#vein; thread

[velhaeil]

through the looking glass – the evening on the second day, @velhansol

that yang hansol (a son, a nephew, a brother—& a particular twin, at that—) had to be the one to claim the spot next to haeil for this heart-wrenching endeavor had to be the most unfortunate stroke of their combined luck. haeil’s hadn’t been the best to begin with; and as he’s staring up at the looming structure of what he knows now to be the glassmire conservatory, he develops the distinct feeling that he shouldn’t place any bets in the near future, even if he trusted in such a thing as coincidence and providence.

it’s fascinating if he allows it to be. haeil had really only listened to that hasty afternoon meeting halfway— had barely even registered when the weight of a gas lamp and an additional pair of gloves had been all but shoved right into his arms before he’d been led beyond the yellow tape cordoning off their latest fiasco. vaguely, he’s aware that he had thrown a hand up for it; the volunteering, the extra eyes to turn that blasted place apart, thinking about the young girl with curious eyes. he hadn’t planned past the wondering though.

it seems plausible to haeil that the bowels of this place could drown him. it smells damp. the air’s pungent with dust and years upon years of disuse. now haeil has to think on how it is easy to be brave in theory. it’s even easier to delegate the task to another set of open hands. rarely has been the moment where he has chosen the smoothest way out.

so haeil swallows the amalgamation of frustration and worry and ineluctable fear wedged in his throat; and gently grasps at hansol’s right arm the second the doors closed behind him just as they’re engulfed within the inconceivably eerie dusk of the conservatory.

“stay close.” he says through his teeth, as kindly and as severely as he could muster as he willed his eyes to adjust to the burgeoning dark. “if you’re spooked by something, don’t run off. just flash the light towards it and we’ll take a step back."

[velhaeil]

substantiation; waking with a head overgrown as the forest, and using that blank world to reinvent oneself

downtown: @velxgraves, red fox tavern, "make a snake bite its tail". triggers: tba

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if the center of the current world is settled in velgrove, then first to the east, then southwards then to east once more is the eastern metropolis of londai. the slumberless londai impresses its might from any given angle except from the top of the mountain range—an account of which haeil hasn’t had the pleasure to get his hands on yet. anyone knows of anyone that has braved that beastly chasm of the earth? not him. so, by lack of witnesses and stories on paper, barring west, the façade of the city proper is impressive only from the north, the east, and the south. in londai, nestled somewhat off-center of the heart of its wheel-spoke roads, there stands the most imposing cathedral haeil had ever laid eyes on. and if memory serves him true, somewhere along the eastern entrance of the city stands the state university and its corollaries, the residence halls, and its bustling library.

time passes. cogs shift. it’s been four years since haeil last set foot in that vibrant city, and more than a decade since he staggered head-first into his first disenchantment with his craft within those stately walls. he could still remember how stale the air had been, when refuge was a seat in a dark corner of that library instead of the bench near a birch tree; when whittling down the endless hours meant keeping himself hunched over his personal copy of the cathedral’s blueprints, ensnared in a dream and a thought. interrupted by strange, idle conversation, from a face he hadn’t known.

yesterday, haeil had taken a seat at his desk and had brought the phone—a weathered candlestick model left behind by the cabin’s previous tenant that he actually really likes— to rest exactly seven centimeters to his right because he writes quicker with the left, in order to tackle his laundry list of “little things to lose time on”. he had made three calls: to the general store to inquire about the availability of vellum paper and the timeframe for acquisition; to the library, to let them know that he did not, in fact, launch the latest copy of some dodgy romance novel into santhe’s very safe waters after the protagonist died at the end, and that he’ll return it the day after tomorrow; and to one red fox tavern (“grave hands?”, chimed the confused operator right back. “no,” haeil had patiently said, “red fox tavern. but yes, that’s the one.”) to inform its keeper that he would be there by ten thirty in the morning, at the latest.

it wasn’t a lie. haeil was there, armed with a few accruements of his craft (knife in one pocket, pencil in the other), knocking at the door of the tavern at ten twenty three, morning-time, after he had analyzed the property in the two times he had allowed himself to circle it. he plasters on an easy and polite smile that’s a thousand times overused, another tool of the trade, and the slightest edges of it crack when an unknown suddenly becomes known; when a sense of déjà vu gut-punches him suddenly and he has to stand for an abrupt second after that door opens, recollecting pieces of—something. maybe of pattern recognition; and just as quickly letting the mental intrusion trickle away with no consequence.

recomposure comes swiftly, the slight a wisp of marsh gas now, and haeil extends a hand and reintroduces himself. he says, “graves. good to see you. do you have an attic, by any chance?”, he doesn’t say: show me the place where the light flickers first; nor does he spit out a say, now that i’m actually looking at you, have we met before? but he gazes somewhere past the man with the unknown but known face, well-mannered as ever, but reluctant to put the recognition to the test. he continues, “i also have some terrible but not-so-terrible news. ask me about it after you grant me a look inside.”

[velhaeil]

force of habit

@velseungjo, triggers: mentions of blood, wounds, hospitals, more tba

“i know what you’re going to say,” he blurts it out as a preface to the conversation with his shoulders cinched up taut as if pulled by strings, hands raised in front of his chest in mock protection; he’s looking quite satisfied with himself for it, despite his attempt to feign some embarrassment. “i did try to protect them better this time, but gloves tend to catch and tear on uneven grain, so i took them off for just a moment—and,” he does sound a tad sorry, at least.

so what if he’s darkening seungjo’s doorstep for the fourth time in the last two weeks? that’s not a crime, and neither was reopening the same angry blister over and over until the skin of his right palm was entirely rage-red in its furious attempt to stop him from resuming his work. besides that, paying anyone in velgrove a visit, however frequent that may be, does not hurt a single soul, even if a hurt is precisely the reason one would visit baek seungjo in the first place. he’ll set aside the matter of that detail. he has no other choice regardless— it is either go to her, the expert in the matter, or to deal with it himself. see where that has gotten him; gloveless, and careless, and possibly two tears away from inviting infection just for the thrill of it.

but it’s good to see her. it truly is. to say he had been surprised to find her reestablished into velgrove that first time had been a rather severe understatement. it was… more than simple astonishment, more than just a shade of lacking wit on his end. it was the faint smell of antiseptics, an overly crowded room and pieces of a night he only halfway remembers right up until the adrenaline and the opioids wore off.

how long had it been? four years? perhaps a smidge less. yet in collocation to the vast majority of faces that find themselves lodged within his mind’s library, the memory of her—her, specifically, with the disarray of londai within white walls and unfortunate curtains between beds and aches—is so starkly glass-like to him. the slightly younger version of her is a mirror polished well until he couldn’t tell where the edges ended of that emergency room ended and reality began; her, backdropped by bothersome blast of artificial light. he remembers the unbelievable amount of pain, too, and seeing her had rankled up a ghost of the sensation all across his chest, over all the scars that have long since toughened up and silvered over. he’s ashamed to admit that he had frankly avoided her for the week—until he needed to concede that it was a terrible idea to do such a thing.

the running never seems to work. fate has a funny way with toying with them. as bungling as the metaphor may sound, the chain is only as tough as its weakest link. the running never works, so haeil gives it up. and because it was the fourth time he’s asking for her help, he ultimately has to find out, “do you remember where you were, around four years ago?”

[velhaeil]

"i need help."

all right, so perhaps haeil hadn’t meant to loiter about so severely around the vicinity of the lake again. it was just so… ineluctably interesting to him these days, from a superfluous kind of curiosity stand-point. of course it had nothing to do with the fact that he was warmer whenever he stood, or sat, or walked the edge of the lake. of course it had nothing to do with the freakish chain of nightmares that accompanied this ungodly mess on their town.

of course it also had nothing to do with mystifying way he could see the mirror-image of the sun, as clear as itself; buoyant. brilliant—and currently painfully unreachable, as it continues to leisure in its break from its pedestal on the sky. pity.

it had to have been about two in the afternoon—or somewhere within that timeframe. he’s not very certain. his circadian rhythm is all but a moot, useless bit of biological phenomena at this point, and he won’t be trying to correct it any time soon for as long as the sun kept at its hiding place and sky continued its depressing lethargy. haeil watches, wastes an indeterminate amount of his day just watching, and that sometimes tends to sort of… place him in new contexts.

so after an indeterminate amount of time wasted for an undetermined purpose, he hears her voice—baek seungjo’s—to his right and, at failing to conceive a fair estimate to her needs so that he could reassure her, he turns to her with a pinched expression. a parody of light grimly frames the soft lines of her jaw. he momentarily feels like he should offer his condolences. again, pity, it’s been rather dark for a few days.

“okay”, the first step to recovery is admitting that there’s a problem. this possibly implies that things might be worse— although “worse” is a terribly subjective concept that very few tend to disagree with. but it might be genuinely worse, or—

he’s getting ahead of himself. the second step is a task, a distraction, and he wordlessly gives her his lamp to hold, “tell me all about it. we’ll see what we can do.”

[velhaeil]

"did you hear that?"

something quiet and severe stalks the shadows; do you lock the door or let it in?

haeil waits, silently willing eudora to perhaps offer up a few more details to minimize the parameters of that query. he’s imagining that she’ll refer to the shuffling of leaves next to natural embankment of the still-glowing lake, or to the distant footfalls of various others stalking away further from this place, towards their proper homes, or to renew a patrol trail— something, anything, that he could try to stick an obvious affirmative on. truth is haeil is not certain that he can reliably confer with his own senses to confirm or deny whatever it is that could’ve caused a loud-enough sound that eudora would’ve picked up on.

having woken up to the same dim room in his cabin, to the same grayscale nightmare that’s laying siege on their small town, with a relentlessly bizarre sequence of dreams chasing away the fraying ends of unconsciousness . . .

well, it convinced haeil that he needs to be ever so preoccupied keeping his hands and his mind distracted with just about any frivolous chore available. thence their current task: to walk back to his shop to fetch an additional bundle of kindle for the library’s temporary residents, and for her to return to her cabin to recover something important.

haeil does not let distraction take over this time, jittery reality be damned. eudora has every wispy line of his attention now and he sidles closer to her until he’s a respectable distance from her; close enough to keep a low pitch on their conversation—all the better to listen, and to keep those supposed ears in the dark out of it. “i’m not sure if i heard the same as you. but we can turn back, or find some cover indoors nearby, and wait it out until we know what it is. unless…” less appealing to logic and coasting more towards unreasonable, he slams the door shut to overt caution, suggests “. . .it’s something you want to investigate?”

[velhaeil]

sun-gravel & evergreen; the colors of mandarin ducks

downtown: @lyravel, azura's apothecary, "a forest in her wardrobe", triggers: n/a

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"eugh”, haeil says, to the air and out of habit, once again hoisting the day’s kindle pickings and resuming his trek towards the south of the town center. he had to stop midway to adjust the bandages around his left hand, when a sliver of it had snagged angrily on a torn portion the rope and had left him with slightly less material to rework over his knuckles with. a small setback. he’ll consider on using gloves next time.

to the south was the downtown, was it? perhaps minus the The. just plain Downtown. he really ought to pay better attention to that, since he’s dead-set on settling himself firmly within the good graces of the denizens of velgrove; and if he’s planning on surviving yet another terrible velgrovian winter with their assistance, he should know the names of the shops, know the people who are inside of said shops, and learn the exact geoposition of each and every one. there are numerous but equally important reasons to keep that information at hand. the first to crop up will be so that he could find the shops if he’s within the realm of the highly unlikely scenario of having his vision completely shot. abrupt blindness notwithstanding, if not for that, then maybe just for sticking his toothpick into the bubble of wanderlust every now and then.

like every other day, when the soles of his boots hit the steadily familiar pavement, haeil finds that he thinks about his two eldest siblings more often whenever he heads to the downtown—pardon, Downtown, and the thought stops there—of the city-center. the call to memory strikes wherever there’s a neat agglomeration of shops not unlike in size and coordination than the ones in velgrove, so he thinks that he can imagine them teetering, chittering at either side of him, pushing and pulling this way and that; to look at that and this; pointing, and locating, and teaching the youngest to do the same; and they all end up pleading for haeil to pick up his pace.

but because he’s rarely in a hurry, his pace remains the ever slow-going one. it’s a trick on energy preservation that he picked up precisely during those endless walks with the oldest myungs, usually with his arms a touch too full. . . well, it wasn’t terribly difficult, but it’s the principle of the matter. haeil also opines very firmly that it’s better for memorization, if only one can look at the details of the buildings, and the names, for more than a minute—

thus more than a minute is what it takes for his feet to carry him to azura’s apothecary, to one lyra hallow, with about a month’s worth of kindle slung over his shoulder. the thoughts about his sisters’, and issues about names and places, tempers down to a background hum when the shop’s bell chimes at his intrusion as he lets himself in.

(in velgrove there’s a little shop stocked full of oddities, and it’s the first one he marked on his map. the sound of the bell now reminds him of the girl dressed in jacaranda colors; that when they first met, it was because he had stumbled into her first, into the store, led by the belief that he would’ve found a tree right where she stood. the second shock: he has the worst time pronouncing her name)  

before everything, he braces on a kind expression because he had, admittedly, already spotted her from the window. he won’t chance a look at his watch. he’s probably about five minutes late. he holds onto his burden, says to her “good morning, hallow. the ladies back home send their regards. they loved the incense you recommended.” haeil hedges away from the entrance and sidles up to the counter, “unfortunately, i might have to clear your stock of it before they decide disown me. do you have any more leftover?”

[velhaeil]

something to be said about that lake

in the grove: @vel-misol, lakeside, "i'm sure nobody dies in here", triggers: tba

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for few long years up until his departure from his island more than a year ago, the residents of a quaint town nestled in the eastern sea had trusted myung haeil’s uncanny trick to tell whenever the weather was about upend itself. to everyone’s utter dismay, it hadn’t been about some sort of ancient sorcery, or the rediscovery of some preternatural ability to connect with things that, by all intents and purposes, were so far flung in the evolutionary theory that it might as well have been a brand new branch of science. it was simply that haeil—and apparently everyone else, way back then, at some point—had trusted the liquid cushioning his joints much more than any kind of weathervane. which was kind of stupid in retrospect, considering that there were such things as “weatherpersons”, and “weather reports”, prattling away on the radio waves, but alas…

haeil held hope for them. the weathervanes, that is. not the weather-people. they were nice to watch, spending their lives away twirling within one gust to the next. his favorite were the mass produced ones made of manufactured steel, with the funny little rooster surfing atop the spindle tube. he owns about three of them (in gold, copper, and steel colors), and had sent a fourth copper one back home in a protected parcel with a handwritten letter signed, “kokkiyo!” at the very bottom. his nephew had been nothing short of delighted.

sparing the mostly embarrassing details about that particular interaction & the easy delight of children; and about the barometric pressures dipping or spiking with no one’s permission with impressive suddenness; the high and low of it was that every extreme occurrence in the weather paid a toll to haeil’s right shoulder right before passing. he knew that the sky was concocting its best tears to shed all over velgrove. he knew it in that same visceral way that he knew not to stare at a wolf in the eyes, or to always enjoy a fresh, still-steaming piece of bakery bread smothered in butter like it was the last. and he had categorically decided that whatever the situation had been back home, the probability that it would be the same here, lands apart, was, to him, near zero. there was a quest to be had to the library, then the general store, and phantom pains aren’t enough to derail that train off the rails.

the sky had been incongruously sunny, to boot. egregiously blue, nary a gray cloud in sight. a beautiful idyllic midday.

he spares yang misol the vagrancies of those thoughts, too. at least in mute apology for not letting her know that he had had the sneaking suspicion of approaching rainwater, even if the possibility did sound a little insane in his mind. maybe he should have left her to her own devices. left her on her walk, or errand—or whichever task occupied her time at around noon, on this side of velgrove. perhaps now was an excellent time to ask.

so haeil tries very, very hard not to disparage his existence once they’re caught under the downpour half-sheltered by the hat of some sort of deciduous tree and half-exposed to the Unforeseen Maelstrom of droplets that hit the side of his face each time he thinks that it’s approaching a stop. he was almost nearing the end of resignation, nosediving into acceptance, extending his small umbrella with his left to cover the poor lovely girl from the absolute worst of it, when the first flash of thunderclap brightens up the sky of their worsening afternoon. he pulls up a mental map of the grove and makes a fair estimate of where they’re standing, which is somewhere…north. near the lake? ah, well, they did head for the trees at the start of the shower.

he’ll bank on sincerity now, thank you, while they’re still whole. he turns to misol with a grimace, careful to keep the umbrella steady above her, “miss yang, two things: i don’t think we’ll make it anywhere without high risk of a cold. and i think we should just keep stepping a little deeper into the woods. i’m fairly sure the canopies will protect us better if we’re, well, fully under them,” but he’s really thinking about that little detail in the lake, bathed in perpetual sun, and the veracity of those anecdotes. “or a third one: we head for the lake and hope for the best.”