liminal
@houseofreglay
Fingers gripped the weathered remains of the notebook in his hands, the covers long worn off and pages wrinkled and blanched white where salt water had seeped into the fibres of the pages. Pent had unearthed it from the black box (the key and the bottle rattled around the bottom of it, mockingly) in his office after Cynthia’s abrupt visit.
(He should have known there was some excitement to be had when she burst in flailing through his window, flapping a flyer so close to his face that he couldn’t make out the words. Pent half expected to have to chase away some peddler of elicit goods until she mentioned ‘a pale stranger with white hair’ but then ‘also not super unique because your hair is white and I was thinking maybe he’s elderly and—’ His stomach dropped out from under him as he cut her off.)
But he stood there then. Months of… suspicion and frustrating dead-ends, all to lead up to standing there in the back of the marketplace, clutching the tattered pages and folded flyer tucked in between them so hard that the pallor of his knuckles matched what little of the stranger’s complexion he could see.
“Ae—” Static. The fog in his head verged on painful, threatening, and Pent grimaced, but took a step forward anyway towards him.
“—I heard someone would be here.” The fog relented. He offered the notebook to the stranger, flipped open to the page marked by the flyer. On the opposite page, there were smudged scribbles in soft graphite, too blurred to read now… And also a very rough sketch of what appeared to be a dragon. “You posted this, I presume?”
The surface was just as terrifying now as it had been when it was an unreachable world beyond fortress gates. The shadowed corner at the far end of the marketplace, between abandoned buildings and old stalls untouched for moons, was still near enough to the heart of the place that the chatter from it was a quiet drone, and the sun still made its presence known through shade and layers of dark robes. The alleyway he had chosen lent him its shelter without its solace, and Aeschylus stood at the back of it like a rabbit poised to run. His eyes remained fixed on the sunlit opening as they had been for what felt like hours now. But the only predators were what imaginary ones his mind made from the wavering shadows.
The shadows lengthened, and the slants of shade at the entrance tilted nearly all the way to one side before footsteps sounded over the lull in distant conversation. Then a man stopped in full view.
Every muscle in his body felt ready to snap, but Aeschylus was rooted to the spot by fear and duty both.
“You have seen my call for assistance,” he answered the man with a calmness that surprised even himself. His eyes fell to the drawing beside the presented flyer. His lips parted slightly, but the speech he had prepared for whatever surface dweller answered his bulletin withered away in silence.
He shook his head abruptly.
“You have my gratitude. The task is not without its dangers, however--” He explained the metal creature that lurked near the cave where the stones would be mined, and the compensation that would be awarded as per the Church’s agreement. With his speech finished, his gaze landed once more on the drawing. Hesitantly, he placed a gloved hand over it.
“... May I have this?”