I have transcended the barrier between the waking world and the dreaming to.. To, uh..” Gerik felt a stirring in his chest that stayed what would have been a typically grandstanding entrance as he finally looked upon his estranged friend. Perhaps it was a machination of the Magistrix’s fabricated dream world that lent her appearance a hint of unfamiliarity about it. After all, one’s dream self was often the ideal, or most dreaded version of the real self.

But, it had been so long since he’d laid eyes upon her in either setting. The dawning uncertainty brought a tickling wetness to the corner of his eyes that no force of will could banish, and his voice broke earnestly when he spoke again, “I-I’ve missed you so much, Kez.”

The Kezza who regards him from behind the desk is someone different than probably expected. Whether due to the oversized chair or the dream’s own design, she seems smaller, and is dressed in the first uniform he would have ever seen her wear. Her hair also harkens back to years past, where she wore it long without adornments. All that seems missing is a mask, though the hands still tentatively hiding her features might suffice.

Worried skepticism follows his approach, his bold and vivid form in noticeable contrast to the grim surroundings. It’s enough to give her a distraction from the dream’s manufactured anguish, which is forced to abate as her mind finds something new to focus on. Kezza watches him with growing disbelief, eventually shifting her hands enough that he might finally see her face.

“Ge-Gerik.. what are you doing here?”

The environment appears to bolster itself despite the meek and befuddled question– The walls of the office straighten themselves to realistic proportions, finding their symmetry once abandoning the extraneous length which resembled the Magistracy’s halls. While Gerik’s presence solidified the setting, however, it did little for Kezza’s lucidity. The mesmer had yet to realize her own dream-state, let alone the truth of her friend’s presence.

Reclaiming his usual blustering composure was not an easy feat when confronted by what he now saw before him: the Magistrix as she was before there was even a Magistracy. It was certainly a dream, then. He hadn’t seen her hair down and unadorned in ages..

But he knew that there was no time to waste when there was no telling how long the ritual would maintain his link with her dreaming mind. Swiping the collected moisture from the corner of his eyes, Gerik started forward a step, humming.

“I’ve established a link with your dreaming mind, Kezza. You’re asleep. I am too. I needed to contact you.”

“Dreaming..”

The notion shudders the dream world, a likely uncomfortable sensation for the interloper as consciousness challenges the subconscious. Kezza places a palm against her temple, eyes scanning her desk with purpose as the fabricated reality shifts incomprehensively. The glyphs of her datawork were wholly illegible, which warranted another test she learned as a budding synergist. The environment begins to stabilize, with a much less tenuous grasp of its own form.

Taking her hands in front of her, Kezza brings them to manifest an orange flame– something impossible in her reality, where mesmeric ability long since displaced her want for an elementalist’s prowess. The fire closes in on itself, liquefying into a glob of water.

Her expression slowly lifts with the realization, though when she looks up, there is a distinct alteration of her features. Without transition, her hair now passes her shoulders in a dull and ragged state, and the wear of long-term stress is clear across her face. Her uniform, too, is supplanted by a contemporary outfit of asuran dress, lacking any implication of her krewe allegiance.

“Ger..!”

Gerik would have only a moment to process the change, however, as he’d find Kezza’s arms embracing him without having witnessed her approach.

Doubt, however, brings her to lift her head from its place at his chest. “But, how? How do I know you’re not a figment?”

With as much as he’d longed for the Magistrix’s embrace, Gerik found himself woefully unprepared for the suddenness with which her arms enircled him, still not entirely acclimated to the whimsy of dream. Nearly stumbling a step, the Disaggregator recovers quickly against the smaller asura’s weight and brings his arms to match her own, the side of his face nuzzling against her neck almost without bidding.

He never wanted it to end. But it had to.

Feeling her head lift from his person, his eyes flicked down to meet Kezza’s gaze, willing away a wetness that might have been telling were it not so readily disposed of. He huffed,

“I can’t imagine any figment you’d dream up could ever match the magnificence of the genuine article. I mean, really Kez. The gall of the thought!”

Though the snooty imperiousness in his tone was entirely real, it did not come without an undercurrent of good nature. He smirked.

“It was a trying endeavor. I’ve spent a small fortune on scented candles and.. Junk food. Euugh.”

It was that touch of derision in his voice and ready wit, which allowed her face to brighten with an irresistible smile. He was right; The times he’d been replicated by her sleeping mind never presented the nuance of this obnoxious charm– it was either one, or the other.

The way his snout wrinkled with mock outrage was also a dead giveaway.

“Candles and junk food?” She echoes with bewildered skepticism, having never seen him partake of the latter. It was an unusual combination. “Just what did you do?”

With as much effort as he put into playing the part of the snide villain, Gerik’s faux superiority was easily broken by the softness of the Magistrix’s smile. Feeling the corners of his mouth tug into a like expression, the Disaggregator nursed the side of Kezza’s neck with a nuzzle, pulling out of it with a chuckle.

“Nothing I’m proud of.” He admitted, already wary of the consequences when he returned to the waking world. “I made use of some of Vinn’s notes on ethereal somnambulance. The ritual that allowed this meeting neccessitated.. Unsavory reagents. I expect the results of this endeavor will greet me poorly when I wake.”

The attention paid to her neck earns him a happy coo, which remains as a smile even as he explains his less than ideal situation.

Even with allowing a breathable space between them, Kezza doesn’t dare release him fully. She reaches up to nuzzle at his cheek with both sympathy, and longing.

“I’ve missed you, so much.”

The admission is all it takes to swall Gerik’s heart fully, a familiar warmth lending his features a subtle hue beneath the thin fuzz coating his cheeks. Cooing softly, he leans in to lay a light kiss on Kezza’s lips, cradling the smaller asura’s weight in his arms.

With his eyes shut, he sighs his response,

“And I, you.”

Some of the weariness across Kezza’s face seems to evaporate, the dream lightened by their reunion. She nuzzles his other cheek, planting another kiss there.

“I thought I might have lost you,” she whispers, the hands at his back shifting to hold him in a warmer embrace.

Sighing his relief at the long-delayed reuinion, Kezza’s weight is accepted at his shoulder with a thoughtful hum.

“Nothing could take me from you, Kez.” Gerik paid her waist a light squeeze, cracking a grin after a fashion. “Excepting a transdimensional enfolding of a cataclysmic scope. But I’m not sure even that would take.”

A while is spent paying soft nuzzles to his neck, unaware (and likely uncaring) that there could be a greater purpose to this visitation.

His response brings a grin against the soft fuzz she attends to, prompting a short coo before she parts from him again.

“What about the rest of the krewe?”

The attentions at his neck are recieved with another light sigh that turns to a coo, the hands at the Magistrix’s waist sliding up to rest between her shoulders.

Even with the mention of the krewe to attempt at souring his mood, Gerik manages to keep his good nature.

“They’re well enough. Well, save Teokkin.” He hums again, this time with a dubious ring to his tone. “He’s at wit’s end, I believe. I didn’t even have to run interference.”

Teokkin’s mention is finally enough to temper Kezza’s heartened spirit. Still, some bright spark in her eyes holds fast, even as the relief she sighs is undercut by lingering concern.

“How severely has he compromised the Magistracy?”

The worry in his friend’s voice is mirrored in Gerik’s own heart, though he masks it with a brush of the snout at Kezza’s collar, a softened smile lifted to greet her as he pulls away.

“It’s holding together. Funding is tight, but he is unable to make any headway no matter how great the lengths he goes to in curtailing spending.”

Despite the good nature engendered by the closeness he’d longed for, the reminder of the necessity for his visitation steals some of the warmth from his expression. “That is.. Why I’ve been able to contact you with confidence, finally. He wants to return ownership of the Magistracy to you.”

Her newly folded ears rise upright, disbelieving, before they fall flat and stiff with a bitter vindication.

“That datawipe had no idea what he was getting involved with,” her resentment reads through, though it fades almost immediately. “But.. he was right. He was right about, everything.”

With as detestable as the subject matter is, Gerik can’t help but let a smirk worm it’s way onto his features at the familiar tells in the curl of the Magistrix’s ears that spoke her indignation.

“He’s wrong, Kez. He admitted it himself. The Magistracy needs you to head it, and no one else. There’s no other asura who could possibly fill the role. I’m certain.”

Kezza’s gaze cast apart from his, she shakes her head with wilting ears.

“No.. Gerik, I saw it. I saw his audience with Administration,” she speaks the confession with such melancholy, it summons a faint graying haze to the ethereal Magistracy office.

“They had every intention to terminate the department.. and us with it, if Teokkin failed to amend our shortcomings.”

Her admission was not quite so surprising as it was a grim confirmation of the fears Gerik had harbored since the beginning of the whole ordeal. It shouldn’t come as any grand revelation to him that Administration had found cause to liquidate them after so many blunders.

But, those hadn’t been their fault! Not any if his– And certainly not Kezza’s.

Moved by the effect his friend’s shift in demeanor had on the room around them and by the reminder that his time was short, the Disaggregator brought a feather light touch to Kezza’s jaw, guiding her gaze up to meet his own.

“Kezza,” His eyes glimmered an amber more brilliant than they should have, a caring insistence lingering behind them. “Whatever you saw, I fully believe it to be true. But the circumstance has changed. Teokkin needs you. The krewe needs you. And.. I need you. He’s provided the legal documentation that will assure your safety, as well as that of your family unit’s.”

Gerik paused at that, recalling the threat he’d left hanging over the Magistrate’s head. A small victory, if it paid out. “I had leverage to negotiate it. Anything to ensure your safety. Your happiness.”

While the warm glow of his eyes arrest her attention, disbelief risks doubt when all he says sounds too good to be true. The memory was as clear in her mind as the one she’d taken it from; Teokkin had been made to negotiate their preservation, even at his own risk. There was no room for misunderstanding in the exchange, and she hadn’t dared hoped for leniency in the face of their condemnation.

The continued decline of the Magistracy didn’t bode well, either. She and Gerik were as good as dead– as well as Teokkin, if its current state was as Gerik reported. So how could it possibly be that he managed to secure their safety?

Unless, he hadn’t. Unless Teokkin had somehow been that very leverage– a sacrifice, to spare herself and the loyal friend who’d do anything for her.

A slow, vague ripple is felt as guilt quietly seeps into the dreamscape. It carries with it the concept of Teokkin, and betrayal– this time a reversal, however marred by the lingering resentment she still carried for the krewemate. It is unclear whether or not Kezza notes the shift in her dream’s tangible mood, as she seeks more pressing answers with growing uncertainty.

“How can we be certain of the document’s legitimacy? Even if it is authentic, how can we know that Administration won’t invalidate it on my return?”

Unsettled by the metamorphosis the dream around them underwent, Gerik kept himself steady by occupying his attention with the asura in front of him– Though that was perhaps not as effective as he might have hoped, given the clear concern she wore on her features.

He hummed thoughtfully, hoping to assuage her worries,

“I have examined it, cross-referenced with no less than four examples of similar litigation. The document is legitimate. I wouldn’t have agreed to make contact with you if it wasn’t.” The corner of Gerik’s mouth twisted at the thought of a lurking betrayal, uncertain exactly what Teokkin might have in store for the both of them if Kezza returned.

“I believe that if it were his intention to liquidate us, he would have attempted to eliminate me at least once already. His efforts to ‘fix’ the Magistracy have seemed earnest enough. More so than anything else he’s ever done.”

The statement warranted a smirk, even if it was a short-lived one. Tilting his head down with a returned seriousness, the Disaggregator held the gaze between the two of them, voice lowered,

“You belong in Rata Sum, Kez. If working with him to earn our old positions back is the only means to ensure you and your family unit’s safe return, then I believe it is a worthy endeavor.”

Despite his reassurances, Kezza’s reservation is still evident. The mention of liquidation folded her ears with agitated concern, and would have been followed by a reminder of Teokkin’s previous attempt, were it not for the small shift in Gerik’s demeanor.

She allows his reasoning a moment of consideration, gaze leaving his to sift through her doubts. As much as she trusted his litigatory aptitude, there was lacking certainty in how far Administration would go. Every datum of the Magistracy’s databanks had at one point crossed her desk, ensuring even the most sensitive material was paid her scrutiny. If she was indeed no longer worthy of that data, there were only a few ways the Inquest could redact it.

It wasn’t a risk to take lightly, when one had a partner and progeny to think of.

Her ears slacken. Danger aside, was she even worthy of her old position? The charges brought against them in Teokkin’s memory had haunted her over the months. Once the crimes had been brought to light, she could only deny them for so long. The krewe had no cause to give her the benefit of the doubt, any more now as they did then.

After all, she was a deserter now.

“I.. I don’t know, Gerik,” her voice pensive, but not despairing. “Even if Teokkin rescinds, the Administrative council has no rationale for restoring my status.. in any capacity.”

Though the Disaggregator was never one to show weakness in the face of adversity, it was no small effort to conceal the reservations Kezza’s uncertainty engendered in him. Who was he to put her through such duress? To cause such delicate ears to curl with anxiety? Certainly no one good.

Seeking to ease her mind, Gerik’s claws traced a delicate line along the small of her back, lips set in a like comiseration.

“Any endeavor has it’s less desireable potentialities.. But if we don’t take action now, we may never be reinstated. You could be on the run for the rest of your life, and I.. I don’t believe I could handle that, Kezza.”

His frown deepened at the thought of being cut off from her forever; with Srazz gone, he’d have no one left– And Kezza’s family would be in more peril than either of them. It was an eventuality he could not allow to come to pass.

“What if we organized a meeting on neutral ground? Depending on the venue, you might not even need to be physically present.”

Even with wilting ears, the touch at her back is repaid with a kind press at his, a hand set between his shoulders and one at his waist. The sympathetic look she gives him is one of comiseration, held until an ear flicks at his suggestion.

“I concur,” she replies softly, “Somewhere in Kryta, perhaps. Where would you say is safest..?”

The question posed was a good one; where could a meeting be organized that would best minimize the threat to their persons, without being so impersonal as to provide no evidence of Teokkin’s intent? Certainly, meeting in Rata Sum was out of the question. But then, where? Mrot Boru? One of the Brisban facilities?

The touch at his back urged him to coo sweetly, an idle nuzzle paid to her neck before the idea struck him.

“Perhaps.. Something could be worked out with Moto? He does possess the technology to facilitate such a meeting..”

The suggestion takes her aback by some small degree, “Moto? But in that case, I would have to return to Rata Sum..”

Her ears droop again at the impossibility, reminded of her longing for home. The reality of the dream shudders with a ripple of homesickness, and the asura places her worry with a chin at his shoulder.

When she speaks again, it is quiet enough to be almost inaudible, were it not for the mechanics of the dreamstate conveying the meaning through sensation alone.

“I can’t even be certain this is real.”

While the necessity of remaining focused on the task at hand gnawed at the back of his mind, Gerik found himself admittedly lost amid the doubt that trailed the Magistrix’s statement– And in the familiar softness of her eyes, gentle lilac hues arrested his gaze.

Taking the smaller asura’s hand in a palm nicked and bitten by scars, he leaned in almost unconsciously bringing their foreheads to meet.

“Let me assure you then.” He murmured, leaning forward to join his lips to hers.

The touch at her hand was enough to bring her to face him again, a light hue brought to her cheeks as he brought his head against hers. His bid to assuage her doubt is accepted with a readiness that may have surprised her, were it not for the knowledge that this was not their waking reality.

With doubt lurking in the shadows of the dream, Kezza’s arms enclose more firmly around him, willing that figment or not– he stay.

Real or not, Gerik felt a curious kind of elation at the contact that might have been shameful if he had not long ago accepted his feelings for his one-time colleague and long-term friend. Reciprocating her arms movements without a hint of reservation, the larger asura’s arms draw Kezza against him with a sigh between joined lips, eye fluttering shut as the peaking emotions color him in a soft magenta hue.

Before their embrace can engross him fully, Gerik has presence of mind enough to speak between the kiss, hushed and breathy,

“Will you afford me this chance? To make things right?”

Though they still embraced so closely, the scarce distance he affords himself must be compensated for with a nuzzle at his cheek. If this was all indeed a dream, it was the most real she’d ever had.

“It isn’t yours to make right,” she answers in a voice softened by intimacy, “But I trust you, Ger.”

While neither asura may be wholly aware of it, the office around them recedes ever so slightly– as though everything were shrouded in a faint fog, save for them.

With her confirmation staying his worries, Gerik gives an affectionate sigh.

“I’ll dispatch a golem with the details,” He breathed, fighting the inclination to swoon at her touch, “We’ll fix this. I promise.”

It wasn’t much, but it was all he could think to say. For as effectively as their differences encouraged his mind to broaden it’s approach to the world, Kezza’s presence seemed to make higher thought a difficulty for the Disaggregator at times. Thankfully, this particular juncture was anything but inopportune. He let another sigh tumble from his lips as he relaxed into the Magistrix’s embrace.

“I’ll maintain my proximity to Divinity’s Reach,” she assures, a soft nuzzle paid to his jaw, “And I’ll find a disguise.”

A slight jolt crosses the scenery around them at the mention of the city, accompanied by a shift to her inn-room’s likeness and general sense of anxiety. She seems unaware that her ears curl with the change.

Yet regardless, her nuzzle offers a light kiss with it, and she would continue to hold him unless deterred.

“I’ll contact you as soon as the arrangements are made. Just be safe.” He murmurs, returning the nuzzle in kind, a light nip at her ear paid as the scene around them shifts.

Though he notes the change in his periphery, it means little to the Disaggregator when Kezza was present to occupy so much of his attention. Driven by a desire to prolong their continued closeness, Gerik lifts her body up against his own, that he might better pay his attentions at her neck.

Almost surprised, Kezza’s coo is a little louder than she’d intended as her feet leave the imagined ground. Content to open her neck to him while her arms adjust at his shoulders, she readily resumes nuzzling at his ear.

“I’ve missed you so much,” her whisper reiterates after a light nip.

The environment shivers around them, her office again replicating itself– though now with a quarter of her inn room, including a bed, and the desk directly behind her.

Whether by his own volition or fortunate happenstance, Kezza’s reciprocation encourages Gerik to move the both of them to the desk’s edge. Allowing her to rest against it, Gerik parts the Magistrix’s collar with a thumb to better allow his affections to reach her.

Between kisses, he leans up to nuzzle at her ear, a hand sliding down along her side,

“You won’t have to much longer, Kez. I promise.”

The dream answers with another warm ripple, its epicenter at the fluttering heart of Kezza’s dreamt self. His attentions are enough to redden her cheeks and take the anxious curl from her ears, especially as she recognizes the familiarities of their position.

After another short while spent indulging in each other’s tenderness, Kezza’s hands rest between his shoulders and at his chest, and she nudges an ear with her short snout. Whether spoken or expressed by the dream itself, she whispers, “I don’t want to wake up.”

The waves of empathic warmth that ripple through the dreamscape wash over Gerik and urge a small sigh from his lips, eyes half-lidded.

"Neither do I. Not yet." He whispers back.

With another kiss, longer than before, Kezza is eased back onto the desk, where he joins beside her with a light coo at her neck.

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream (RP)

Another long pull from her wine glass, and another sigh following it. It was a routine she’d long since fallen into– were she not so dedicated to regular visits with her family, she could fall harder into such a habit. What else would keep her going, after losing everything? Without Vinn and her precious Pwitt, the once-Magistrix was an asura without purpose. And she knew it.

Kezza gripped the bridge of her snout over the mask– perhaps the last trapping of the glory days which still served her. Alchemy knew her krewe didn’t. And the masks would grant her protection from that very same krewe, provided the assassins they sent were unfamiliar with her old practice. It seemed unlikely, but so far.. so good.

An emptied flagon crashed beside her, thrown against the bar behind the order of the bookah wielding it. The crude and surly thing demanded a refreshed glass, by Kezza’s count, her fifth. How this repulsive cretin could stomach that much swill in so short a time was a curiosity worth research, but the asura only gave the specimen a dull stare. Seemingly incensed by the look, the human growled at her and muttered something incomprehensible.

One of the most regrettable aspects of her exile was the safety protocol she’d assigned herself: Never be alone outside of her hideout. Even if it meant the company of bookah. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but solitude took its toll between risked visits with Vinn and Pwitt.

Acceptance became easier to grasp, but..

It never got less depressing.

At least in Divinity’s Reach, there was wine. A guilty pleasure, she admitted, but one made forgivable with the reminder of its discovery. Pained now as it was, the memory could still warm her where the wine couldn’t. She had been reluctant to indulge her friend’s incessant push for the outing, reminding him of every unpleasantry the city held.

But as always, Gerik had a way of swaying her. The absence of his whimsy made her stay in the city much less amicable, even as she recalled his more obnoxious tendencies. She’d trade every glass of fermented grape to hear just one of his annoying quips.

Kezza brought a hand to her forehead, unable and unwilling to acknowledge the irate female next her. The bottle of wine she’d ingested was nothing to the horrid lead weight in her stomach, a nausea she’d never once shaken in the past months. There was no way to know for certain whether or not the Disaggregator had succeeded his escape, and it was an anxiety that overwhelmed her thoughts when her guard grew weak. Relief only hinted itself in the determined hope that he was as capable as she’d always known him to be.

–

The journey back to her hideaway through the foreign city was mercifully uneventful under the cover of mesmeric subterfuge. Despite the sore arm she’d acquired during the inevitable altercation with the bookah woman, the cause of her fatigue was far less tangible. These days were exhausting in their boredom, and the nights restless with angst.

Yet for once, perhaps by the grace of that bookah’s dirty tricks, Kezza found her makeshift cot an almost welcome sight, and sleep came before it could be questioned.

The Disaggregator was no stranger to ritual. Binding a spirit, for instance, was a process with which he and any other Inquest agent worth their datastacks were intimately familiar. Though the exact methods and preferred location differred from the habits of the pedestrian lab jockey or floundering bookah, the curvature of the binding lines and the crumbled reagents, the powdered bone and muttered incantations were all the same. It was a similar experience to any other ritual of a like magic.

This, though. This was different. Certainly, the chalk lines had been drawn up and the candles had been lit; surely, he’d canted the sacred words, written in times long passed into antiquity as proscribed by the simian gods– But it was different. This time, there had been no bundled sticks to burn, or dried rat bones to break over consecrated water.

This time, there had only been an overwhelming consumption of junk food. As much as he disdained the stuff, he’d eaten the first bag of grub chips quickly enough. By the fifth container of Planthopper Pasties, however, the Disaggregator was beginning to feel the strain. By the tenth, he was unconscious, face down in a circle of chalk.

When he entered the dream world, it took a moment for the asura to reacquaint himself with his own consciousness– Or subconsciousness. He couldn’t be certain which was which. Everything around him was smoke and sunlight, the moon wreathed in dust, a rippling veil of ephemeral mist. If he had the time, he might spend a while grappling with the nature of his newfound lucidity. As it was, the task at hand demanded too much focus, lending his form a hard edge in the soft, blooming murk of dreamlight.

Impelling himself forward, it was a long, sometimes harrowing while before he touched on a dream sphere that might read as anything resembling familiar, but when he did, the sensation was unmistakable. Careening around the edge of the crystalline orb, Gerik allowed a dragged claw to maintain contact and prevent him from losing hold as he peered within from without.

What he saw skipped his heart a beat. There, mere meters beneath him, was the Magistrix– Long-sought and wrapped in the fitful turnings of an anxious sleep. He began to tap at the surface.

The ragged asura tosses and turns under the coat she’s reassigned as a blanket. Her limp ears flick now and then, until her subconscious detects something which rouses them.

While not dreamless, the restless sleep is occupied by a general malaise, manifested in her mind as a dark and chaotic haze. Images of familiar places– her office, her domicile, the Magistracy lobby– form and fade before any of them can stick. The most stable of environments is her office, a dim place lit with more crimson than its reality ever held. It isn’t much longer before it wins out against the grey and busy void, adhering itself to her subconscious enough that Kezza finds herself standing in its altered form; The ceiling warped, too low at her desk and stretched beyond the confines of its tangible twin in a way which mirrored the Magistracy’s halls. Databanks and furniture are likewise discordant, and perhaps curiously, lacking doors. The entry to her private washroom seems the most realistic, though its interior is starker than it ought to be.

Kezza stands in the middle of the scene, dully awakening to the dream. Without lucidity, she starts for her desk, and seats herself in her chair which is too large for her person. Noise, indecipherable, clouds the air, and Kezza feels herself begin to panic under the sudden stress her dream generates.

From the noise, however, comes a rhythmic tapping. Somehow, she finds it overcome the chaos, and it permits her focus enough that a presence is felt. The outer rim of her dream becomes permeable, allowing the interloper to phase into the dream freely.

Peering through the hazy sphere’s surface, there’s little else the Disaggregator can make of the scene within beyond the vaguely feminine form inside. If it weren’t for the whisper of a unknowingly shared memory to draw him in, he might well have passed it by entirely. Thankfully, he hadn’t– And more fortuitously still, the sphere’s occupant took note enough of his harassment that the barrier between void and dream became porous, allowing him to pass.

Not risking a moment to the capricious nature of the dreamscape, Gerik pushed himself beyond the threshold and into darkness. It was then that he realized his mistake. In his haste, the ever keen Disaggregator had failed to think through his manner of entry; a blundering that left him suspended in the air above the room’s center for a moment before the idea of gravity asserted itself and sent him hurtling to the floor with a yelp.

“HWUUAA–OORRMF!”

Already in distress, the cry of a familiar voice spurs a shriek from Kezza, who shrinks back into the chair as though shielding herself from something terrible.

After a few moments of cowering, she pries apart the fingers she’d thrown across her face, and looks ahead at where the vivid sound came from. After another pause, the unaware Kezza swallows, “Who are you? G-Gerik..?”

It took a moment for the Disaggregator to realize that he was being addressed, and longer still for his body to register that it had no cause to be in pain. This was, after all, only a dream. Willing his supposed injuries mended, the asura picks himself up and dusts himself off, paying particular attention to the straightening of his collar before he can find it in himself to respond to the Magistrix,

“Affimative, Kezza, it is I; the great and powerful Disaggregator! I have transcended the barrier between the waking world and the dreaming to.. To, uh..” Gerik felt a stirring in his chest that stayed what would have been a typically grandstanding entrance as he finally looked upon his estranged friend. Perhaps it was a machination of the Magistrix’s fabricated dream world that lent her appearance a hint of unfamiliarity about it. After all, one’s dream self was often the ideal, or most dreaded version of the real self.

But, it had been so long since he’d laid eyes upon her in either setting. The dawning uncertainty brought a tickling wetness to the corner of his eyes that no force of will could banish, and his voice broke earnestly when he spoke again, “I-I’ve missed you so much, Kez.”

The Kezza who regards him from behind the desk is someone different than probably expected. Whether due to the oversized chair or the dream’s own design, she seems smaller, and is dressed in the first uniform he would have ever seen her wear. Her hair also harkens back to years past, where she wore it long without adornments. All that seems missing is a mask, though the hands still tentatively hiding her features might suffice.

Worried skepticism follows his approach, his bold and vivid form in noticeable contrast to the grim surroundings. It’s enough to give her a distraction from the dream’s manufactured anguish, which is forced to abate as her mind finds something new to focus on. Kezza watches him with growing disbelief, eventually shifting her hands enough that he might finally see her face.

“Ge-Gerik.. what are you doing here?”

The environment appears to bolster itself despite the meek and befuddled question– The walls of the office straighten themselves to realistic proportions, finding their symmetry once abandoning the extraneous length which resembled the Magistracy’s halls. While Gerik’s presence solidified the setting, however, it did little for Kezza’s lucidity. The mesmer had yet to realize her own dream-state, let alone the truth of her friend’s presence.

Reclaiming his usual blustering composure was not an easy feat when confronted by what he now saw before him: the Magistrix as she was before there was even a Magistracy. It was certainly a dream, then. He hadn’t seen her hair down and unadorned in ages..

But he knew that there was no time to waste when there was no telling how long the ritual would maintain his link with her dreaming mind. Swiping the collected moisture from the corner of his eyes, Gerik started forward a step, humming.

“I’ve established a link with your dreaming mind, Kezza. You’re asleep. I am too. I needed to contact you.”

“Dreaming..”

The notion shudders the dream world, a likely uncomfortable sensation for the interloper as consciousness challenges the subconscious. Kezza places a palm against her temple, eyes scanning her desk with purpose as the fabricated reality shifts incomprehensively. The glyphs of her datawork were wholly illegible, which warranted another test she learned as a budding synergist. The environment begins to stabilize, with a much less tenuous grasp of its own form.

Taking her hands in front of her, Kezza brings them to manifest an orange flame– something impossible in her reality, where mesmeric ability long since displaced her want for an elementalist’s prowess. The fire closes in on itself, liquefying into a glob of water.

Her expression slowly lifts with the realization, though when she looks up, there is a distinct alteration of her features. Without transition, her hair now passes her shoulders in a dull and ragged state, and the wear of long-term stress is clear across her face. Her uniform, too, is supplanted by a contemporary outfit of asuran dress, lacking any implication of her krewe allegiance.

“Ger..!”

Gerik would have only a moment to process the change, however, as he’d find Kezza’s arms embracing him without having witnessed her approach.

Doubt, however, brings her to lift her head from its place at his chest. “But, how? How do I know you’re not a figment?”

With as much as he’d longed for the Magistrix’s embrace, Gerik found himself woefully unprepared for the suddenness with which her arms enircled him, still not entirely acclimated to the whimsy of dream. Nearly stumbling a step, the Disaggregator recovers quickly against the smaller asura’s weight and brings his arms to match her own, the side of his face nuzzling against her neck almost without bidding.

He never wanted it to end. But it had to.

Feeling her head lift from his person, his eyes flicked down to meet Kezza’s gaze, willing away a wetness that might have been telling were it not so readily disposed of. He huffed,

“I can’t imagine any figment you’d dream up could ever match the magnificence of the genuine article. I mean, really Kez. The gall of the thought!”

Though the snooty imperiousness in his tone was entirely real, it did not come without an undercurrent of good nature. He smirked.

“It was a trying endeavor. I’ve spent a small fortune on scented candles and.. Junk food. Euugh.”

It was that touch of derision in his voice and ready wit, which allowed her face to brighten with an irresistible smile. He was right; The times he’d been replicated by her sleeping mind never presented the nuance of this obnoxious charm– it was either one, or the other.

The way his snout wrinkled with mock outrage was also a dead giveaway.

“Candles and junk food?” She echoes with bewildered skepticism, having never seen him partake of the latter. It was an unusual combination. “Just what did you do?”

With as much effort as he put into playing the part of the snide villain, Gerik’s faux superiority was easily broken by the softness of the Magistrix’s smile. Feeling the corners of his mouth tug into a like expression, the Disaggregator nursed the side of Kezza’s neck with a nuzzle, pulling out of it with a chuckle.

“Nothing I’m proud of.” He admitted, already wary of the consequences when he returned to the waking world. “I made use of some of Vinn’s notes on ethereal somnambulance. The ritual that allowed this meeting neccessitated.. Unsavory reagents. I expect the results of this endeavor will greet me poorly when I wake.”

The attention paid to her neck earns him a happy coo, which remains as a smile even as he explains his less than ideal situation.

Even with allowing a breathable space between them, Kezza doesn’t dare release him fully. She reaches up to nuzzle at his cheek with both sympathy, and longing.

“I’ve missed you, so much.”

The admission is all it takes to swall Gerik’s heart fully, a familiar warmth lending his features a subtle hue beneath the thin fuzz coating his cheeks. Cooing softly, he leans in to lay a light kiss on Kezza’s lips, cradling the smaller asura’s weight in his arms.

With his eyes shut, he sighs his response,

“And I, you.”

Some of the weariness across Kezza’s face seems to evaporate, the dream lightened by their reunion. She nuzzles his other cheek, planting another kiss there.

“I thought I might have lost you,” she whispers, the hands at his back shifting to hold him in a warmer embrace.

Sighing his relief at the long-delayed reuinion, Kezza’s weight is accepted at his shoulder with a thoughtful hum.

“Nothing could take me from you, Kez.” Gerik paid her waist a light squeeze, cracking a grin after a fashion. “Excepting a transdimensional enfolding of a cataclysmic scope. But I’m not sure even that would take.”

A while is spent paying soft nuzzles to his neck, unaware (and likely uncaring) that there could be a greater purpose to this visitation.

His response brings a grin against the soft fuzz she attends to, prompting a short coo before she parts from him again.

“What about the rest of the krewe?”

The attentions at his neck are recieved with another light sigh that turns to a coo, the hands at the Magistrix’s waist sliding up to rest between her shoulders.

Even with the mention of the krewe to attempt at souring his mood, Gerik manages to keep his good nature.

“They’re well enough. Well, save Teokkin.” He hums again, this time with a dubious ring to his tone. “He’s at wit’s end, I believe. I didn’t even have to run interference.”

Teokkin’s mention is finally enough to temper Kezza’s heartened spirit. Still, some bright spark in her eyes holds fast, even as the relief she sighs is undercut by lingering concern.

“How severely has he compromised the Magistracy?”

The worry in his friend’s voice is mirrored in Gerik’s own heart, though he masks it with a brush of the snout at Kezza’s collar, a softened smile lifted to greet her as he pulls away.

“It’s holding together. Funding is tight, but he is unable to make any headway no matter how great the lengths he goes to in curtailing spending.”

Despite the good nature engendered by the closeness he’d longed for, the reminder of the necessity for his visitation steals some of the warmth from his expression. “That is.. Why I’ve been able to contact you with confidence, finally. He wants to return ownership of the Magistracy to you.”

Her newly folded ears rise upright, disbelieving, before they fall flat and stiff with a bitter vindication.

“That datawipe had no idea what he was getting involved with,” her resentment reads through, though it fades almost immediately. “But.. he was right. He was right about, everything.”

With as detestable as the subject matter is, Gerik can’t help but let a smirk worm it’s way onto his features at the familiar tells in the curl of the Magistrix’s ears that spoke her indignation.

“He’s wrong, Kez. He admitted it himself. The Magistracy needs you to head it, and no one else. There’s no other asura who could possibly fill the role. I’m certain.”

Kezza’s gaze cast apart from his, she shakes her head with wilting ears.

“No.. Gerik, I saw it. I saw his audience with Administration,” she speaks the confession with such melancholy, it summons a faint graying haze to the ethereal Magistracy office.

“They had every intention to terminate the department.. and us with it, if Teokkin failed to amend our shortcomings.”

Her admission was not quite so surprising as it was a grim confirmation of the fears Gerik had harbored since the beginning of the whole ordeal. It shouldn’t come as any grand revelation to him that Administration had found cause to liquidate them after so many blunders.

But, those hadn’t been their fault! Not any if his– And certainly not Kezza’s.

Moved by the effect his friend’s shift in demeanor had on the room around them and by the reminder that his time was short, the Disaggregator brought a feather light touch to Kezza’s jaw, guiding her gaze up to meet his own.

“Kezza,” His eyes glimmered an amber more brilliant than they should have, a caring insistence lingering behind them. “Whatever you saw, I fully believe it to be true. But the circumstance has changed. Teokkin needs you. The krewe needs you. And.. I need you. He’s provided the legal documentation that will assure your safety, as well as that of your family unit’s.”

Gerik paused at that, recalling the threat he’d left hanging over the Magistrate’s head. A small victory, if it paid out. “I had leverage to negotiate it. Anything to ensure your safety. Your happiness.”

While the warm glow of his eyes arrest her attention, disbelief risks doubt when all he says sounds too good to be true. The memory was as clear in her mind as the one she’d taken it from; Teokkin had been made to negotiate their preservation, even at his own risk. There was no room for misunderstanding in the exchange, and she hadn’t dared hoped for leniency in the face of their condemnation.

The continued decline of the Magistracy didn’t bode well, either. She and Gerik were as good as dead– as well as Teokkin, if its current state was as Gerik reported. So how could it possibly be that he managed to secure their safety?

Unless, he hadn’t. Unless Teokkin had somehow been that very leverage– a sacrifice, to spare herself and the loyal friend who’d do anything for her.

A slow, vague ripple is felt as guilt quietly seeps into the dreamscape. It carries with it the concept of Teokkin, and betrayal– this time a reversal, however marred by the lingering resentment she still carried for the krewemate. It is unclear whether or not Kezza notes the shift in her dream’s tangible mood, as she seeks more pressing answers with growing uncertainty.

“How can we be certain of the document’s legitimacy? Even if it is authentic, how can we know that Administration won’t invalidate it on my return?”

Unsettled by the metamorphosis the dream around them underwent, Gerik kept himself steady by occupying his attention with the asura in front of him– Though that was perhaps not as effective as he might have hoped, given the clear concern she wore on her features.

He hummed thoughtfully, hoping to assuage her worries,

“I have examined it, cross-referenced with no less than four examples of similar litigation. The document is legitimate. I wouldn’t have agreed to make contact with you if it wasn’t.” The corner of Gerik’s mouth twisted at the thought of a lurking betrayal, uncertain exactly what Teokkin might have in store for the both of them if Kezza returned.

“I believe that if it were his intention to liquidate us, he would have attempted to eliminate me at least once already. His efforts to ‘fix’ the Magistracy have seemed earnest enough. More so than anything else he’s ever done.”

The statement warranted a smirk, even if it was a short-lived one. Tilting his head down with a returned seriousness, the Disaggregator held the gaze between the two of them, voice lowered,

“You belong in Rata Sum, Kez. If working with him to earn our old positions back is the only means to ensure you and your family unit’s safe return, then I believe it is a worthy endeavor.”

Despite his reassurances, Kezza’s reservation is still evident. The mention of liquidation folded her ears with agitated concern, and would have been followed by a reminder of Teokkin’s previous attempt, were it not for the small shift in Gerik’s demeanor.

She allows his reasoning a moment of consideration, gaze leaving his to sift through her doubts. As much as she trusted his litigatory aptitude, there was lacking certainty in how far Administration would go. Every datum of the Magistracy’s databanks had at one point crossed her desk, ensuring even the most sensitive material was paid her scrutiny. If she was indeed no longer worthy of that data, there were only a few ways the Inquest could redact it.

It wasn’t a risk to take lightly, when one had a partner and progeny to think of.

Her ears slacken. Danger aside, was she even worthy of her old position? The charges brought against them in Teokkin’s memory had haunted her over the months. Once the crimes had been brought to light, she could only deny them for so long. The krewe had no cause to give her the benefit of the doubt, any more now as they did then.

After all, she was a deserter now.

“I.. I don’t know, Gerik,” her voice pensive, but not despairing. “Even if Teokkin rescinds, the Administrative council has no rationale for restoring my status.. in any capacity.”

Though the Disaggregator was never one to show weakness in the face of adversity, it was no small effort to conceal the reservations Kezza’s uncertainty engendered in him. Who was he to put her through such duress? To cause such delicate ears to curl with anxiety? Certainly no one good.

Seeking to ease her mind, Gerik’s claws traced a delicate line along the small of her back, lips set in a like comiseration.

“Any endeavor has it’s less desireable potentialities.. But if we don’t take action now, we may never be reinstated. You could be on the run for the rest of your life, and I.. I don’t believe I could handle that, Kezza.”

His frown deepened at the thought of being cut off from her forever; with Srazz gone, he’d have no one left– And Kezza’s family would be in more peril than either of them. It was an eventuality he could not allow to come to pass.

“What if we organized a meeting on neutral ground? Depending on the venue, you might not even need to be physically present.”

Even with wilting ears, the touch at her back is repaid with a kind press at his, a hand set between his shoulders and one at his waist. The sympathetic look she gives him is one of comiseration, held until an ear flicks at his suggestion.

“I concur,” she replies softly, “Somewhere in Kryta, perhaps. Where would you say is safest..?”

The question posed was a good one; where could a meeting be organized that would best minimize the threat to their persons, without being so impersonal as to provide no evidence of Teokkin’s intent? Certainly, meeting in Rata Sum was out of the question. But then, where? Mrot Boru? One of the Brisban facilities?

The touch at his back urged him to coo sweetly, an idle nuzzle paid to her neck before the idea struck him.

“Perhaps.. Something could be worked out with Moto? He does possess the technology to facilitate such a meeting..”

The suggestion takes her aback by some small degree, “Moto? But in that case, I would have to return to Rata Sum..”

Her ears droop again at the impossibility, reminded of her longing for home. The reality of the dream shudders with a ripple of homesickness, and the asura places her worry with a chin at his shoulder.

When she speaks again, it is quiet enough to be almost inaudible, were it not for the mechanics of the dreamstate conveying the meaning through sensation alone.

“I can’t even be certain this is real.”

While the necessity of remaining focused on the task at hand gnawed at the back of his mind, Gerik found himself admittedly lost amid the doubt that trailed the Magistrix’s statement– And in the familiar softness of her eyes, gentle lilac hues arrested his gaze.

Taking the smaller asura’s hand in a palm nicked and bitten by scars, he leaned in almost unconsciously bringing their foreheads to meet.

“Let me assure you then.” He murmured, leaning forward to join his lips to hers.

The touch at her hand was enough to bring her to face him again, a light hue brought to her cheeks as he brought his head against hers. His bid to assuage her doubt is accepted with a readiness that may have surprised her, were it not for the knowledge that this was not their waking reality.

With doubt lurking in the shadows of the dream, Kezza’s arms enclose more firmly around him, willing that figment or not– he stay.

Real or not, Gerik felt a curious kind of elation at the contact that might have been shameful if he had not long ago accepted his feelings for his one-time colleague and long-term friend. Reciprocating her arms movements without a hint of reservation, the larger asura’s arms draw Kezza against him with a sigh between joined lips, eye fluttering shut as the peaking emotions color him in a soft magenta hue.

Before their embrace can engross him fully, Gerik has presence of mind enough to speak between the kiss, hushed and breathy,

“Will you afford me this chance? To make things right?”

Though they still embraced so closely, the scarce distance he affords himself must be compensated for with a nuzzle at his cheek. If this was all indeed a dream, it was the most real she’d ever had.

“It isn’t yours to make right,” she answers in a voice softened by intimacy, “But I trust you, Ger.”

While neither asura may be wholly aware of it, the office around them recedes ever so slightly– as though everything were shrouded in a faint fog, save for them.

With her confirmation staying his worries, Gerik gives an affectionate sigh.

“I’ll dispatch a golem with the details,” He breathed, fighting the inclination to swoon at her touch, “We’ll fix this. I promise.”

It wasn’t much, but it was all he could think to say. For as effectively as their differences encouraged his mind to broaden it’s approach to the world, Kezza’s presence seemed to make higher thought a difficulty for the Disaggregator at times. Thankfully, this particular juncture was anything but inopportune. He let another sigh tumble from his lips as he relaxed into the Magistrix’s embrace.

“I’ll maintain my proximity to Divinity’s Reach,” she assures, a soft nuzzle paid to his jaw, “And I’ll find a disguise.”

A slight jolt crosses the scenery around them at the mention of the city, accompanied by a shift to her inn-room’s likeness and general sense of anxiety. She seems unaware that her ears curl with the change.

Yet regardless, her nuzzle offers a light kiss with it, and she would continue to hold him unless deterred.

“I’ll contact you as soon as the arrangements are made. Just be safe.” He murmurs, returning the nuzzle in kind, a light nip at her ear paid as the scene around them shifts.

Though he notes the change in his periphery, it means little to the Disaggregator when Kezza was present to occupy so much of his attention. Driven by a desire to prolong their continued closeness, Gerik lifts her body up against his own, that he might better pay his attentions at her neck.

Almost surprised, Kezza’s coo is a little louder than she’d intended as her feet leave the imagined ground. Content to open her neck to him while her arms adjust at his shoulders, she readily resumes nuzzling at his ear.

“I’ve missed you so much,” her whisper reiterates after a light nip.

The environment shivers around them, her office again replicating itself– though now with a quarter of her inn room, including a bed, and the desk directly behind her.

Whether by his own volition or fortunate happenstance, Kezza's reciprocation encourages Gerik to move the both of them to the desk's edge. Allowing her to rest against it, Gerik parts the Magistrix's collar with a thumb to better allow his affections to reach her.

Between kisses, he leans up to nuzzle at her ear, a hand sliding down along her side,

"You won't have to much longer, Kez. I promise."

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream (RP)

Another long pull from her wine glass, and another sigh following it. It was a routine she’d long since fallen into– were she not so dedicated to regular visits with her family, she could fall harder into such a habit. What else would keep her going, after losing everything? Without Vinn and her precious Pwitt, the once-Magistrix was an asura without purpose. And she knew it.

Kezza gripped the bridge of her snout over the mask– perhaps the last trapping of the glory days which still served her. Alchemy knew her krewe didn’t. And the masks would grant her protection from that very same krewe, provided the assassins they sent were unfamiliar with her old practice. It seemed unlikely, but so far.. so good.

An emptied flagon crashed beside her, thrown against the bar behind the order of the bookah wielding it. The crude and surly thing demanded a refreshed glass, by Kezza’s count, her fifth. How this repulsive cretin could stomach that much swill in so short a time was a curiosity worth research, but the asura only gave the specimen a dull stare. Seemingly incensed by the look, the human growled at her and muttered something incomprehensible.

One of the most regrettable aspects of her exile was the safety protocol she’d assigned herself: Never be alone outside of her hideout. Even if it meant the company of bookah. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but solitude took its toll between risked visits with Vinn and Pwitt.

Acceptance became easier to grasp, but..

It never got less depressing.

At least in Divinity’s Reach, there was wine. A guilty pleasure, she admitted, but one made forgivable with the reminder of its discovery. Pained now as it was, the memory could still warm her where the wine couldn’t. She had been reluctant to indulge her friend’s incessant push for the outing, reminding him of every unpleasantry the city held.

But as always, Gerik had a way of swaying her. The absence of his whimsy made her stay in the city much less amicable, even as she recalled his more obnoxious tendencies. She’d trade every glass of fermented grape to hear just one of his annoying quips.

Kezza brought a hand to her forehead, unable and unwilling to acknowledge the irate female next her. The bottle of wine she’d ingested was nothing to the horrid lead weight in her stomach, a nausea she’d never once shaken in the past months. There was no way to know for certain whether or not the Disaggregator had succeeded his escape, and it was an anxiety that overwhelmed her thoughts when her guard grew weak. Relief only hinted itself in the determined hope that he was as capable as she’d always known him to be.

–

The journey back to her hideaway through the foreign city was mercifully uneventful under the cover of mesmeric subterfuge. Despite the sore arm she’d acquired during the inevitable altercation with the bookah woman, the cause of her fatigue was far less tangible. These days were exhausting in their boredom, and the nights restless with angst.

Yet for once, perhaps by the grace of that bookah’s dirty tricks, Kezza found her makeshift cot an almost welcome sight, and sleep came before it could be questioned.

The Disaggregator was no stranger to ritual. Binding a spirit, for instance, was a process with which he and any other Inquest agent worth their datastacks were intimately familiar. Though the exact methods and preferred location differred from the habits of the pedestrian lab jockey or floundering bookah, the curvature of the binding lines and the crumbled reagents, the powdered bone and muttered incantations were all the same. It was a similar experience to any other ritual of a like magic.

This, though. This was different. Certainly, the chalk lines had been drawn up and the candles had been lit; surely, he’d canted the sacred words, written in times long passed into antiquity as proscribed by the simian gods– But it was different. This time, there had been no bundled sticks to burn, or dried rat bones to break over consecrated water.

This time, there had only been an overwhelming consumption of junk food. As much as he disdained the stuff, he’d eaten the first bag of grub chips quickly enough. By the fifth container of Planthopper Pasties, however, the Disaggregator was beginning to feel the strain. By the tenth, he was unconscious, face down in a circle of chalk.

When he entered the dream world, it took a moment for the asura to reacquaint himself with his own consciousness– Or subconsciousness. He couldn’t be certain which was which. Everything around him was smoke and sunlight, the moon wreathed in dust, a rippling veil of ephemeral mist. If he had the time, he might spend a while grappling with the nature of his newfound lucidity. As it was, the task at hand demanded too much focus, lending his form a hard edge in the soft, blooming murk of dreamlight.

Impelling himself forward, it was a long, sometimes harrowing while before he touched on a dream sphere that might read as anything resembling familiar, but when he did, the sensation was unmistakable. Careening around the edge of the crystalline orb, Gerik allowed a dragged claw to maintain contact and prevent him from losing hold as he peered within from without.

What he saw skipped his heart a beat. There, mere meters beneath him, was the Magistrix– Long-sought and wrapped in the fitful turnings of an anxious sleep. He began to tap at the surface.

The ragged asura tosses and turns under the coat she’s reassigned as a blanket. Her limp ears flick now and then, until her subconscious detects something which rouses them.

While not dreamless, the restless sleep is occupied by a general malaise, manifested in her mind as a dark and chaotic haze. Images of familiar places– her office, her domicile, the Magistracy lobby– form and fade before any of them can stick. The most stable of environments is her office, a dim place lit with more crimson than its reality ever held. It isn’t much longer before it wins out against the grey and busy void, adhering itself to her subconscious enough that Kezza finds herself standing in its altered form; The ceiling warped, too low at her desk and stretched beyond the confines of its tangible twin in a way which mirrored the Magistracy’s halls. Databanks and furniture are likewise discordant, and perhaps curiously, lacking doors. The entry to her private washroom seems the most realistic, though its interior is starker than it ought to be.

Kezza stands in the middle of the scene, dully awakening to the dream. Without lucidity, she starts for her desk, and seats herself in her chair which is too large for her person. Noise, indecipherable, clouds the air, and Kezza feels herself begin to panic under the sudden stress her dream generates.

From the noise, however, comes a rhythmic tapping. Somehow, she finds it overcome the chaos, and it permits her focus enough that a presence is felt. The outer rim of her dream becomes permeable, allowing the interloper to phase into the dream freely.

Peering through the hazy sphere’s surface, there’s little else the Disaggregator can make of the scene within beyond the vaguely feminine form inside. If it weren’t for the whisper of a unknowingly shared memory to draw him in, he might well have passed it by entirely. Thankfully, he hadn’t– And more fortuitously still, the sphere’s occupant took note enough of his harassment that the barrier between void and dream became porous, allowing him to pass.

Not risking a moment to the capricious nature of the dreamscape, Gerik pushed himself beyond the threshold and into darkness. It was then that he realized his mistake. In his haste, the ever keen Disaggregator had failed to think through his manner of entry; a blundering that left him suspended in the air above the room’s center for a moment before the idea of gravity asserted itself and sent him hurtling to the floor with a yelp.

“HWUUAA–OORRMF!”

Already in distress, the cry of a familiar voice spurs a shriek from Kezza, who shrinks back into the chair as though shielding herself from something terrible.

After a few moments of cowering, she pries apart the fingers she’d thrown across her face, and looks ahead at where the vivid sound came from. After another pause, the unaware Kezza swallows, “Who are you? G-Gerik..?”

It took a moment for the Disaggregator to realize that he was being addressed, and longer still for his body to register that it had no cause to be in pain. This was, after all, only a dream. Willing his supposed injuries mended, the asura picks himself up and dusts himself off, paying particular attention to the straightening of his collar before he can find it in himself to respond to the Magistrix,

“Affimative, Kezza, it is I; the great and powerful Disaggregator! I have transcended the barrier between the waking world and the dreaming to.. To, uh..” Gerik felt a stirring in his chest that stayed what would have been a typically grandstanding entrance as he finally looked upon his estranged friend. Perhaps it was a machination of the Magistrix’s fabricated dream world that lent her appearance a hint of unfamiliarity about it. After all, one’s dream self was often the ideal, or most dreaded version of the real self.

But, it had been so long since he’d laid eyes upon her in either setting. The dawning uncertainty brought a tickling wetness to the corner of his eyes that no force of will could banish, and his voice broke earnestly when he spoke again, “I-I’ve missed you so much, Kez.”

The Kezza who regards him from behind the desk is someone different than probably expected. Whether due to the oversized chair or the dream’s own design, she seems smaller, and is dressed in the first uniform he would have ever seen her wear. Her hair also harkens back to years past, where she wore it long without adornments. All that seems missing is a mask, though the hands still tentatively hiding her features might suffice.

Worried skepticism follows his approach, his bold and vivid form in noticeable contrast to the grim surroundings. It’s enough to give her a distraction from the dream’s manufactured anguish, which is forced to abate as her mind finds something new to focus on. Kezza watches him with growing disbelief, eventually shifting her hands enough that he might finally see her face.

“Ge-Gerik.. what are you doing here?”

The environment appears to bolster itself despite the meek and befuddled question– The walls of the office straighten themselves to realistic proportions, finding their symmetry once abandoning the extraneous length which resembled the Magistracy’s halls. While Gerik’s presence solidified the setting, however, it did little for Kezza’s lucidity. The mesmer had yet to realize her own dream-state, let alone the truth of her friend’s presence.

Reclaiming his usual blustering composure was not an easy feat when confronted by what he now saw before him: the Magistrix as she was before there was even a Magistracy. It was certainly a dream, then. He hadn’t seen her hair down and unadorned in ages..

But he knew that there was no time to waste when there was no telling how long the ritual would maintain his link with her dreaming mind. Swiping the collected moisture from the corner of his eyes, Gerik started forward a step, humming.

“I’ve established a link with your dreaming mind, Kezza. You’re asleep. I am too. I needed to contact you.”

“Dreaming..”

The notion shudders the dream world, a likely uncomfortable sensation for the interloper as consciousness challenges the subconscious. Kezza places a palm against her temple, eyes scanning her desk with purpose as the fabricated reality shifts incomprehensively. The glyphs of her datawork were wholly illegible, which warranted another test she learned as a budding synergist. The environment begins to stabilize, with a much less tenuous grasp of its own form.

Taking her hands in front of her, Kezza brings them to manifest an orange flame– something impossible in her reality, where mesmeric ability long since displaced her want for an elementalist’s prowess. The fire closes in on itself, liquefying into a glob of water.

Her expression slowly lifts with the realization, though when she looks up, there is a distinct alteration of her features. Without transition, her hair now passes her shoulders in a dull and ragged state, and the wear of long-term stress is clear across her face. Her uniform, too, is supplanted by a contemporary outfit of asuran dress, lacking any implication of her krewe allegiance.

“Ger..!”

Gerik would have only a moment to process the change, however, as he’d find Kezza’s arms embracing him without having witnessed her approach.

Doubt, however, brings her to lift her head from its place at his chest. “But, how? How do I know you’re not a figment?”

With as much as he’d longed for the Magistrix’s embrace, Gerik found himself woefully unprepared for the suddenness with which her arms enircled him, still not entirely acclimated to the whimsy of dream. Nearly stumbling a step, the Disaggregator recovers quickly against the smaller asura’s weight and brings his arms to match her own, the side of his face nuzzling against her neck almost without bidding.

He never wanted it to end. But it had to.

Feeling her head lift from his person, his eyes flicked down to meet Kezza’s gaze, willing away a wetness that might have been telling were it not so readily disposed of. He huffed,

“I can’t imagine any figment you’d dream up could ever match the magnificence of the genuine article. I mean, really Kez. The gall of the thought!”

Though the snooty imperiousness in his tone was entirely real, it did not come without an undercurrent of good nature. He smirked.

“It was a trying endeavor. I’ve spent a small fortune on scented candles and.. Junk food. Euugh.”

It was that touch of derision in his voice and ready wit, which allowed her face to brighten with an irresistible smile. He was right; The times he’d been replicated by her sleeping mind never presented the nuance of this obnoxious charm– it was either one, or the other.

The way his snout wrinkled with mock outrage was also a dead giveaway.

“Candles and junk food?” She echoes with bewildered skepticism, having never seen him partake of the latter. It was an unusual combination. “Just what did you do?”

With as much effort as he put into playing the part of the snide villain, Gerik’s faux superiority was easily broken by the softness of the Magistrix’s smile. Feeling the corners of his mouth tug into a like expression, the Disaggregator nursed the side of Kezza’s neck with a nuzzle, pulling out of it with a chuckle.

“Nothing I’m proud of.” He admitted, already wary of the consequences when he returned to the waking world. “I made use of some of Vinn’s notes on ethereal somnambulance. The ritual that allowed this meeting neccessitated.. Unsavory reagents. I expect the results of this endeavor will greet me poorly when I wake.”

The attention paid to her neck earns him a happy coo, which remains as a smile even as he explains his less than ideal situation.

Even with allowing a breathable space between them, Kezza doesn’t dare release him fully. She reaches up to nuzzle at his cheek with both sympathy, and longing.

“I’ve missed you, so much.”

The admission is all it takes to swall Gerik’s heart fully, a familiar warmth lending his features a subtle hue beneath the thin fuzz coating his cheeks. Cooing softly, he leans in to lay a light kiss on Kezza’s lips, cradling the smaller asura’s weight in his arms.

With his eyes shut, he sighs his response,

“And I, you.”

Some of the weariness across Kezza’s face seems to evaporate, the dream lightened by their reunion. She nuzzles his other cheek, planting another kiss there.

“I thought I might have lost you,” she whispers, the hands at his back shifting to hold him in a warmer embrace.

Sighing his relief at the long-delayed reuinion, Kezza’s weight is accepted at his shoulder with a thoughtful hum.

“Nothing could take me from you, Kez.” Gerik paid her waist a light squeeze, cracking a grin after a fashion. “Excepting a transdimensional enfolding of a cataclysmic scope. But I’m not sure even that would take.”

A while is spent paying soft nuzzles to his neck, unaware (and likely uncaring) that there could be a greater purpose to this visitation.

His response brings a grin against the soft fuzz she attends to, prompting a short coo before she parts from him again.

“What about the rest of the krewe?”

The attentions at his neck are recieved with another light sigh that turns to a coo, the hands at the Magistrix’s waist sliding up to rest between her shoulders.

Even with the mention of the krewe to attempt at souring his mood, Gerik manages to keep his good nature.

“They’re well enough. Well, save Teokkin.” He hums again, this time with a dubious ring to his tone. “He’s at wit’s end, I believe. I didn’t even have to run interference.”

Teokkin’s mention is finally enough to temper Kezza’s heartened spirit. Still, some bright spark in her eyes holds fast, even as the relief she sighs is undercut by lingering concern.

“How severely has he compromised the Magistracy?”

The worry in his friend’s voice is mirrored in Gerik’s own heart, though he masks it with a brush of the snout at Kezza’s collar, a softened smile lifted to greet her as he pulls away.

“It’s holding together. Funding is tight, but he is unable to make any headway no matter how great the lengths he goes to in curtailing spending.”

Despite the good nature engendered by the closeness he’d longed for, the reminder of the necessity for his visitation steals some of the warmth from his expression. “That is.. Why I’ve been able to contact you with confidence, finally. He wants to return ownership of the Magistracy to you.”

Her newly folded ears rise upright, disbelieving, before they fall flat and stiff with a bitter vindication.

“That datawipe had no idea what he was getting involved with,” her resentment reads through, though it fades almost immediately. “But.. he was right. He was right about, everything.”

With as detestable as the subject matter is, Gerik can’t help but let a smirk worm it’s way onto his features at the familiar tells in the curl of the Magistrix’s ears that spoke her indignation.

“He’s wrong, Kez. He admitted it himself. The Magistracy needs you to head it, and no one else. There’s no other asura who could possibly fill the role. I’m certain.”

Kezza’s gaze cast apart from his, she shakes her head with wilting ears.

“No.. Gerik, I saw it. I saw his audience with Administration,” she speaks the confession with such melancholy, it summons a faint graying haze to the ethereal Magistracy office.

“They had every intention to terminate the department.. and us with it, if Teokkin failed to amend our shortcomings.”

Her admission was not quite so surprising as it was a grim confirmation of the fears Gerik had harbored since the beginning of the whole ordeal. It shouldn’t come as any grand revelation to him that Administration had found cause to liquidate them after so many blunders.

But, those hadn’t been their fault! Not any if his– And certainly not Kezza’s.

Moved by the effect his friend’s shift in demeanor had on the room around them and by the reminder that his time was short, the Disaggregator brought a feather light touch to Kezza’s jaw, guiding her gaze up to meet his own.

“Kezza,” His eyes glimmered an amber more brilliant than they should have, a caring insistence lingering behind them. “Whatever you saw, I fully believe it to be true. But the circumstance has changed. Teokkin needs you. The krewe needs you. And.. I need you. He’s provided the legal documentation that will assure your safety, as well as that of your family unit’s.”

Gerik paused at that, recalling the threat he’d left hanging over the Magistrate’s head. A small victory, if it paid out. “I had leverage to negotiate it. Anything to ensure your safety. Your happiness.”

While the warm glow of his eyes arrest her attention, disbelief risks doubt when all he says sounds too good to be true. The memory was as clear in her mind as the one she’d taken it from; Teokkin had been made to negotiate their preservation, even at his own risk. There was no room for misunderstanding in the exchange, and she hadn’t dared hoped for leniency in the face of their condemnation.

The continued decline of the Magistracy didn’t bode well, either. She and Gerik were as good as dead– as well as Teokkin, if its current state was as Gerik reported. So how could it possibly be that he managed to secure their safety?

Unless, he hadn’t. Unless Teokkin had somehow been that very leverage– a sacrifice, to spare herself and the loyal friend who’d do anything for her.

A slow, vague ripple is felt as guilt quietly seeps into the dreamscape. It carries with it the concept of Teokkin, and betrayal– this time a reversal, however marred by the lingering resentment she still carried for the krewemate. It is unclear whether or not Kezza notes the shift in her dream’s tangible mood, as she seeks more pressing answers with growing uncertainty.

“How can we be certain of the document’s legitimacy? Even if it is authentic, how can we know that Administration won’t invalidate it on my return?”

Unsettled by the metamorphosis the dream around them underwent, Gerik kept himself steady by occupying his attention with the asura in front of him– Though that was perhaps not as effective as he might have hoped, given the clear concern she wore on her features.

He hummed thoughtfully, hoping to assuage her worries,

“I have examined it, cross-referenced with no less than four examples of similar litigation. The document is legitimate. I wouldn’t have agreed to make contact with you if it wasn’t.” The corner of Gerik’s mouth twisted at the thought of a lurking betrayal, uncertain exactly what Teokkin might have in store for the both of them if Kezza returned.

“I believe that if it were his intention to liquidate us, he would have attempted to eliminate me at least once already. His efforts to ‘fix’ the Magistracy have seemed earnest enough. More so than anything else he’s ever done.”

The statement warranted a smirk, even if it was a short-lived one. Tilting his head down with a returned seriousness, the Disaggregator held the gaze between the two of them, voice lowered,

“You belong in Rata Sum, Kez. If working with him to earn our old positions back is the only means to ensure you and your family unit’s safe return, then I believe it is a worthy endeavor.”

Despite his reassurances, Kezza’s reservation is still evident. The mention of liquidation folded her ears with agitated concern, and would have been followed by a reminder of Teokkin’s previous attempt, were it not for the small shift in Gerik’s demeanor.

She allows his reasoning a moment of consideration, gaze leaving his to sift through her doubts. As much as she trusted his litigatory aptitude, there was lacking certainty in how far Administration would go. Every datum of the Magistracy’s databanks had at one point crossed her desk, ensuring even the most sensitive material was paid her scrutiny. If she was indeed no longer worthy of that data, there were only a few ways the Inquest could redact it.

It wasn’t a risk to take lightly, when one had a partner and progeny to think of.

Her ears slacken. Danger aside, was she even worthy of her old position? The charges brought against them in Teokkin’s memory had haunted her over the months. Once the crimes had been brought to light, she could only deny them for so long. The krewe had no cause to give her the benefit of the doubt, any more now as they did then.

After all, she was a deserter now.

“I.. I don’t know, Gerik,” her voice pensive, but not despairing. “Even if Teokkin rescinds, the Administrative council has no rationale for restoring my status.. in any capacity.”

Though the Disaggregator was never one to show weakness in the face of adversity, it was no small effort to conceal the reservations Kezza’s uncertainty engendered in him. Who was he to put her through such duress? To cause such delicate ears to curl with anxiety? Certainly no one good.

Seeking to ease her mind, Gerik’s claws traced a delicate line along the small of her back, lips set in a like comiseration.

“Any endeavor has it’s less desireable potentialities.. But if we don’t take action now, we may never be reinstated. You could be on the run for the rest of your life, and I.. I don’t believe I could handle that, Kezza.”

His frown deepened at the thought of being cut off from her forever; with Srazz gone, he’d have no one left– And Kezza’s family would be in more peril than either of them. It was an eventuality he could not allow to come to pass.

“What if we organized a meeting on neutral ground? Depending on the venue, you might not even need to be physically present.”

Even with wilting ears, the touch at her back is repaid with a kind press at his, a hand set between his shoulders and one at his waist. The sympathetic look she gives him is one of comiseration, held until an ear flicks at his suggestion.

“I concur,” she replies softly, “Somewhere in Kryta, perhaps. Where would you say is safest..?”

The question posed was a good one; where could a meeting be organized that would best minimize the threat to their persons, without being so impersonal as to provide no evidence of Teokkin’s intent? Certainly, meeting in Rata Sum was out of the question. But then, where? Mrot Boru? One of the Brisban facilities?

The touch at his back urged him to coo sweetly, an idle nuzzle paid to her neck before the idea struck him.

“Perhaps.. Something could be worked out with Moto? He does possess the technology to facilitate such a meeting..”

The suggestion takes her aback by some small degree, “Moto? But in that case, I would have to return to Rata Sum..”

Her ears droop again at the impossibility, reminded of her longing for home. The reality of the dream shudders with a ripple of homesickness, and the asura places her worry with a chin at his shoulder.

When she speaks again, it is quiet enough to be almost inaudible, were it not for the mechanics of the dreamstate conveying the meaning through sensation alone.

“I can’t even be certain this is real.”

While the necessity of remaining focused on the task at hand gnawed at the back of his mind, Gerik found himself admittedly lost amid the doubt that trailed the Magistrix’s statement– And in the familiar softness of her eyes, gentle lilac hues arrested his gaze.

Taking the smaller asura’s hand in a palm nicked and bitten by scars, he leaned in almost unconsciously bringing their foreheads to meet.

“Let me assure you then.” He murmured, leaning forward to join his lips to hers.

The touch at her hand was enough to bring her to face him again, a light hue brought to her cheeks as he brought his head against hers. His bid to assuage her doubt is accepted with a readiness that may have surprised her, were it not for the knowledge that this was not their waking reality.

With doubt lurking in the shadows of the dream, Kezza’s arms enclose more firmly around him, willing that figment or not– he stay.

Real or not, Gerik felt a curious kind of elation at the contact that might have been shameful if he had not long ago accepted his feelings for his one-time colleague and long-term friend. Reciprocating her arms movements without a hint of reservation, the larger asura’s arms draw Kezza against him with a sigh between joined lips, eye fluttering shut as the peaking emotions color him in a soft magenta hue.

Before their embrace can engross him fully, Gerik has presence of mind enough to speak between the kiss, hushed and breathy,

“Will you afford me this chance? To make things right?”

Though they still embraced so closely, the scarce distance he affords himself must be compensated for with a nuzzle at his cheek. If this was all indeed a dream, it was the most real she’d ever had.

“It isn’t yours to make right,” she answers in a voice softened by intimacy, “But I trust you, Ger.”

While neither asura may be wholly aware of it, the office around them recedes ever so slightly– as though everything were shrouded in a faint fog, save for them.

With her confirmation staying his worries, Gerik gives an affectionate sigh.

“I’ll dispatch a golem with the details,” He breathed, fighting the inclination to swoon at her touch, “We’ll fix this. I promise.”

It wasn’t much, but it was all he could think to say. For as effectively as their differences encouraged his mind to broaden it’s approach to the world, Kezza’s presence seemed to make higher thought a difficulty for the Disaggregator at times. Thankfully, this particular juncture was anything but inopportune. He let another sigh tumble from his lips as he relaxed into the Magistrix’s embrace.

“I’ll maintain my proximity to Divinity’s Reach,” she assures, a soft nuzzle paid to his jaw, “And I’ll find a disguise.”

A slight jolt crosses the scenery around them at the mention of the city, accompanied by a shift to her inn-room’s likeness and general sense of anxiety. She seems unaware that her ears curl with the change.

Yet regardless, her nuzzle offers a light kiss with it, and she would continue to hold him unless deterred.

“I’ll contact you as soon as the arrangements are made. Just be safe.” He murmurs, returning the nuzzle in kind, a light nip at her ear paid as the scene around them shifts.

Though he notes the change in his periphery, it means little to the Disaggregator when Kezza was present to occupy so much of his attention. Driven by a desire to prolong their continued closeness, Gerik lifts her body up against his own, that he might better pay his attentions at her neck.

Kezza’s Exile - The Dream (RP)

Another long pull from her wine glass, and another sigh following it. It was a routine she’d long since fallen into– were she not so dedicated to regular visits with her family, she could fall harder into such a habit. What else would keep her going, after losing everything? Without Vinn and her precious Pwitt, the once-Magistrix was an asura without purpose. And she knew it.

Kezza gripped the bridge of her snout over the mask– perhaps the last trapping of the glory days which still served her. Alchemy knew her krewe didn’t. And the masks would grant her protection from that very same krewe, provided the assassins they sent were unfamiliar with her old practice. It seemed unlikely, but so far.. so good.

An emptied flagon crashed beside her, thrown against the bar behind the order of the bookah wielding it. The crude and surly thing demanded a refreshed glass, by Kezza’s count, her fifth. How this repulsive cretin could stomach that much swill in so short a time was a curiosity worth research, but the asura only gave the specimen a dull stare. Seemingly incensed by the look, the human growled at her and muttered something incomprehensible.

One of the most regrettable aspects of her exile was the safety protocol she’d assigned herself: Never be alone outside of her hideout. Even if it meant the company of bookah. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but solitude took its toll between risked visits with Vinn and Pwitt.

Acceptance became easier to grasp, but..

It never got less depressing.

At least in Divinity’s Reach, there was wine. A guilty pleasure, she admitted, but one made forgivable with the reminder of its discovery. Pained now as it was, the memory could still warm her where the wine couldn’t. She had been reluctant to indulge her friend’s incessant push for the outing, reminding him of every unpleasantry the city held.

But as always, Gerik had a way of swaying her. The absence of his whimsy made her stay in the city much less amicable, even as she recalled his more obnoxious tendencies. She’d trade every glass of fermented grape to hear just one of his annoying quips.

Kezza brought a hand to her forehead, unable and unwilling to acknowledge the irate female next her. The bottle of wine she’d ingested was nothing to the horrid lead weight in her stomach, a nausea she’d never once shaken in the past months. There was no way to know for certain whether or not the Disaggregator had succeeded his escape, and it was an anxiety that overwhelmed her thoughts when her guard grew weak. Relief only hinted itself in the determined hope that he was as capable as she’d always known him to be.

–

The journey back to her hideaway through the foreign city was mercifully uneventful under the cover of mesmeric subterfuge. Despite the sore arm she’d acquired during the inevitable altercation with the bookah woman, the cause of her fatigue was far less tangible. These days were exhausting in their boredom, and the nights restless with angst.

Yet for once, perhaps by the grace of that bookah’s dirty tricks, Kezza found her makeshift cot an almost welcome sight, and sleep came before it could be questioned.

The Disaggregator was no stranger to ritual. Binding a spirit, for instance, was a process with which he and any other Inquest agent worth their datastacks were intimately familiar. Though the exact methods and preferred location differred from the habits of the pedestrian lab jockey or floundering bookah, the curvature of the binding lines and the crumbled reagents, the powdered bone and muttered incantations were all the same. It was a similar experience to any other ritual of a like magic.

This, though. This was different. Certainly, the chalk lines had been drawn up and the candles had been lit; surely, he’d canted the sacred words, written in times long passed into antiquity as proscribed by the simian gods– But it was different. This time, there had been no bundled sticks to burn, or dried rat bones to break over consecrated water.

This time, there had only been an overwhelming consumption of junk food. As much as he disdained the stuff, he’d eaten the first bag of grub chips quickly enough. By the fifth container of Planthopper Pasties, however, the Disaggregator was beginning to feel the strain. By the tenth, he was unconscious, face down in a circle of chalk.

When he entered the dream world, it took a moment for the asura to reacquaint himself with his own consciousness– Or subconsciousness. He couldn’t be certain which was which. Everything around him was smoke and sunlight, the moon wreathed in dust, a rippling veil of ephemeral mist. If he had the time, he might spend a while grappling with the nature of his newfound lucidity. As it was, the task at hand demanded too much focus, lending his form a hard edge in the soft, blooming murk of dreamlight.

Impelling himself forward, it was a long, sometimes harrowing while before he touched on a dream sphere that might read as anything resembling familiar, but when he did, the sensation was unmistakable. Careening around the edge of the crystalline orb, Gerik allowed a dragged claw to maintain contact and prevent him from losing hold as he peered within from without.

What he saw skipped his heart a beat. There, mere meters beneath him, was the Magistrix– Long-sought and wrapped in the fitful turnings of an anxious sleep. He began to tap at the surface.

The ragged asura tosses and turns under the coat she’s reassigned as a blanket. Her limp ears flick now and then, until her subconscious detects something which rouses them.

While not dreamless, the restless sleep is occupied by a general malaise, manifested in her mind as a dark and chaotic haze. Images of familiar places– her office, her domicile, the Magistracy lobby– form and fade before any of them can stick. The most stable of environments is her office, a dim place lit with more crimson than its reality ever held. It isn’t much longer before it wins out against the grey and busy void, adhering itself to her subconscious enough that Kezza finds herself standing in its altered form; The ceiling warped, too low at her desk and stretched beyond the confines of its tangible twin in a way which mirrored the Magistracy’s halls. Databanks and furniture are likewise discordant, and perhaps curiously, lacking doors. The entry to her private washroom seems the most realistic, though its interior is starker than it ought to be.

Kezza stands in the middle of the scene, dully awakening to the dream. Without lucidity, she starts for her desk, and seats herself in her chair which is too large for her person. Noise, indecipherable, clouds the air, and Kezza feels herself begin to panic under the sudden stress her dream generates.

From the noise, however, comes a rhythmic tapping. Somehow, she finds it overcome the chaos, and it permits her focus enough that a presence is felt. The outer rim of her dream becomes permeable, allowing the interloper to phase into the dream freely.

Peering through the hazy sphere’s surface, there’s little else the Disaggregator can make of the scene within beyond the vaguely feminine form inside. If it weren’t for the whisper of a unknowingly shared memory to draw him in, he might well have passed it by entirely. Thankfully, he hadn’t– And more fortuitously still, the sphere’s occupant took note enough of his harassment that the barrier between void and dream became porous, allowing him to pass.

Not risking a moment to the capricious nature of the dreamscape, Gerik pushed himself beyond the threshold and into darkness. It was then that he realized his mistake. In his haste, the ever keen Disaggregator had failed to think through his manner of entry; a blundering that left him suspended in the air above the room’s center for a moment before the idea of gravity asserted itself and sent him hurtling to the floor with a yelp.

“HWUUAA–OORRMF!”

Already in distress, the cry of a familiar voice spurs a shriek from Kezza, who shrinks back into the chair as though shielding herself from something terrible.

After a few moments of cowering, she pries apart the fingers she’d thrown across her face, and looks ahead at where the vivid sound came from. After another pause, the unaware Kezza swallows, “Who are you? G-Gerik..?”

It took a moment for the Disaggregator to realize that he was being addressed, and longer still for his body to register that it had no cause to be in pain. This was, after all, only a dream. Willing his supposed injuries mended, the asura picks himself up and dusts himself off, paying particular attention to the straightening of his collar before he can find it in himself to respond to the Magistrix,

“Affimative, Kezza, it is I; the great and powerful Disaggregator! I have transcended the barrier between the waking world and the dreaming to.. To, uh..” Gerik felt a stirring in his chest that stayed what would have been a typically grandstanding entrance as he finally looked upon his estranged friend. Perhaps it was a machination of the Magistrix’s fabricated dream world that lent her appearance a hint of unfamiliarity about it. After all, one’s dream self was often the ideal, or most dreaded version of the real self.

But, it had been so long since he’d laid eyes upon her in either setting. The dawning uncertainty brought a tickling wetness to the corner of his eyes that no force of will could banish, and his voice broke earnestly when he spoke again, “I-I’ve missed you so much, Kez.”

The Kezza who regards him from behind the desk is someone different than probably expected. Whether due to the oversized chair or the dream’s own design, she seems smaller, and is dressed in the first uniform he would have ever seen her wear. Her hair also harkens back to years past, where she wore it long without adornments. All that seems missing is a mask, though the hands still tentatively hiding her features might suffice.

Worried skepticism follows his approach, his bold and vivid form in noticeable contrast to the grim surroundings. It’s enough to give her a distraction from the dream’s manufactured anguish, which is forced to abate as her mind finds something new to focus on. Kezza watches him with growing disbelief, eventually shifting her hands enough that he might finally see her face.

“Ge-Gerik.. what are you doing here?”

The environment appears to bolster itself despite the meek and befuddled question– The walls of the office straighten themselves to realistic proportions, finding their symmetry once abandoning the extraneous length which resembled the Magistracy’s halls. While Gerik’s presence solidified the setting, however, it did little for Kezza’s lucidity. The mesmer had yet to realize her own dream-state, let alone the truth of her friend’s presence.

Reclaiming his usual blustering composure was not an easy feat when confronted by what he now saw before him: the Magistrix as she was before there was even a Magistracy. It was certainly a dream, then. He hadn’t seen her hair down and unadorned in ages..

But he knew that there was no time to waste when there was no telling how long the ritual would maintain his link with her dreaming mind. Swiping the collected moisture from the corner of his eyes, Gerik started forward a step, humming.

“I’ve established a link with your dreaming mind, Kezza. You’re asleep. I am too. I needed to contact you.”

“Dreaming..”

The notion shudders the dream world, a likely uncomfortable sensation for the interloper as consciousness challenges the subconscious. Kezza places a palm against her temple, eyes scanning her desk with purpose as the fabricated reality shifts incomprehensively. The glyphs of her datawork were wholly illegible, which warranted another test she learned as a budding synergist. The environment begins to stabilize, with a much less tenuous grasp of its own form.

Taking her hands in front of her, Kezza brings them to manifest an orange flame– something impossible in her reality, where mesmeric ability long since displaced her want for an elementalist’s prowess. The fire closes in on itself, liquefying into a glob of water.

Her expression slowly lifts with the realization, though when she looks up, there is a distinct alteration of her features. Without transition, her hair now passes her shoulders in a dull and ragged state, and the wear of long-term stress is clear across her face. Her uniform, too, is supplanted by a contemporary outfit of asuran dress, lacking any implication of her krewe allegiance.

“Ger..!”

Gerik would have only a moment to process the change, however, as he’d find Kezza’s arms embracing him without having witnessed her approach.

Doubt, however, brings her to lift her head from its place at his chest. “But, how? How do I know you’re not a figment?”

With as much as he’d longed for the Magistrix’s embrace, Gerik found himself woefully unprepared for the suddenness with which her arms enircled him, still not entirely acclimated to the whimsy of dream. Nearly stumbling a step, the Disaggregator recovers quickly against the smaller asura’s weight and brings his arms to match her own, the side of his face nuzzling against her neck almost without bidding.

He never wanted it to end. But it had to.

Feeling her head lift from his person, his eyes flicked down to meet Kezza’s gaze, willing away a wetness that might have been telling were it not so readily disposed of. He huffed,

“I can’t imagine any figment you’d dream up could ever match the magnificence of the genuine article. I mean, really Kez. The gall of the thought!”

Though the snooty imperiousness in his tone was entirely real, it did not come without an undercurrent of good nature. He smirked.

“It was a trying endeavor. I’ve spent a small fortune on scented candles and.. Junk food. Euugh.”

It was that touch of derision in his voice and ready wit, which allowed her face to brighten with an irresistible smile. He was right; The times he’d been replicated by her sleeping mind never presented the nuance of this obnoxious charm– it was either one, or the other.

The way his snout wrinkled with mock outrage was also a dead giveaway.

“Candles and junk food?” She echoes with bewildered skepticism, having never seen him partake of the latter. It was an unusual combination. “Just what did you do?”

With as much effort as he put into playing the part of the snide villain, Gerik’s faux superiority was easily broken by the softness of the Magistrix’s smile. Feeling the corners of his mouth tug into a like expression, the Disaggregator nursed the side of Kezza’s neck with a nuzzle, pulling out of it with a chuckle.

“Nothing I’m proud of.” He admitted, already wary of the consequences when he returned to the waking world. “I made use of some of Vinn’s notes on ethereal somnambulance. The ritual that allowed this meeting neccessitated.. Unsavory reagents. I expect the results of this endeavor will greet me poorly when I wake.”

The attention paid to her neck earns him a happy coo, which remains as a smile even as he explains his less than ideal situation.

Even with allowing a breathable space between them, Kezza doesn’t dare release him fully. She reaches up to nuzzle at his cheek with both sympathy, and longing.

“I’ve missed you, so much.”

The admission is all it takes to swall Gerik’s heart fully, a familiar warmth lending his features a subtle hue beneath the thin fuzz coating his cheeks. Cooing softly, he leans in to lay a light kiss on Kezza’s lips, cradling the smaller asura’s weight in his arms.

With his eyes shut, he sighs his response,

“And I, you.”

Some of the weariness across Kezza’s face seems to evaporate, the dream lightened by their reunion. She nuzzles his other cheek, planting another kiss there.

“I thought I might have lost you,” she whispers, the hands at his back shifting to hold him in a warmer embrace.

Sighing his relief at the long-delayed reuinion, Kezza’s weight is accepted at his shoulder with a thoughtful hum.

“Nothing could take me from you, Kez.” Gerik paid her waist a light squeeze, cracking a grin after a fashion. “Excepting a transdimensional enfolding of a cataclysmic scope. But I’m not sure even that would take.”

A while is spent paying soft nuzzles to his neck, unaware (and likely uncaring) that there could be a greater purpose to this visitation.

His response brings a grin against the soft fuzz she attends to, prompting a short coo before she parts from him again.

“What about the rest of the krewe?”

The attentions at his neck are recieved with another light sigh that turns to a coo, the hands at the Magistrix’s waist sliding up to rest between her shoulders.

Even with the mention of the krewe to attempt at souring his mood, Gerik manages to keep his good nature.

“They’re well enough. Well, save Teokkin.” He hums again, this time with a dubious ring to his tone. “He’s at wit’s end, I believe. I didn’t even have to run interference.”

Teokkin’s mention is finally enough to temper Kezza’s heartened spirit. Still, some bright spark in her eyes holds fast, even as the relief she sighs is undercut by lingering concern.

“How severely has he compromised the Magistracy?”

The worry in his friend’s voice is mirrored in Gerik’s own heart, though he masks it with a brush of the snout at Kezza’s collar, a softened smile lifted to greet her as he pulls away.

“It’s holding together. Funding is tight, but he is unable to make any headway no matter how great the lengths he goes to in curtailing spending.”

Despite the good nature engendered by the closeness he’d longed for, the reminder of the necessity for his visitation steals some of the warmth from his expression. “That is.. Why I’ve been able to contact you with confidence, finally. He wants to return ownership of the Magistracy to you.”

Her newly folded ears rise upright, disbelieving, before they fall flat and stiff with a bitter vindication.

“That datawipe had no idea what he was getting involved with,” her resentment reads through, though it fades almost immediately. “But.. he was right. He was right about, everything.”

With as detestable as the subject matter is, Gerik can’t help but let a smirk worm it’s way onto his features at the familiar tells in the curl of the Magistrix’s ears that spoke her indignation.

“He’s wrong, Kez. He admitted it himself. The Magistracy needs you to head it, and no one else. There’s no other asura who could possibly fill the role. I’m certain.”

Kezza’s gaze cast apart from his, she shakes her head with wilting ears.

“No.. Gerik, I saw it. I saw his audience with Administration,” she speaks the confession with such melancholy, it summons a faint graying haze to the ethereal Magistracy office.

“They had every intention to terminate the department.. and us with it, if Teokkin failed to amend our shortcomings.”

Her admission was not quite so surprising as it was a grim confirmation of the fears Gerik had harbored since the beginning of the whole ordeal. It shouldn’t come as any grand revelation to him that Administration had found cause to liquidate them after so many blunders.

But, those hadn’t been their fault! Not any if his– And certainly not Kezza’s.

Moved by the effect his friend’s shift in demeanor had on the room around them and by the reminder that his time was short, the Disaggregator brought a feather light touch to Kezza’s jaw, guiding her gaze up to meet his own.

“Kezza,” His eyes glimmered an amber more brilliant than they should have, a caring insistence lingering behind them. “Whatever you saw, I fully believe it to be true. But the circumstance has changed. Teokkin needs you. The krewe needs you. And.. I need you. He’s provided the legal documentation that will assure your safety, as well as that of your family unit’s.”

Gerik paused at that, recalling the threat he’d left hanging over the Magistrate’s head. A small victory, if it paid out. “I had leverage to negotiate it. Anything to ensure your safety. Your happiness.”

While the warm glow of his eyes arrest her attention, disbelief risks doubt when all he says sounds too good to be true. The memory was as clear in her mind as the one she’d taken it from; Teokkin had been made to negotiate their preservation, even at his own risk. There was no room for misunderstanding in the exchange, and she hadn’t dared hoped for leniency in the face of their condemnation.

The continued decline of the Magistracy didn’t bode well, either. She and Gerik were as good as dead– as well as Teokkin, if its current state was as Gerik reported. So how could it possibly be that he managed to secure their safety?

Unless, he hadn’t. Unless Teokkin had somehow been that very leverage– a sacrifice, to spare herself and the loyal friend who’d do anything for her.

A slow, vague ripple is felt as guilt quietly seeps into the dreamscape. It carries with it the concept of Teokkin, and betrayal– this time a reversal, however marred by the lingering resentment she still carried for the krewemate. It is unclear whether or not Kezza notes the shift in her dream’s tangible mood, as she seeks more pressing answers with growing uncertainty.

“How can we be certain of the document’s legitimacy? Even if it is authentic, how can we know that Administration won’t invalidate it on my return?”

Unsettled by the metamorphosis the dream around them underwent, Gerik kept himself steady by occupying his attention with the asura in front of him– Though that was perhaps not as effective as he might have hoped, given the clear concern she wore on her features.

He hummed thoughtfully, hoping to assuage her worries,

“I have examined it, cross-referenced with no less than four examples of similar litigation. The document is legitimate. I wouldn’t have agreed to make contact with you if it wasn’t.” The corner of Gerik’s mouth twisted at the thought of a lurking betrayal, uncertain exactly what Teokkin might have in store for the both of them if Kezza returned.

“I believe that if it were his intention to liquidate us, he would have attempted to eliminate me at least once already. His efforts to ‘fix’ the Magistracy have seemed earnest enough. More so than anything else he’s ever done.”

The statement warranted a smirk, even if it was a short-lived one. Tilting his head down with a returned seriousness, the Disaggregator held the gaze between the two of them, voice lowered,

“You belong in Rata Sum, Kez. If working with him to earn our old positions back is the only means to ensure you and your family unit’s safe return, then I believe it is a worthy endeavor.”

Despite his reassurances, Kezza’s reservation is still evident. The mention of liquidation folded her ears with agitated concern, and would have been followed by a reminder of Teokkin’s previous attempt, were it not for the small shift in Gerik’s demeanor.

She allows his reasoning a moment of consideration, gaze leaving his to sift through her doubts. As much as she trusted his litigatory aptitude, there was lacking certainty in how far Administration would go. Every datum of the Magistracy’s databanks had at one point crossed her desk, ensuring even the most sensitive material was paid her scrutiny. If she was indeed no longer worthy of that data, there were only a few ways the Inquest could redact it.

It wasn’t a risk to take lightly, when one had a partner and progeny to think of.

Her ears slacken. Danger aside, was she even worthy of her old position? The charges brought against them in Teokkin’s memory had haunted her over the months. Once the crimes had been brought to light, she could only deny them for so long. The krewe had no cause to give her the benefit of the doubt, any more now as they did then.

After all, she was a deserter now.

“I.. I don’t know, Gerik,” her voice pensive, but not despairing. “Even if Teokkin rescinds, the Administrative council has no rationale for restoring my status.. in any capacity.”

Though the Disaggregator was never one to show weakness in the face of adversity, it was no small effort to conceal the reservations Kezza’s uncertainty engendered in him. Who was he to put her through such duress? To cause such delicate ears to curl with anxiety? Certainly no one good.

Seeking to ease her mind, Gerik’s claws traced a delicate line along the small of her back, lips set in a like comiseration.

“Any endeavor has it’s less desireable potentialities.. But if we don’t take action now, we may never be reinstated. You could be on the run for the rest of your life, and I.. I don’t believe I could handle that, Kezza.”

His frown deepened at the thought of being cut off from her forever; with Srazz gone, he’d have no one left– And Kezza’s family would be in more peril than either of them. It was an eventuality he could not allow to come to pass.

“What if we organized a meeting on neutral ground? Depending on the venue, you might not even need to be physically present.”

Even with wilting ears, the touch at her back is repaid with a kind press at his, a hand set between his shoulders and one at his waist. The sympathetic look she gives him is one of comiseration, held until an ear flicks at his suggestion.

“I concur,” she replies softly, “Somewhere in Kryta, perhaps. Where would you say is safest..?”

The question posed was a good one; where could a meeting be organized that would best minimize the threat to their persons, without being so impersonal as to provide no evidence of Teokkin’s intent? Certainly, meeting in Rata Sum was out of the question. But then, where? Mrot Boru? One of the Brisban facilities?

The touch at his back urged him to coo sweetly, an idle nuzzle paid to her neck before the idea struck him.

“Perhaps.. Something could be worked out with Moto? He does possess the technology to facilitate such a meeting..”

The suggestion takes her aback by some small degree, “Moto? But in that case, I would have to return to Rata Sum..”

Her ears droop again at the impossibility, reminded of her longing for home. The reality of the dream shudders with a ripple of homesickness, and the asura places her worry with a chin at his shoulder.

When she speaks again, it is quiet enough to be almost inaudible, were it not for the mechanics of the dreamstate conveying the meaning through sensation alone.

“I can’t even be certain this is real.”

While the necessity of remaining focused on the task at hand gnawed at the back of his mind, Gerik found himself admittedly lost amid the doubt that trailed the Magistrix’s statement– And in the familiar softness of her eyes, gentle lilac hues arrested his gaze.

Taking the smaller asura’s hand in a palm nicked and bitten by scars, he leaned in almost unconsciously bringing their foreheads to meet.

“Let me assure you then.” He murmured, leaning forward to join his lips to hers.

The touch at her hand was enough to bring her to face him again, a light hue brought to her cheeks as he brought his head against hers. His bid to assuage her doubt is accepted with a readiness that may have surprised her, were it not for the knowledge that this was not their waking reality.

With doubt lurking in the shadows of the dream, Kezza’s arms enclose more firmly around him, willing that figment or not– he stay.

Real or not, Gerik felt a curious kind of elation at the contact that might have been shameful if he had not long ago accepted his feelings for his one-time colleague and long-term friend. Reciprocating her arms movements without a hint of reservation, the larger asura’s arms draw Kezza against him with a sigh between joined lips, eye fluttering shut as the peaking emotions color him in a soft magenta hue.

Before their embrace can engross him fully, Gerik has presence of mind enough to speak between the kiss, hushed and breathy,

“Will you afford me this chance? To make things right?”

Though they still embraced so closely, the scarce distance he affords himself must be compensated for with a nuzzle at his cheek. If this was all indeed a dream, it was the most real she’d ever had.

“It isn’t yours to make right,” she answers in a voice softened by intimacy, “But I trust you, Ger.”

While neither asura may be wholly aware of it, the office around them recedes ever so slightly– as though everything were shrouded in a faint fog, save for them.

With her confirmation staying his worries, Gerik gives an affectionate sigh.

"I'll dispatch a golem with the details," He breathed, fighting the inclination to swoon at her touch, "We'll fix this. I promise."

It wasn't much, but it was all he could think to say. For as effectively as their differences encouraged his mind to broaden it's approach to the world, Kezza's presence seemed to make higher thought a difficulty for the Disaggregator at times. Thankfully, this particular juncture was anything but inopportune. He let another sigh tumble from his lips as he relaxed into the Magistrix's embrace.

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