chakravanti.

acarya

We could say: it is as before, but that would have to be a lie. There was no before. Richard has no memory of how long it took him to die, how long it was before he found himself in the darkness that became a wood that became the land leading to a lifeless sea. He has no memory, now. He is only dying again, and he is alone. The only others here are dead spirits. His acarya is gone. The torch is gone. He feels darkness, he feels cold, and then he feels nothing.

There is a blessing in this, though: for him, upon waking, there is no memory, there is no panicked waiting. The darkness comes with the cold, and then there is light and warmth and he finds his heart -- oh! his heart! -- is pounding rapidly, frantically, like a child bouncing off the walls. Sensation comes back so forcefully after such abstinence that it's almost painful, and it's certainly overwhelming. Things have color again, things have light and movement and noise isn't flattened out. Oh, god, this is what it is. This is what life is.

At first it's all a blur, and he can't see anything clearly or recognize voices or understand where exactly on his body he's being touch. Smell clarifies first, even when his eyes are begging for the merciful dark and his body is flinching and everything is too noisy to be bearable. He can smell something smoky in the air, sweet and botanical but touched by fire. It's just a remnant, though, and in the fresh air cutting through it there is the sea with all its salt, teeming with so many forms of life that they have not been counted since the word science was coined, will not all be counted by the time Richard truly returns to the Wheel. Oh: he smells food. Enough food that he can't even tell what kind yet, it's just food and his stomach is reacting to this before he can, it's as gleeful and demanding as his heart.

Before he quite processes the pressure he feels, or knows which direction his head and feet are pointing, he can smell Eleanor. Funny how you don't know that you recognize someone's smell like that, til one day you miss it, one day you've gone without it and then it's there again in a piece of clothing or, more blessedly, the real person close again. That's Eleanor. Not perfume but the soap she uses, which is not the same as the soap he's brought and left in the 'guest' bathroom at her house, and whatever it is she puts in her hair, and a bit of the incense lingering on her hair and clothes and laundry detergent and softener that both their clothes smell like sometimes because she is totally cool with him doing laundry at her house, why wouldn't she be.

Touch next. Eleanor with her arms around him, and that must be her throat where his head is resting because he can feel her pulse against his temple, the two beats blending. Her palm on his crown, her other arm around his shoulders. She's holding him tight; he knows she's stronger than she looks, right now she seems stronger than she really is. His head is pointed up, his feet are pointed toward a wall, so he's... sitting up, on the living room rug. Something light and ticklish against his legs and arms and his clothing stuck to him with sweat, a spot of dried blood on his inner elbow where the second needle went in, the wake-up call, whatever it was, feeling clean despite the blood because it is also touched with Sunitha's magic.

Sight comes. He's in Sunitha's living room, Eleanor holding him with her chin atop his head because his body isn't quite... reacting yet, isn't responding, isn't listening to his instructions yet, he knows he'd fall over if she let him go. Sunitha is beside them, and she -- like Richard and Eleanor -- still wears a tilak, though marred by sweat on her brow. He's surrounded by flowers. Big yellow ones, red ones, deep green waxy leaves, a thousand petals in each blossom, orange ones like fire, laid around him like they were laid around Brahma and Shiva upstairs. He can smell them, too, realizes that's where some of the sweetness in the air has been coming from. The windows are all open, breezes flowing through, taking out the incense and bringing in the night air.

Oh god, the voices. Coming from outside the French doors between this half of the house and the other, voices with unseen owners, but many of them. Men and women, even children, a house packed to the gills with other human beings, even if it's just Sunitha and Eleanor and Richard here in the parlor. All of them have sweat on their brow, though Sunitha seems the calmest, the most at ease, the guide through this ordeal.

Eleanor is talking, though. Language is returning. She is just saying his name. Nothing else, really. Nothing explicable. Just

Richard. oh, Richard.

She sounds so proud of him. Or maybe -- maybe something other than pride. It feels so shared, something between the two of them unlike anything else, though not better or worse or closer or more intimate or harsher or more visceral, just... its own. And it feels like relief. And it feels like survival, and something else he's so rarely, if ever, heard in Eleanor's voice it's hard to name it at first.

It's joy.

Sunitha is rubbing his back, despite his shirt sticking to his skin from copious sweat. She has been waiting for his eyes to focus, for his mouth to stop being so slack, for his pulse under her fingers at his wrist to slow down a bit. She sees him reacting to sounds, words, and meets his eyes, seeing no panic in his.

"You must wash," she tells him, with true kindness, with real gentleness. Her eyes flick up to Eleanor. "You must both wash. Dress in new clothes. I will be close if you are weak."

And with that, she begins to rise from her knees to her bare feet, to help them up, to guide them up the stairs to get cleaned up, even though her home seems filled to overflowing with party guests at the moment.

Richard Levasseur

It all happens so fast.

Eleanor vanishing. His panic, his terror, all those warnings coming back to him: Oblivion is close, Oblivion haunts our every step, Entropy will draw Oblivion, Oblivion will destroy your soul forever. He doesn't know where she is, he doesn't know what happened to her, he doesn't know what will become of her or himself and --

-- and he finds her.

He didn't know he had it in himself to do that. He thought maybe he could, he hoped maybe he could, but the truth is he's never really had to work like this. Never really had to cast, to work magic, to work his will under such pressure, in such circumstances, utterly without the guiding hand of his acarya.

He can, though. He knows that about himself now.

And he knows, also:

what it feels like to die. Again. To die out of the world of shadows, this time without the luxury of knowing it is his turn, without the luxury of a day and a night and a week and a month of psychoemotional preparation. To die the way all humans really die in the, suddenly and unexpectedly, no room for discussion.

Something cold in his veins.

The lights go out.

--

And then:

sensation. That is the first thing to return. It returns so utterly, so forcefully. Comes back to him from the inside out. The thunder of his heart, the way it thrashes in his chest. His alveoli inflating, popping open with that first ragged gasp. His eyes open but there is no vision, it's all a blur, he can't focus yet. Everything is light and shapes and it's all too bright too much too close too loud.

There is so much noise. Nothing muffles his ears. Nothing could have prepared him for this. He wants to put his hands over his ears or shut his eyes or something but it's too much for him, he's too weak, he's upright --

he's upright?

-- well, he's semi-upright, and that's only because he is being held. Oh, someone is holding him, and it smells so familiar, it smells like Eleanor. That's Eleanor, his acarya. He knows; he found her. He found her with his mind and now he's really found her and he is relieved, relieved, he closes his eyes and those frantic irregular pulls of breath turn into actual breathing. There are flowers everywhere. There are voices everywhere. He doesn't know how much of that is real, but he does know it's all just too much for him right now and it's nice to just be held.

It's nice to just rest a while, exhausted by his passage.

--

Someone is rubbing his back. He opens his eyes again. His cheek is resting against Eleanor's upper chest, her shoulder. His hair is soaked in sweat and so is his back. He should be ashamed, except then he realizes no he shouldn't be. So he's not. He blinks once, slowly, as his eyes focus.

You must wash, says Sunitha, ferrywoman of the dead, deliverer of the reborn. Dress in new clothes. He supposes there's something ritualistic about that too. The incense is gone and it smells like food. The heavy, suffocating, sepulchral quality to the air has vanished. The house feels alive again.

He feels alive again. Weak, and trembling, and shaky in every joint: but alive.

Sunitha rises and so Richard tries to rise as well. He puts a hand on the floor and there are a few false starts. A few attempts that go nowhere, a few more that end in him tumbling bonelessly down again. Hands reach out to help him. Sunitha's perhaps. He has a handful of her sari in his hand, he pulls him up with her strength. She doesn't mind. She is patient, and kind. He sways a little, he almost goes down again, and then

he manages. He keeps his balance. He takes a step, and another. He reaches out. He takes, if it is there for him to take, Eleanor's hand.

acarya

Sunitha is stable, is strong. She helps him rise, and Eleanor too, though he can tell that Eleanor is a bit shaky as well, can tell that Sunitha is very tired, has drained much of her own power tonight. They are all worn out from their work this evening. But they all rise, and go to the stairs slowly, shufflingly. Sunitha walks behind them, picking up the hem of her sari, as they slowly ascend to the upper floor.

And Eleanor holds his hand as they go. Eleanor is smiling, wan and exhausted but smiling, still, with that same joy.

--

Upstairs, Sunitha makes sure they can both stand under their own power without tipping over before she leaves them. The hot water heater pumps gallons onto each of them in separate bathrooms, warm and soaking.

In the shower near her own room, Eleanor sits on the floor of the tub for a while. She finds herself crying into her palms out of nowhere, but they aren't the wracking, despairing tears that seem to be killing her. She just weeps, cathartic and strange and grateful and yes, sad too. When she leaves the water she dries herself, combs and braids her hair, walks to the bedroom and dresses in new, clean, fresh clothes. She inhales their scent when she picks them up, holding the cloth to her face, feeling the softness and smelling the detergent and softener all together. She smells her own skin for no reason. She runs her hands over her arms and her breasts and belly and her knees and she adores her toes, wraps them in her palms for a while and holds on, warming them with her palms, because she's warm now.

--

The truth is, Sunitha is washed and clean and downstairs again even before Eleanor is. And Eleanor, even with the tears, is out before Richard is. And when he leaves his shower, when he is dressed again, the upstairs is quiet,

and someone is laughing downstairs.

Richard Levasseur

Water never felt so good in his life -- nevermind that he spent a great deal of that life in varying forms of water. It's never felt this pure, this utter, this hot, this drenching.

He stands there in the shower for a very, very long time. He soaps and scrubs with strengthless hands, slowly and limply, and when he is done he simply ... stands there. Lets the water pour over him, over his head and through his hair, over his shoulders and down his back. Sometimes he turns and gives another angle of his body to the water. Sometimes he places his hands against the tile and leans there, head hanging.

Eventually his skin flushes pink. Eventually his fingertips shrivel. Eventually his skin attains a new, transcendant numbness, beaten past sensitivity by the unending spray. Eventually -- finally -- he turns the water off in two deliberate cranks.

His body feels heavy and new. He is aware of it in ways he doesn't remember being aware of it before, its dimensions and capabilities, its motion and cohesiveness. He dries himself on the softest towels he has ever touched and dresses himself in the cleanest clothes he has ever worn, and everything is the most, is the maximum, is the best, because everything is real, and he is alive.

The upstairs is quiet. Someone laughs downstairs. He listens, head tilted, trying to place the voice. It sounds like there's a party down there. For him? For life. He puts his hand on the banister -- weak still, but it's a better sort of weakness; that sort of bone-deep, satisfied weakness that comes after a thorough exertion. Step by step he descends the stairs, feet bare, hair wet.

acarya

The water eventually cools. Enough to feel lukewarm, enough to make him aware that if he stays much longer it will get cold indeed. But he shrivels up and he pinks and then he turns the water off. By now his senses have cleared, have learned how to modulate the information coming at him a bit better. The weakness and wooziness have left, the nausea and headache from dying and returning have abated. Sunitha's magic is powerful indeed, and she brought him back from the very brink of death; he can still feel the touch of it inside of him, shadowy but very clean, reverent and... sort of homey. He can feel himself entirely, feel everything entirely,

and this is a gift. This is the gift of the sojourn, the diksha, the agama te.

When he comes down the stairs, the doors have all been thrown open, including the ones to the front and back porch. Air moves freely through. The living room has been cleaned, the flowers gathered and tossed into the world, littering the porches, petals dancing in the breeze. The room where he died has taken on the overflow of people. There's so many of them, young and old, but all Awake or 'consors', as Eleanor calls them. Then there are children, young enough to not know the difference or old enough to be consors of a kind themselves. It's very late but they are allowed to stay up, they are playing and sneaking around.

One of them, a little girl with dark hair and large, dark eyes, stops in front of the stairs. She is wearing a patterned dress and gold necklace, gold earrings, gold charm in her hair, tiny bindi mark between her brows. She sees him and gives an excited shriek, running into the kitchen, and that is when adults and others start coming into the main hallway. That is when Sunitha and Eleanor come to the foot of the stairs, Sunitha in red and gold wearing a much simpler tilak only on her brow now, Eleanor dressed in a knee-length, short-sleeved A-line dress, dark blue with tiny flowers on it, like you might see someone wearing with saddle shoes, dancing in the fifties. But Eleanor is barefoot. Most people are, shoes crowded by the door.

People start clapping. Even the ones clad all in black who never smile, who bring a darkness with them and around them reminiscent of the shadowlands. They begin clapping, grinning up at him, as he comes down. And when he reaches the floor, Eleanor hugs him.

Richard Levasseur

It is only when they all turn to watch him coming down the stairs, when they all smile at him, when they all start clapping and grinning and cheering that Richard realizes -- this is for him. This is all for him.

Silly Richard.

He breaks into a grin himself. He comes down the steps a little faster, still careful with those new feet of his. He gains the ground and there's a little girl there, one that shrieks with sheer joy and delight and maybe just a little bit of overtiredness because good god what hour is it before running into the kitchen. Richard laughs, then: bursts with it, a cloudburst of open happiness. He is still laughing when Eleanor comes to him

and hugs him

which is something she almost never never never does. Which isn't to say she's cold or distant. Just reserved. Between the two of them, he's so much more likely to hug, to jump, to dance, to use his body to express his mind.

She hugs him now, though. And he, laughing, throws his long arms around her and hugs her back very, very tightly. It is too noisy and there are too many people for him to say what is in him, but perhaps that hug alone conveys some of the gratitude, and relief, and joy, and love that fills that happy kind heart of his.

acarya

She hugs him so unreservedly, despite the crowd of people, many of whom know her... professionally. Only not as lawyers or judges, of course. She hugs him like she can't help it, like she doesn't think of it, and that is something Eleanor never does. Not even at her worst, on her worst day, in her bleakest hour. She embraces him wholeheartedly, squeezing him even though her head is roughly eye-level with his solar plexus, and he squeezes her right back. Both of them have wet hair. Both of them are new and clean and scrubbed and... alive again. An hour ago, they weren't.

Many people come around him even after Eleanor steps back, even after she is just a hand-hold away. They are clapping him on the back and shaking his hand and some say simply welcome and some issue blessings in various languages, but he is touched and the room actually smells a little because there's so many people crammed in here but it's all a lively, welcome smell after the lifelessness and horror of the shadowlands.

The kitchen is where he is half-guided. There's flowers laid out even here, on the table and counters and windowsills. Music is playing, and someone turns it up. It's a potluck: the dishes don't match, there's everything from soda to wine to fine scotch, there's pitchers of clear water in every corner, there's dal and there's an eggplant casserole and a huge fruit salad and platters of cupcakes and chips-and-dip and there's even meat and steak, because... well. Potluck. And Sunitha may have her beliefs, but this party is not for her. There's those soft iced sugar cookies from Lofthouse and baklava and deviled eggs and sushi and veggie platters and hummus and god, it's hard to see just how much food is here because everyone brought something.

Someone -- Eleanor -- presses a cup of water into Richard's hands, and then a small bowl of rice. "Eat this," she says quietly, in between greetings with other people. "Make sure you can keep that down before you have anything else, okay?"

She looks at him, eyebrows up a bit, to make sure he's listening.

Richard Levasseur

Which just makes him laugh again. And hug her again, unreservedly as she did moments ago only -- this is not rare for him. This is Richard, and he is her happy, bright, excessively tall, golden apprentice, and his long arm is around her and he hugs her against his side and there's a faint dampness up at the top of his shirt where his hair is still dripping onto his collar.

"I promise I won't throw up," he says, his tone gently teasing. He takes the small bowl of rice. It is so small in his big hand, and he wolfs it down, and all the while people around them are recognizing him and welcoming him and touching him and blessing him. It is a birthday party, and it is a welcome-home party, and the very fact that they threw it for him,

that his acarya and her friend had enough faith in his resurrection that they invited so many people for him,

touches him more deeply than he can process right now. He finishes the rice; he lifts the bowl all triumphantly, seizes it and thrusts it up into the air like a medal or a trophy or something and there is laughter, there are a few scattered pockets of joking applause.

He is not an arrogant man, though, not even in jest, and he is not really a showman either. He raises his hands in that universal okay, okay gesture, still smiling, still chewing, and he sets the emptied bowl down

to begin filling it with food. Just fruit right now, though he's ravenous. He doesn't want to throw up, after all. "Where did all these people come from?" he asks Eleanor as he fills his bowl.

acarya

They hug this time with a bit of water sloshing and a bowl of rice held between, then to the side. Eleanor huffs a breath out through her nostrils. She pats his back, and lets him have the rice, and she knows how hungry he is because, frankly, she's been there. And because she's starving, too.

But there is rice. And eggplant parmesan and tofu and dal and all kinds of things for everyone to eat. Eleanor just smiles. "All over. The ones who could get here. I know many. Sunitha knows more. At least four people here were her apprentices at once point in their lives. The little girl who saw you coming downstairs is her godchild, in a manner of speaking. Some of them are not Euthanatoi but are followers of a Craft, or they are sorcerers and pychics, not fully awakened." She gives a single-shouldered shrug. "They are just people we know. Many of whom have been where you were."

Eleanor's smile is surprisingly warm. "We're all just here to celebrate."

Richard Levasseur

He has a palm full of fruit on the night of his death and rebirth. There is something about that that seems like it should be symbolic. An idol of the divine, here in this moment. There is something about that that is symbolic, and divine, and beautiful, but then everything about this moment is beautiful. Everything about this kitchen, this house, its mistress, the party, its people, his acarya, her smile

is beautiful.

And he smiles back at her. He is so happy; his heart is so full. "We are," he says, and that smile breaks into a grin, and he holds his free hand out to her. She's held her hand to him over and over again. Quite literally led him through the valley of the shadow, where he feared no evil; only the prospect of being alone.

"Come on," he says, laughing. "I want to meet all your friends. All of them."

acarya

He's so happy. And maybe later, on the way home or when they're back in her house some night, they'll talk about other things -- her own initiation rites, perhaps. Or the tears she found herself overwhelmed by when she came back, though she's not sure she could explain those, share them somehow. These things are personal. She is glad she can share even this much with him, with anyone.

Richard holds out his hand this time. Eleanor takes it, this time. He says what he says, and she just smiles, squeezes. "You go. I'm going to get a scotch. Introduce yourself. You're one of us now." Still her apprentice. But a full member of the Tradition, just like all the other Euthanatoi here.

Like the one in the corner doing nothing but drinking 20-ounce Red Bulls and eating Ruffles. Weird, since he's about as thin as a stick. Like the people eat sitting on cushions or leaning against counters or in the living room or hanging out on the steps. Like the father in slacks and button-down shirt whose little girl is standing on his feet, holding his hands, trying to climb up his legs to flip over, which she does again and again, flush-faced and breathless, while he carries on a conversation to the side. Eleanor isn't kidding. She squeezes his hand but goes to get her drink, and it's up to Richard to ---

well, not really.

Most people know each other already, but most of them go out of their way to talk to Richard as soon as Eleanor leaves his side, to ask him about... everything, really. From school to swimming to his other studies. Some ask what he saw on the other side, others want to know his favorite food. Mostly, they converse about life on this side. They introduce children with glassy, exhausted eyes. They insist he try this plum wine. He won't stop talking about the cooking classes he takes and how it's like, sometimes the only thing that like, you know, makes him feel like the universe is in order, if that makes sense? Here, I brought this sushi you have to be totally honest about it or else I won't learn anything. She is unnerved by kids, she says, watching one playing, she can't believe they let kids come to this, it's weird -- Jesus, I'm sorry, this is your party. I don't mean to be downer. How'd you meet Ms. Yates?

Red Bull Guy is a conspiracy theorist who is twitchy about so many of them being in one place at one time making so much noise.

Doctor Gupta has a million questions about Richard's health and physiology pre-, during, and post-Olympic career.

Wilhemina-call-me-Mina knows a lot more than Eleanor does about the spirit world. She explains a few things, if Richard asks: what a ghost's 'Shadow' is, how Oblivion and the Great Unmaking are sort of but not entirely the same thing, but maybe it's more like Oblivion itself is a yin-yang: it has its active destructive force, the dark one, and the passive destructive force, the white, which merely waits, and it is the passive Oblivion that the Euthanatoi call the Great Unmaking, counter to the active Oblivion that -- according to Mina -- some creatures in the world call the 'Great Serpent', or the 'Wyrm', or any number of names, like any devil.

Some are Eleanor's friends, or Sunitha's, or are mere acquaintances, or are new themselves, or are here with a friend. Some are consors. One explains that she's a psychic, a firestarter, that Red Bull Guy saved her life and her sanity when he found her. She knows he's kind of nuts, but if you knew what he'd been through...

But even those who are not Euthanatoi understand what happened here tonight. A death. A resurrection. A rebirth. These things have meaning. These things must be marked. And the new Chakravanti must be welcomed, for he is one of them now.

the darkness they carry.

acarya

So they walk. He doesn't mind, but

that will pass. So will the minding, so will

the awareness of how long they've been walking,

or where they were,

or where they are going,

or why,

or why it matters,

or why anything matters.

--

The torch given from Sunitha to Eleanor and to Richard still burns, though, and it is a source of memory. When his eyes catch the flame and its movement, its life, he'll remember. When Eleanor squeezes his hand. They are walking up the shoreline beside that black, endless ocean, and perhaps he sees boats out there, perhaps he thinks he sees boats out there, but they are as ghostly as anything else.

They come into town again, pass through a quiet place. The buildings are dim and the wood is rotting. Paint peels. Signs move though they feel no breeze. They walk along a boardwalk. They hear things, and they move quickly before they see the things they hear. Eleanor pulls him in between two shops once, suddenly, as something wanders past. Something caught in webs, dragging them. It looks human-formed but confused, the eyes wide and blank but were once blue, the hair thin, the face constantly turning toward an ocean, hoping to see -- but no.

That sea is gone. That memory is violated here, ruined. Every time he dares remember the ocean and all its shining, monstrous power, he forgets that what he will really see is dark and black and dead. He keeps walking along the boardwalk, shuffling, and down the way, they can hear him weeping. At the end of the boardwalk he just turns around. He just paces again, trying to recapture some moment long past, long forgotten, trying to regain something he has no hope of ever reaching.

Eleanor takes him a different way. They cannot help him without drawing attention they cannot deal with, she tells him quietly, as they walk on, though he can see in her eyes a brief flicker of her own passion: grief can be a passion. Loss, agony, terrible pain... these things can keep one alive, keep one tethered, keep one burning. Of course she relates, though she also takes strength from it. That wraith's hope is pointless. He will never find what he looks for.

All she has to do, one day, is die. All she has to do is stay alive long enough to break the curse. All she has to do is wait until Henrik's rebirth has made him old enough that she can find him, age-separated as they might be, and nurture him a while until she is reborn again. She has hope, still. She has died many times. She has been reborn many times. She will escape this, and so will Richard.

Her hand is tight on his as they go forward. There is some life in that, some fervor, that is a precious resource in this place.

--

Soon, the hospital. It is massive and its walls are thick. They stand across the street from it, watching from darkness, as ghosts move past, as they move in and out of the hospital, but the truth is, this place is mostly deserted. It is not as though hospitals, particularly hospitals in resort towns, are just constantly churning out new dead people. They mostly try to avoid that, in hospitals.

But all the same. It's autumn, and there is a wet chill. They wait, and watch. Eleanor is quiet. They do not want to draw attention. She almost tells him to snuff the torch, but it is how Sunitha keeps a hold of them with her Will. They dare not lose that light.

Eventually, they cross the street. They slip through the doors and enter the hospital, which is mostly deserted. A few places, here and there, are the unliving. Not all doctors and nurses but people who were once patients here. Some look as they did when they died, and they are grisly. Others look as they did twenty, thirty years before they died, and they are confused, they are not sure what is happening, even if they have been here for decades. One that walks by is very clearly a doctor.

And here she had her most passionate moments, her highest highs, her lowest lows. Here she was exhausted to the point of death, here she was exalted to moments of profound meaning. She did not die here. She died very far from here, in retirement. But she found her way back, yes she did, and she clipped on her badge again and wears her white coat and checks on everyone, but

like the man on the boardwalk,

she is waiting for something to happen. Something to give her that high, or even that low. That exultation of saving someone's life. The profound intimacy of being there when someone dies, being the one to watch their life leave them. She checks on everyone, over and over and over and over and over, waiting for a code, waiting for a seizure, a flatline, anything, please, Christ, anything to make her feel again. She'll wait forever if she has to.

Her heels click-clack softly on the floor as she walks. She always hated wearing heels, the work wasn't made for heels, but they didn't take her seriously in flats. She holds onto that, too.

--

Eleanor finds a space where they can talk, where they aren't sneaking, where they aren't holding their breath even though they don't need to breathe. She doesn't dare use Entropy here to sense impending death; Oblivion will zero in on them, and every ancient wraith that can feel that call.

"There," she whispers, pointing to a corner of a shadowy, light-dark room where everything stands in sharp contrast. There is something on the bed, something unseen but growing more substantial as they watch.

She has let go of his hand by now, but she reaches down to hold it.

She doesn't tell him what they're watching.

She doesn't need to.

Someone is dying.

Richard Levasseur

Richard stays close in Eleanor's wake as they walk these hollow streets. His hand in hers, his head turning this way and that. He looks at the ghosts they pass. The little girl skipping down the pavement, avoiding cracks, hop-scotching. Getting to the end of the sidewalk and not looking, not looking up, not looking both ways, hopping off the curb and stepping into the street and --

-- there the record skips. The tape loops. Suddenly she's back where she started, she's hopscotching down the sidewalk again, but if you look very very very very close you'd see, just for an instant, right in that split-second before she's back on the pavement,

the grotesque twist of her body, her small hands flung sideways by momentum and her pretty hair lashing out; that horrible impact. Just for an instant.

Then she's skipping down the sidewalk again. She never knows where she's going. Or what awaits her there. Or that she has been here before.

--

Eleanor pulls Richard between buildings at one point. He keeps close to the walls, scarcely daring to breathe, afraid to draw attention to himself. But the truth is perhaps that thing-that-was-once-a-man, web-bound and lost, cannot see them at all. Richard watches him go, watches him look at the ocean that has no waves, no whitecaps, no tide, no motion.

Dead endless black. As dead and endless and black as the sky: as though all the cosmos had ceased to exist. As though they truly were alone here, a night without day, a world without time.

Richard shudders again. And they move on.

--

The hospital then. Where they step out of the way of that phantom physician. Where Eleanor is searching and seeking; where Richard is trailing behind, looking into some of the rooms, peering in until he sees something he never ever wants to see ever again. Then he is simply following her, his eyes on her back, his hand reaching for hers again even as she reaches for his.

She has stopped. There, she says. And he looks. The light is different in there. Sharper. Bright-dark. The edges of the shadows crisp. Something is coming through. Something is coming across. A soul reaped by the reaper, one might say. Someone passing into the night.

Richard discovers he is holding his breath, and he lets it out. "Can we ... is there anything we can do to help?"

acarya

It is bright. Only it is lightless. It is hard to look at but it draws everything toward it, it sucks at the air and pulls at the body. Someone is being born, not into the world of color and motion and sensation but into this bleakness. Maybe they will become a drone like those poor ghosts Richard and Eleanor keep passing by. Maybe they will stir, maybe they will be conscious, know they are dead, like the doctor does. Maybe they will grow powerful here. There are reasons to hold on, for some. Eternity is long; you may speak of friendship and of love lasting forever, but here those things really can exist.

Not many think it is worth the cost. A few, though. And it is antithesis to everything the Euthanatoi stand for, to see such wanton, hedonistic, selfish stagnation.

She aches a little. Shakes her head, her brows drawn, as the white core they are looking at recedes to reveal a shape lying now on the bed. A shape, because it is not a person. They are in some sort of sac, milk-white but dry-looking, soft and draping but not exactly a web. The shape is humanoid, but does not breathe. It twitches but does not rise.

"What do you mean, 'help'?" she asks him, in a whisper.

Richard Levasseur

"Help... help it move on."

His eyes are fixed on that bizarre not-person. On that ash-white, ash-dry sac; like the very antithesis of birth, of amnion and chorion.

"Help whoever that is not be stuck here like the others. I know I can't help most of them. They've been here too long and I'm not strong enough. But maybe someone new, someone who hasn't ... stagnated yet."

acarya

The sac moves, but it's not fluid. It's something else, something joked about in Ghostbusters, but it's real. It's not green slime. Here, at least, ectoplasm is just... difficult to describe.

Eleanor looks at Richard. She's still holding his hand. "Chances are," she says quietly, "if he's here... that will be very difficult indeed. But if you would like to try --"

Heels clipping on lineoleum tile. Close by. But she drifts so softly, too. She comes in, ignoring Eleanor and Richard, examining a chart in her hand. The clipboard is black, the paper blank. "Mister Smith, how are we feeling today?" she is asking. In the skinlands her voice would be clear, alert, but here it is slowed down, tired-sounding, every breath a sigh. She doesn't even glance at the two magi; Eleanor has gone very still and has stopped speaking.

The doctor goes to the bedside of the twitching but otherwise motionless creature who has just died. She sucks on a tooth, a hollow sound that echoes in the hospital room, and flicks through some more blank paper, going through sheets that have nothing but heavy black scribbles all over them, some words: KILL YOURSELF, BITCH. KILL YOURSELF.

ROOF.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT FUCKING CUNT BITCH.

FUCK YOU. FUCKING DIE.

She doesn't seem to read a word of the large, enraged letters. She just flicks the pages down, back to a blank one, and sets the clipboard aside. "Not very talkative today, I see," she sighs, turning to face him. For a moment she stands, arms spread in an A to either side of her, resting on the edge of the mattress, lifeless eyes looking over her patient. In case he moves, in case he speaks, Eleanor squeezes Richard's hand hard. They do not know what this wraith can do.

"I can't hear you," the doctor says, shaking her head, almost tsking. She draws her hands together, reaching for the sac right where a person's throat might be. "I can't hear you when you mumble," she adds, with irritation,

digging her fingers in, poking holes, tearing at the sac. Fluid rushes out, or something like fluid. It moves like liquid but leaves nothing behind, no stain, no darkening of fabric, no residue on her hands. If water could be dry, this would be it. Well: cloudy, white-gray water. The doctor keeps tearing, with surprisingly forceful, savage tearing, like she is ripping up a bedsheet. For a moment, dark fury blackens her gaze, freezes in her features as though rigor mortis caught her in the midst of a screaming rage. Her face is frozen like that for a moment, just a flicker of a second, while she tears and tears and opens up the caul covering the enfant ghost. It is tough work; the caul does not want to be removed, the child does not want to be born.

Richard Levasseur

Even here she is his acarya: always blunt, always pragmatic, always truthful; never discouraging. It's not that she lies. It's not that she tells him it will be easy or even possible. But she doesn't tell him no, either. He's an adult. He's a grown man. He's an Awakened mage, no matter how small his power. She does not ever give him the impression that he needs her permission to do anything. She does not ever give him the impression, either, that something he does and does without malice will result in her turning away from him. That she will not, if need be, protect him.

And perhaps he's on the verge of trying -- something. Perhaps he's about to step forward, away from the wall where they've all but plastered themselves, but then:

oh, then.

Then the doctor comes. She comes with her chart of blank paper, only it's not all blank, no, it's not all blank at all. Richard, from his prodigious height, can look over her shoulder. Can see the words, black and angry, hateful, rageful, scrawled so heavy and dark that they seem almost to beat with an intensity of their own. He catches his breath. It's nearly a gasp,

but oh, he doesn't make a sound. Not when his acarya grips his hand like that. Pulls him back. He doesn't move, he doesn't speak. His jaw is tense and his teeth set, his eyes so wide. He watches. Fluid splashes, but it leaves no stain. No wetness. No shine on the floor. The ghost tears and tears and tears and this, this too is work. A labor on the other side of the shroud. His heart is beating in his chest, or is that only what he imagines to be his heart? Is the very imagining dangerous, a sign that he is an impostor, the living amongst the dead? He puts his hand over his breastbone, but that hammering cannot be muffled.

acarya

He still has the torch. It burns. It moves. It almost seems warm, it almost has color. He is not alone here. He and Eleanor are not alone. A mage greater than she is knows where they are and can come to them, can find them, can pull them out if need be. They did not come to the shadowlands to truly die. Or be lost. He still has the torch. He still has that, and holding it is a reminder: they are not alone. He is alive. His heart beats, even if right now, in his body across the shroud, it beats almost not at all.

The caul splits open, torn and shredded, and the new wraith is born. He is thin, very thin, though he has not lost his hair. He sits up sharply, suddenly, gasping. He is unclothed and barely seems real for a moment, his form shifting and akimbo, askew somehow. Wild-eyed he searches, searches, finds the doctor, begins to scramble away, but he can barely move; his legs are still in the caul. The doctor grabs both of his wrists, pins him down to the bed with a shocking strength.

"There," she says. "Now --"

"Tom!" he wails, the voice sounding like it comes from down the hall and not this room, carried on wind. "Tom! Tom, help me! Tom!"

"-- Mister Smith, you must stay --"

"My name's not Smith! My name is --" he struggles a moment, pants, struggling against her grasp. "My name is Kevin, my husband's name is Tom, he said he wouldn't leave my side! He said he wouldn't --"

"-- calm, you've been very weakeened by the --"

"-- leave me. Tom! TOM!" he's screaming now, hollering toward the door, thrashing weakly, impotently. But there's such anger in it, such ... bitterness. Tom left his side. Tom left him alone here, while he was dying. He broke his promise. His vow.

"-- treatment," the doctor finishes firmly, ignoring him almost entirely. She is holding him down still, but something awful is growing in his voice and his eyes, something broken by waking up to find Tom gone. Tom was all he had left. These kids these days, they don't know what it was really like. Everyone he knew in the scene was homeless or crashing on couches. No one talked about their families if they could help it. No one talked about getting found out, getting kicked out, or getting abandoned when the beatings and the electroshock and whatever else didn't work. Tom was everything. And he was so scared, and he was so sick. He could be okay, he thought, if Tom just stayed there and held his hand. He wouldn't be scared to --

Eleanor and Richard both see the word blossom in his mind, though they do not know his story. The word die. The loneliness of it. The rage at being left. The bitterness, the surging resentment, the betrayal. They see the horror insinuating into his mind as the doctor is calmly, though not patiently, trying to make him be still. The room's shadows are growing darker.

She exhales beside him. The two wraiths are fighting now, wrestling, but the newborn is filling with something, some power, something so new and so fresh from life that it is taking him completely. "Richard," Eleanor says, and the prophecy of motion is in her body, the promise of movement, quickly, "Richard we need to go."

Richard Levasseur

Richard.

He doesn't want to go. That which is bright in him, that which believes in what is good and right and proper in him: it wants to stay. He wants to stay, he wants to do something, he wants to -- help. Help the doctor, help Kevin, help them both. Help them move on. Move them out of here before it's too late, before they lose their way entirely, before an eternity of horror comes to pass, before they are crushed by something more powerful, before they become something more terrible,

before Oblivion takes them. Something. He resists when Eleanor tells him he must leave, not consciously but simply because he is rooted in place, caught between wanting to stay and wanting to do something.

She speaks again:

Richard, we need to go.

He pants a short gasp of an exhale out. He tears his eyes from the tableau. Finds Eleanor's eyes. He nods, once, hastily. "Okay." He's moving. He is. "Okay. Let's go."

acarya

They go. Very quickly, then, for Eleanor is lithe and smooth and sliding past him, gripping his hand, pulling him after her, while something erupts behind them, its voice guttural and angry, resounding off the walls, filling this already awful place.

DYKE BITCH.

They do not see what happens. Blackness coats the room, and maybe it is violence, and maybe it is just despair, and maybe it is anger and pain. It is, strangely, a pure emotion, and there is a surprising amount of lively energy to that much hatred, that much loathing turned both inward and outward, that howling angst and pain. Maybe Kevin will hold onto it. Maybe it will keep him here, in one existence instead of another. Maybe it will draw Oblivion, and he will surrender to it, maybe he will become Unmade, maybe he will carry some of that sorrow into a new life, maybe he will be cleansed.

Even the Awakened do not know everything about what happens across the shroud.

--

They run down the hospital hallway, and out of the hospital, before Eleanor slows down. They heard that booming, sepulchural voice behind them a few more times, saying horrific things, and it was unclear if it was the doctor or the man, if the voice was speaking to the self or to someone else. If they were even in a struggle against each other, or simply against themselves.

Outside she slows. She is holding his hand, and looks at him with something like apology.

"I'm so sorry," Eleanor tells him, quietly. "I wish --" what does she wish. "I wish there were more hope here." Which she finishes, saying it with dim awareness of just how ironic it is. How the fact that there is so little hope, so little to wish for, is sort of the point. How showing him this, its horrors and its sights which cannot be unseen, is the whole goddamn point.

Richard Levasseur

They run.

They run, and they run the way people do in dreams: fleet, tireless, so very fast. The world streaks by. The shadowy corridors and the dank halls. The stairwells with their strange shadows. All the way out to the street, which does not smell of the sea, does not smell of anything at all. Flatness all around. A black motionless ocean. A black land, a black sky, a grey street.

Here they stop. Here Richard bends to prop hands on knees, automatically, reflexively, before he realizes he doesn't need to. He is not out of breath. He does not even need to breathe, really.

Slowly he straightens. He looks over his shoulder, back at that place. Then at her.

"What was that? That ... voice. That thing that was gaining power in that room."

acarya

"The voice?" she exhales. She is not winded; there is no breath here. But she exhales nonetheless, out of habit. She is tight-shouldered, anxious, and has not let him go, even when his knees bend. She doesn't dare, right now. She shakes her head.

"I don't know. The darkness they carry, maybe. Maybe what keeps them here."

Richard Levasseur

"And if they listen to it?"

acarya

Eleanor looks back at him, up at him, her brows still drawn, her forehead wrinkled. She just shakes her head. She doesn't know. She's not sure she wishes she did.

Richard Levasseur

His brow furrows too. He looks again at that hospital. Endlessly tall, endlessly dark in this realm. A citadel of new souls.

"You told me," he says, "everyone who dies comes here." His eyes come back to her. "How many make it out?"

acarya

This time Eleanor does not shake her head. Does not nod. Does not shrug. She just looks at him, because the answer is the same. She does not know. There is no way to know, no census of the Underworld, unless the restless dead themselves take it.

But eventually, thinking on it, she has an answer, though paltry answer it is. A reminder, because they two stand here. Because Henrik and she have been reborn so many times, because Sunitha, because his parents, because every living person he knows who is not in their first incarnation has passed through here and not been held.

"Enough."

Richard Levasseur

He gives that thought too. Mulls it, chews it, internalizes it. This time, he is the one to reach out to her, wrapping his warmthless fingers around hers.

Squeezes. After a long moment:

"I'm glad you made it out."

acarya

Eleanor huffs. It's a dry sound. And she nods. She doesn't know what to say. But she nods.

"Let's go back to Sunitha's house. This side of it, at least."

Richard Levasseur

Richard nods, casting a glance around. Nods again, firmer. "Okay."

--

So they walk again. And this time, he doesn't look around. He keeps his eyes straight ahead. Averts his gaze from those ghosts and those phantoms, those wraiths and those shades. Doesn't look at that web-caught man by the sea. That little girl replaying, over and over, the last few moments of her life. Doesn't look at the dead ocean or the dead sky.

Looks at his own hand a few times, though. Looks at the flatness of his skin, which goes beyond mere pallor. It's like he's grown two-dimensional here. Like if he didn't hold that torch, if that torch didn't cast shadows and dancing light, he would not have depth or volume at all.

acarya

They walk quietly. There's no attempt to try and see a sunset over the sea; the sea is not a sea, the life-giving sea is dead here, and there is no sun. Eleanor doesn't wax poetic about an eternity in the same mind that you got to live in; she is a Euthanatos, and she is lost in her own thoughts of not-letting-go as it is. There is nothing to turn around what they've seen -- the new ghost in the caul, the empty-minded little girl forever playing, forever dying, her afterlife an endless loop of a few moments until some greater being comes to harvest her somehow. The man looking for the beauty of the sea, because he has been cut off from every other tether and he fears Oblivion still. The doctor, perhaps most tragic of all, trying to save lives when everyone is already lost.

How do you turn that around? What do you make of this? There's no silver lining. There's no hope here. There's nothing beautiful about it, nothing uplifting, nothing really to take from it other than, well,

perhaps what the point of all this is. That no soul should be confined to an afterlife such as this. That Euthantoi exist in part to save souls from this non-existence. That it is better to end than to stagnate. But about this place, itself, there is no redeeming quality. There isn't meant to be one.

--

Sunitha's house still seems strong, seems firm. Protected. Here there are no wandering restless; the area is scarcely populated as it is, and the few that exist here stay away from the southern tip of Seaside's shadowy reflection. Away from its wards, its walls. Or perhaps it's simply hidden from them.

They cannot see her; they walk along the beach, between the wall of black trees and the endless black sea. That must be where they came out. Eleanor walks with him towards that treeline, into that darkness. She has not spoken. He sees her beside him, clad in white, hair still covered, but then she takes her hand from his for a moment, reaching up to draw the hood back, for what reason --

and she is gone.

Richard Levasseur

Gone.

Gone.

For an instant Richard is simply stunned. Staring, disbelieving. It is so sudden and so complete that he thinks surely he imagined it. Maybe he's dreaming.

Then he turns in place. Pivots, wildly, this way and that. The torch in his hand billows; the sound is almost angry. "Eleanor!" His voice falls flat into the distance. "Eleanor!"

And then shouting, shouting his throat raw:

"ACARYA!"

Richard Levasseur

-- and nothing. Nothing but his voice racing away into the distance, swallowed by the flatness. No echo. No reverberation. No Acarya.

Richard is breathing now. He is breathing in short, shallow pants, very nearly gasps. Very nearly a panic. His hand clutches the torch. He still has the torch. It still burns. Surely that means something. Surely it's just a test. Surely he can do something. He can do something. He is not entirely helpless. He has not learned nothing. He digs his free hand into his pocket, and for a moment he realizes he doesn't even know what he's wearing, if he's dressed; is afraid for a second that this will be one of those dreams when he looks down and sees he is naked.

But no. His fingers jam into the bottom of a pocket. He looks down. He is wearing shorts. Longish shorts, shorts that cover the knee, comfortably loose. Beach attire. It's not what he was wearing when he succumbed to the ritual, but he doesn't remember that right now. His mind creates for him the shorts, the t-shirt, the car keys and house keys inexplicably in his pocket, even though he left both in his luggage. His mind creates for him, too, a thin wallet, which he fumbles out. Fumbles open. A credit card flaps to the ground, disregarded. He finds no dice, but he does find a single quarter, which he maneuvers onto his thumb

and flips.

Once, glittering through the night. Games of chance. An errant thought: he wonders if even this would be dangerous, if even this is a subtle weaving of Entropy, if this will draw Oblivion. He puts it out of mind. Flips the coin again, again, again, and as he does,

pulls his senses in. In, in, in. In, until all the world draws in with his senses. Like wormholes and curved timespace, see. All of reality compressing to a pinpoint. A singularity. All places as one, and from that one single axis, if he tries hard enough,

he can sense all.

acarya

[1. What are you trying to do?

2. How are you trying to do it? (paradigm-wise)

3. Calculate the difficulty.

3a. Coincidental: highest sphere + 3

3b. Vulgar without witnesses: highest sphere + 4

3c. Vulgar with witnesses: highest sphere + 5

4. Add/subtract modifiers

4a. -1 for using a specialized focus

4b. -1 (on top of 4a) for using a unique focus

4c. -1 if you take your time casting

4d. -1 for each point of Quintessence channeled (up to your Avatar rating)

4e. -1 for appropriate resonance (see ST)

5. Roll Arete vs. your difficulty! Which can only go down to 3.]

Richard Levasseur

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 4, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Richard Levasseur

[ARETAAAYYY. wif WP.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

acarya

She has been at his side since they came here. She gave him the lantern that became the torch he still holds. And she held his hand, kept reaching for him. She brought him out of the screaming, storm shroud. She held onto him, ran with him, walked for miles with him, and then she's just gone. She wouldn't just leave him. He has to know that. She wouldn't abandon him,

would she?

Not here.

--

He calls and there is no answer. His voice does not echo. He is terrified. He thinks: surely it's a test. He thinks, immediately and powerfully, of what he can do. Just as he did back at the hospital, just as he always has. He is action and creation. He does things. He is, like all of them,

a will-worker.

--

He focuses. He flips a coin, which has no care for him or his panic. He flips a coin, which does not care for his relationship with his mentor or his longing for life. The coin doesn't care about him at all. The coin exists outside of him. It rises in the non-air, spinning and twisting, and though the connection between a game of chance and the arts of Prime and Correspondence is a thin one, he makes it work for him. He just needs something to take his mind into that space, that reaching, that grasping of the threads of reality and brushing them aside so he can see further, clearer, see more than any human ever hopes to see while they Sleep.

The torch in his hand flares with Sunitha's magic. He senses that powerfully, can even know that he could figure out the exact spells cast on it, realizes -- a touch later -- that the torch itself is a spell, nothing more. But he is not looking for Sunitha. He is looking for the drowned one, the endless winter, the sword that was broken. And he can feel her, sense her somewhere out there, but he knows brutally that he cannot reach her.

She is on the other side. That he can sense her at all, dimly, far away, is a feat. They are not in the same space. All he can feel is the after-image of her magic, her presence. He is alone here. He knows that now for sure.

--

There is an end to the woods. He can find Sunitha's house even in the pitch darkness, there is such power to it, such magic, even if it's not the magic he's looking for. He can almost see it, before

the torch goes out. Nothing but darkness, now.

And something cold enters his veins.

And consciousness begins to leave him.

where the dead go.

acarya

Forget everything you've been told. There is no white light to go toward. There is no welcoming arms of your ancestors or the loved ones who have gone on before. He does not float above his body, looking down at himself while Sunitha lays herself down and injects herself with the same poison. He does not watch her pour a few drops of water from the Ganges into his mouth, or how she holds a few drops in her own mouth while she slides a needle into her arm.

Richard just dies. And he is not conscious then of anything. He is just dead, and it is dark, and there is nothing.

--

When consciousness does return, shadows are moving around him like fog, slowly parting. There is a light, but he does not go toward it; it comes toward him, slow and unwavering. He has never felt such silence in his life; he did not know such silence could exist. Everything is cold. Swimming in the autumnal ocean he was not this cold, but he does not shiver. Shivering is for the living, trying to warm themselves, and Richard is not alive.

The light makes the shadows dissipate and shift aside, but they do not leave. It is a plain lantern, held aloft by the slender hand of his acarya, who appears here in white. Her clothes are white, her hair shrouded. Still everything is thick and difficult and there is no connection between this imagining of a body and the memory of a mind. Her mouth moves but he hears nothing, cannot connect what his eyes see with anything. He knows her but does not have her name or his relationship to her. He knows her and he knows what 'light' is but he is a part of the darkness now, it is wrong to pull him from the darkness, this is what death is.

Only gradually does her name come baack to him, and then her voice, and his own name being said. There is a shadow beside her, still in a sari, but this one is stony gray, unadorned, and her long black hair is unbound, her body is unmarked. He can't remember the shadow, the ghost, but she holds no light and does not call his name. That's

Eleanor

saying

Richard.

--

Oh, her voice is firm. Perhaps he breathes. Perhaps it comes rushing back: he is Richard, he's an apprentice, this is his ritual, his mother and his father and that's Eleanor that's his teacher she's a lawyer they're in Oregon and panic sets in because he's dead, they're all dead, and this isn't silence, this is profound noise, this is a hollow, howling, screaming storm raging all around them, they are caught in it no wonder he can't hear her voice until she's SHOUTING RICHARD

RICHARD

RICHARD TAKE MY HAND

Richard Levasseur

One wonders what it is Eleanor sees when she reaches the other side and begins to look for her apprentice. One wonders if he appears there, a new shadow amongst shadows, if this shadow is formless or perhaps quite tall, if this shadow perhaps just feels like her apprentice.

Regardless she finds him. She finds him and he is coming back to himself, shadows are leaving his face and his hands and peeling back from him, slithering unwillingly away as her light casts them away. He is looking at her then, caught in the absolute silence which is really absolute noise. There is no recognition in his eyes.

And then there is. There is recognition and clarity, and by this alone one can say: this is not true death. In true death there is no clarity, no recognition. No noise. Only silence and a timeless sort of waiting; waiting for that wheel to come around again, to catch one's spirit up in its momentum, lash it screaming and kicking and wailing into the horrid bright world, the shine of operating lights, the gloved and gowned hands of the obstetrician,

congratulations, it's a boy!

There is no obstetrician here, and that grey shadow is not his mother. There is a woman in white. It is his acarya. She is shouting RICHARD, RICHARD, RICHARD TAKE MY HAND and as suddenly as that profound grief had crashed over him, a profound relief crashes over him now. He grabs her hand. He would hug her but he is not sure it is allowed. Then he thinks to hell with what is allowed, I am dead, so he hugs her after all, flinging both arms around her and squeezing.

acarya

She grabs hold of him. Her hand is tight but not warm, not warm like it was in the house and on the beach. She is as cold as he is; it is difficult to feel anything. Even the panic, fear, even loss or confusion is difficult. It is hard to feel anything here, just as it is hard to hear, and see. The most profound loss is scent. There's no smell here, not blood or death or rot, nothing. Existence has flattened out. Death is, as they say, the great equalizer. All who breathe share this destiny.

He's dead. He doesn't care what's allowed. He throws his arms around her, engulfing her, and if she were not dead she might buckle from the intensity of it. As it is she pats his back, rubs it. Tells him it's all right. you're all right. but maybe that's just the tenor of what he hears. For a moment it sounds like someone else talking, someone speaking French, but that brief flicker passes.

Sunitha witnesses. She is as silent and still as one of the statues of gods in her home.

When Richard lets her go, Eleanor passes him the lantern. As it changes hands it changes form: becomes a torch, primitive and fiery. Even before it comes to him he can feel its warmth, feel its magic. That is Sunitha's touch, on that lantern, and it is not a real lantern, not a real torch. That is not fire, though it flickers and moves like fire. That is magic, and it is a beacon. "Keep this," Eleanor says, her voice sounding as hollow as before, as though it echoes within herself, as though she is emptied out,

they are all emptied out.

"You may feel a pull to return to the Great Unmaking," she tells him. This is Sunitha speaking. "Just as you may feel a pull to remain here forever. Resist both. Here you must witness the breaking-down that must come before rebirth, but there is Oblivion here as well. Do not use tamas," she tells him, using the old word for Entropy. "It will draw Oblivion to you. In the Great Unmaking there is renewal and reincarnation; in Oblivion, your soul will be gone forever."

She turns, nodding to Eleanor. Eleanor reaches out, taking Richard's hand again. They walk into the darkness.

He hears a whisper against his ear, neither voice nor wind, and that whisper feels like a touch. It passes. There is no one there.

Richard Levasseur

The lantern becomes a torch. The torch blazes. It feels like magic. It feels more real and solid and present than anything else here, his own body included. As his hand grips the haft, he can feel the roughness of wood, the splinters that, if he's not careful, will work their way into his palm. He can hear the hollow roar of the fire, see the light it casts.

For an instant his memory is confused. He remembers not this most-recent life but one longer ago, a time before electricity, a time when torches such as these were commonplace and necessary. Perhaps he was a soldier. Perhaps he crossed the Channel; perhaps he Crusaded. He was laughing and kind in that lifetime too, but it was not a laughing, kind time. I go where my Lord bids me, he said, and I do as I am told. He cannot remember if it was a man or a god he meant. It didn't matter. In the end it was always blood, blood, such blood and such atrocities committed in the name of Good and Righteousness. His mind shrinks back from the memories. He is glad that spoke of the wheel is behind him now. Death comes so much rarer at his hand in this iteration.

You may feel a pull, Sunitha is telling him. Do not, do not. Your soul will be gone forever.

He looks at her in the light she gave him and he nods. "Thank you," he says. This is as far as she goes, though some apprehensive part of Richard wishes she would stay. She is, he thinks, perhaps even more powerful than his acarya, and more certain and sure of herself in these strange lands than either Richard or Eleanor.

He understands why she leaves them, though; just as he would understand if, at some crucial juncture, Eleanor chose simply to step back and observe. It is his Agama Te, after all.

His hand grips Eleanor's. They walk into darkness.

acarya

As they go, the darkness abates a little, but everything is shadowed, everything is a bit dim, a bit dark. Sunitha recedes, but she is not gone, not completely. She is tethered to them, following far behind, but the longer they go, the harder it is to remember that she is there.

Loneliness pervades everything. It would be easy to despair, here. Every emotion seems to be singular, to be total, to be faced in its entirety and faced entirely alone. But Eleanor does not let go of his hand, and gradually, they pass through that pitch-dark veil between worlds, the endless blackness that, apparently, has an end.

Shapes form like sketches, first pencil and then charcoal, solidifying slowly. He begins to recognize things: this a tree, that a road, a lamp that does not flicker because here, lighting it means using a precious soul reforged into flame. He begins to know that they are near the sea, they are now standing outside of a house, it's a familiar house, it's... Sunitha's house, which -- as he looks back on it -- holds a surprising strength, where other structures are more dim. It is a warning, though, that dark pulsing that comes from it. Strong spiritual magics guard that house, anchored by Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

Eleanor is watching him as things begin to clarify around him and to his young, lively sight that is not quite made to see the other side of death.

"It is called the shadowlands because it is a shadow of the world we know," Eleanor tells him, her voice a bit toneless. God help them if she'd woken up today like she does some days, unable to feel anything but grief. She wouldn't survive here. She'd just let go. She looks around, toward a sea that has no waves, that is black and eternal and terrifyingly still. "It has many names. Beyond it there are places that it's hard to imagine, or describe. Those realms are night." Her eyes come back to him. "This realm is only twilight."

Richard Levasseur

The darkness: it doesn't quite go away. It recedes, though. It's like the tide -- sometimes low, sometimes high. Doesn't mean the ocean isn't always there.

He can see now. And he looks, letting go of Eleanor's hand so he can turn in place. Three sixty. All the way around, shadows shifting and changing on those well-made planes of his face. His eyes, which are always wide and clear, seem huge right now. He's looking at everything, everything he can possibly see.

When his acarya speaks he attends. He looks at her, focusing on her. It doesn't escape him that she is -- flat. Flatter, when today was a good day for her. It doesn't escape him to wonder what it would have been like if it had been one of those days, those grey days. He wonders if she would have come all the same. He wonders if she would have made it back.

He asks, "Is this where the dead go when they die?"

acarya

The sky has no stars. No moon. The sky is slate-colored. Maybe sometimes ghosts look at it and remember things like the color blue, the movement of clouds, the shapes they could take. But there's really nothing there.

He can see sand under his feet, but no matter: everything feels cold and a bit damp right now. There would be no pleasure in digging his toes into this. Just the grate of it on his soles, the stick of it under his nails. Eleanor stays close, and the light from his torch loses and finds her again as he turns; she seems to appear again out of nowhere, but for a moment, for a second, she was so shadowed that she seemed to flicker.

Richard can't see himself, but he's flat, too. His voice doesn't sound right. There's almost no emotion; emotion, even wonder, is a strain to bring up. Yes. Even wonder. Wonder, and joy, and the satisfaction of knowledge pursued and gained: all these things are passions, and passions are a precious resource here. They can only drum them up in themselves at all because they are alived and Awakened. But they're not immune.

It would be unwise to stay here long. Or come here alone. But some do.

She gives him a small nod. "One of the places the dead can go. One of the places they can also get stuck. Ghost stories -- spirits hanging around because of something left undone, some passion they can't let go of -- aren't far from the truth. That's why we place such emphasis on the Good Death, so they can meet their end without remaining tied to what came before." Eleanor takes a breath. "Other things come here, too, from other realms. From here they can reach into the physical world and touch the living. But you would have to talk to a more experienced Spirit mage to learn more about them."

Richard Levasseur

He thinks about this for a moment. He tastes the concepts, imbibes them and digests them. Or -- he would, if he could, but he can't drum up the interest, the keen curiosity that he has come to take for granted and she has come to know. He simply absorbs it, here. Analyzes it for a moment, then moves on.

"If there are many places the dead can go, why do we come here for our Agama Te?"

acarya

"Because most pass through here, at very least," she tells him. "I only say that there are other places because even the Awakened don't know everything."

She walks towards him. "The thing is, one path you may find yourself walking will keep you on the boundary of this place more often than most living. You may need to speak with the dead, or find them. You may need something from the shadowlands that has been lost. Before you can really call yourself a Euthanatos, you need to know what is on the other side of the Shroud.

"And should you kill, even rarely, you need to know what you are sending that soul to. This place." She looks around, exhales, but it hardly makes noise. Small wonder they've both chosen to stay here a bit, where Sunitha's house seems so strong, so real, so safe. "I hear nightmarish stories about this place. Where ghosts enslave one another, strong to weak, and forge lost souls into everything from coins to walls, trade them as currency. There are wraiths who spend their afterlives just trying to walk in the skinlands again. And Oblivion winds like a snake through everything, seeking souls to devour, to destroy, removing them from the Wheel entirely."

Eleanor shakes her head. "Think of this place as an interruption. Souls are bound for eternity, whatever that eternity might be: a heaven, a hell, a purgatory, a paradise, an emptiness, or -- and I believe this is the majority of them -- a reincarnation. But so many, especially these days, do not die in any kind of acceptance or peace. Even those who want to... sometimes the will is too forceful, the mind too strong, and the spirit can't truly rest. Some of them, after a time in the shadowlands, manage to really let go. They move on. But this place wants to hold you. And the other things here want to hold you. Oblivion wants to unravel you.

"Some Euthanatoi," she says slowly, "are devoted to entering the shadowlands to try and clean it up. I think it is too dangerous, and too overwhelming a task, to be of much use. There are spirits here who are older than whole civilizations, and even an Awakened mage is a poor match for them. We have enough to do on the side of the living, I think. Including living, ourselves."

Richard Levasseur

She tells him more, now, than she has ever told him before of this place. He has never asked much. She has never volunteered information. He thinks he understands: after all, how does one describe a place that is so defined by its flatness, its silence, its not-ness?

She tells him, too, a little more than Sunitha had. The Great Unmaking, that mage had told him. Oblivion. And staying here. Three paths only. To those branchings his acarya adds more. Heavens and hells and purgatories and paradises and nothingness which is not quite the same as Oblivion. A handful of the many, many, many, perhaps infinite paths a soul can take after it is gleaned from the world of the living. Before it is reborn -- if ever it is reborn.

The fell economy of the place horrifies him. The strong enslave the weak. The powerful and old forge the weak and lost into objects, things, coins, currency. And everywhere, inescapable, perhaps inevitable if one remains here long enough: Oblivion. Richard's mind conjures the image of a snake made of shadow, but he knows that is not what it is. It is not a thing at all; that is the point. It is the very definition of nothing.

"Can you show me ... " he trails off; struggles for a while to put it into words. "Can you show me some of the souls that reside here? The ones that are bound here, and the ones who are moving through?"

acarya

There are some who consider the Great Unmaking and Oblivion to be one and the same; Sunitha does not, Eleanor does not. Unmaking breaks one down, but there is a return. Oblivion just eats. And perhaps in practice the two are impossible to tell apart, and are to be equally feared. Who knows. Eleanor lost much when she lost Henrik.

The depth of understanding she once had of the sphere of spirit was one of those things she lost. She is a neophyte here with him, here to protect him as much as guide him. She tells him what she knows, what she thinks she knows, and tucks away knowledge of what to send him off to find for himself, if he chooses; but she does not think he will become a spirit mage of the Euthanatos. She does not think he will seek that far into death, though perhaps he may learn to speak with the idealized avatars of elements and living things. She wonders so much about who he will be, what he will do.

She hopes he can hold on to the wonder that, even here and now, flickers occasionally in his eyes. It is a strong passion.

She hopes nothing comes, hungry for it.

"The departed are not, in general, fond of Wheel-turners," she says, slowly, a bit hesitantly. "We meddle. We send them into Unmaking, we smash their fetters, and some less moral necromancers... do other things to them. There is a whole world here, with its own politics and economies, and I am not strong enough in this sphere to keep us safe from that world, should we walk into the middle of it as tourists."

Eleanor takes a breath. "But I think there is a place where I can show you, more safely." She holds out her hand to him. "It will be a long walk, though."

Richard Levasseur

Richard's smile is thin, thin as Eleanor's often are. He can't help it. Here, all things feel thin. Thin and worn-out, almost worn-through. Everything is a shade of what it was. A shadow.

Still: curiosity. Still: wonder. A dread, horror-bound wonder at times, true. He comes again and again to what she said: the strong and the weak, the forging of souls into things. He understands why some amongst their order want to come here. Want to clear the place out, banish souls onward to one fate or another, sweep it all clean and dissipate -- this.

He understands, too -- intuitively, without even having seen the true denizens and masters of this land -- why that would be dangerous. Deadly. Nigh-impossible.

He takes her hand again, unhesitatingly; trustingly. His fingers fold around hers. Neither of them have any heat to give here. Even sensation seems numbed -- he knows the pressure of her fingers but not the feel of them. All the same he gives her that smile, which is as much a smile as he can manage.

"I don't mind the walk," he says.

and so he dies.

Richard Levasseur

This is how Richard spends what could be the last days of his life:

He reads quite a bit. He spends hours reading in bed, his feet crossed atop the pillow-padded box he put there to extend the insufficient length of his bed -- not textbooks for class or treatises on magic but books that he reads for pleasure, novels and surveys of subjects he finds interesting. He skips class quite a bit too. He calls his family. He sees his friends. He hangs out at the many independent cafes dotting the campus and its vicinity; stays there late into the evening hours, has conversations about atoms and shakespeare and the origin of life, about hopes and dreams and what they want to be when they all Grow Up. He meets old friends. He makes new ones. He does not, even obliquely drop hints of what he might like to be said about him at his funeral, or what they should remember him for, or ... any of it. Any of it.

He swims, too. Particularly the day before they leave. He does not fast, not strictly, but he eats less because he does not want to eat. He goes to the gym late at night when the treadmills and ellipticals and weightracks are all quiet, when the pool is abandoned. He floats on his back, eyes closed, moving his arms and legs with the same instinctive thoughtless slow regularity of sea-mammals, sharks. He clears himself this way. Clarifies himself. Purifies himself.

--

It is Friday evening, and they are flying out of DIA. They are in business class again, which is an expense his Agama Te has made for him, and which is again an expense he argued against and then accepted with grace and gratitude.

She stares out the window. He has the aisle seat. His hands rest on the armrests, too symmetric to be natural. He is, of course, nervous. He stares straight ahead and he obviously isn't listening to the flight attendant giving her safety spiel; his thoughts are his own, and they are far from here.

"If I don't make it back," he says quietly, "will you find some way to tell my family? Some story they can understand?"

acarya

[Despair]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 7) ( success x 1 )

acarya

Eleanor has died many times. She has died as Eleanor but she has died as many others. She remembers some of these; they come to her in flashes. One was a little child, attacked during a home invasion, killed not as a bystander but by brutal intention. Once she was a palm reader and a bit of a madam, and she wore the pendant that Eleanor now keeps against her skin, found after generations of being lost. Once she had a twin brother, and they were both dark of eye and hair and pale of skin, they were beautiful and terrible and Eleanor knows how broken she was in that life, how blackhearted, just as she knows that the palm reader trusted strangers too much and loved ones not at all, just as she knows that her soul may always carry a remnant of the helpless terror she once felt as a child being murdered in their own home.

When they go to Seaside, Eleanor will die again. She will go on the sojourn with her student and with a master of their Tradition, and this means that she will die one more time. The preparation is different for her. She meditates. She holds yoga poses for endless counts, a spinal twist that never ends, a sense of openness in herself. She lifts her chest and her throat and herself to the sky until she trembles from the vulnerability of it and curls into the fetal position on her mat, tucked in on herself until she feels safe again, permitting herself to weep slightly. She eats less, too. She spends a great deal of time alone, often outside until it is too cold to do so.

Some days, the losses she has suffered and the loneliness she feels are too much, and she at once fears the shadowlands and longs for them.

During one of those days in between, she goes dancing. She dances with her hair whipping out and her feet flying, twirling in and out of her partner's arms, til her cheeks are flushed and her breath is ragged. She goes for a run so long and so hard that she throws up by the side of the trail. She gets on a swingset, for fuck's sake. She feels herself in her body every way she can.

But she also works. She makes her dinner, she grades papers, she goes on with life as though nothing is changing and nothing has changed. People die every day. People can die any day.

--

When they fly out, she is quiet and she is dim. He's seen her like this before, the edges of her seem strained, the corners of her eyes are tight. She looks so weary, she looks almost ill, she looks

like maybe she's thinking of not coming back.

He speaks, and she turns, looking up at him because even seated, he is much taller than she is. He asks her a question that makes her brows furrow together. "If there's any way to do that, I'll try," she says, her tone a bit flat as is, but hopefully by now he knows it has nothing to do with him.

Richard Levasseur

It is one of those days for her. Not the worst he's ever seen her -- and he's only seen her that way the once -- but close. Yes, close. The flatness to her affect. The flatness in her eyes. The flatness of her very presence, as though what was vital in her, what was alive and beating and struggling and breathing, was already gone. Long gone. Torn away.

Here is where I felt him.

He has known her long enough that he knows it has nothing to do with him. He has known her long enough that he tries very hard and usually succeeds in not taking it personally. There were times when he wondered -- was it something he said, something he did, something he could have changed? But as with all rhythms of the heart, this one is its own master. It comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and some days she can hardly get out of bed, and others she is snapping and vibrant, a live wire of icy energy.

She'll try, she says. He glances at her, sideways and down. Smiles a little.

"Thank you," he says, and means it. It is all he can ask for, that she tries.

acarya

That was cold. That flatness, that distance, that frown even. She realizes it a moment later, recognizes it because Richard doesn't take it personally, looks at her and smiles a little and means what he says and she feels bad. She feels bad anyway but this is just... sadness, too. Guilt, a bit.

Eleanor reaches over with one of her hands, which is cool today, like her heart just doesn't have the energy to send warm blood into her extremities, and touches his, holding it for a moment. "Do everything you can to make it back," she tells him, with as much earnestness as she can muster, as much affection as she is capable of showing. It's exhausting. She wants to curl up and cry and sleep after the words are out, after the energy has left her. But she holds his hand so tightly, and looks him in his eyes, and gives him something to hold onto in return.

"I will do everything I can to get you back," she promises him, too. This does not exhaust her to say, does not take earnestness she has to drum up to share with him. This is a hard promise, a truth. She is his acarya. And this is why she doesn't tell him that if he doesn't make it back, then chances are, she isn't, either.

Richard Levasseur

His hand grips hers. He is at once holding on to her and giving her something to hold on to.

"I will." This is a promise he makes. And this, a promise he acknowledges: "And I know you will."

A little later, the plane lifts beneath them. Pushes them into the air. It is not a long flight to Oregon, or at least: not so long as the flight to Vienna. Still, Richard leans his seat back and closes his eyes. Tries to rest.

acarya

[I AM CHANGING NPC's NAME. It is not Joy Sharpe, it is Sunitha Khare.]

acarya

Eleanor doesn't rest. She is exhausted. She is very tired, and she doesn't want to be awake, doesn't want to be aware. But she is. And she can't sleep for some reason. So when Richard leans back, she keeps holding his hand. She seems to forget about it, but she hasn't. Right now, awareness of their hands held together is part of what keeps her tethered to life and to wanting-to-live, as the plane rises and the world drops away.

--

It is very late at night when they get to Portland International and disembark to get on the much smaller plane that will take them out to Seaside. It's a resort town, and this is the off season, so the plane is mostly empty. They take their carry-ons and cram into the smaller seats and then it's just a hop, a quick zip out to the town that is home to fewer than seven thousand people. They pick up a rental car. They have to drive south, all the way to the southernmost tip of Seaside, past some houses that border on palatial, all along Sunset Boulevard til they reach a house that is more reminiscent of the bungalows that used to be enough for oceanside living, before everyone wanted a mansion to go with their expensive property.

Everything here is wet and chilly at the moment. But they can hear the sea, smell the Pacific everywhere. It is pitch dark but for stars and a few dim, widely spaced street lamps. The light is on beside the front door. The walls of the house are a faded teal blue that peels in places, that looks almost colorless in the dark. Eleanor and Richard park the rental and pop the trunk to get their suitcases out, and by that time a woman has come to the door wearing a casual black, maroon, and orange sari. She is marked with tilaka on her brow and her forearms, white ash and red and yellow pastes dried to her skin. Her hair is tied back, and though her nose is pierced it bears only a single gold ring. Something about her -- though she looks different from every single one of her neighbors and only looks even moreso like this --

does not seem strange at all.

Sunitha is a little taller than Eleanor but nowhere near Richard's height. She is quiet as they come up the steps, holding the door for them as they go inside. The surfaces are clean, the rugs thick. It is a normal house; there are no knives or swords displayed. Just Sunitha, no pets or children or others coming running. Sunitha, and Sunitha's home, feel suffused faintly with a darkness, a cloudy and drugged-feeling depth to it, as though darkness and nightfall were an incense that could be breathed in through the nostrils. And yet: cleanliness. The feeling of a slate erased, a counter wiped clean,

which makes the feeling of a knife being shoved into one's chest seem so at odds. Yet this is the feeling, a visceral penetration through the heart, that one gets in her presence. She is dark, she is pure, and she is deadly, and she is reverent. All these things -- the darkness, the cleanness, the violence -- are given up in service of something else, something high and holy. They are offerings. They are a part of her, this woman who serves the Wheel.

When the door is closed and they stand in her entryway of her coastal, comfortable home, she puts her palms together, inclining her head. "Namaste," to both of them.

Eleanor has taught Richard what this really means. Especially among the magi, especially among the Euthanatoi. That which is divine in her, that which is Awakened in her, bows to that which is Awakened with in them. Her soul, her avatar, her atman, recognizes and appreciates and bows to their souls, their avatars, their atmans. And Eleanor, who used up almost everything she had to reassure Richard, delves a little deeper now to touch her palms lightly together, incline her head to Sunitha, and say in response,

"Namaste."

Richard Levasseur

Here they are so close to the sea that the sea pervades everything. Gives a certain moisture to the planks in the porch; peels paint from wood as though to reduce everything, everything down to its most fundamental form. The ocean is vital and powerful and everlasting and mercilessly, endlessly erosive. Each grain of sand was once a stone. Each stone, once a mountain.

It seems familiar to him. The deep boom in the night. The wet wind. The smell of the sea. All these things, they remind him of childhood trips to Monterey and down the highway to Big Sur. Reminds him, on a more instinctual, half-remembered level, of infancy and toddlerhood on the Normandy coast, a couple hours' drive from Paris. These are the memories, imprints, that follow him in his life. He didn't compete in saltwater sports. He doesn't swim in the ocean now. And yet when he casts, it's the scent and taste and rhythm of the ocean that fills the air around him. Cool and blue. Deep and shimmering.

Vital. Patient. Erosive.

They meet Sunitha Khare there on the coast. They follow her into her simple, spare home. She greets them; that which is divine in her bows to that which is divine in them. Richard follows suit. His murmured Namaste lacks a little in pronunciation, but not in sincerity.

He adds, "Thank you for doing this for us."

acarya

They have something in common there, Richard and his acarya, but it is not the same. He feels like the ocean; she feels like the sort of death you find there. It lacks the vitality but not the power, the eternity but not the mercilessness. But to feel her magic is to feel frozen in it, drowning and drowned but not eroded, not becoming one with the sea again, returning to it as one returns to the Wheel. You are not dead, you are not rebirthed, you are dying, halted at the moment when you know that your lungs will never pull in another blessing of air, halted at the moment when the water rushes in and you stop fighting it, because you can't anymore.

Eleanor does not carry an ounce of panic in her, though. There's no fear of that. Even if a part of her soul is forever standing in that moment, she has come to peace with it. She has learned to live in it, and she feels no terror at it. Imagine the strength that comes from that acceptance.

Look at the strength that comes from that acceptance.

--

They stand on a rug, and there are others in the living room and dining room, which they can see to either side of the entryway. Thick rugs, intricate and colorful and deep. There are photographs everywhere, landscapes and family members and friends and memories. There are also, yes, images of gods both carved and painted, but they are household gods, friendly gods with smiling faces and bright bindis. They are not Sunitha's only gods. They are the ones that protect the home, though, that promise the things that life needs. Those gods, the ones that slaughter and the ones that drink blood and the ones that hold swords, also live here, but not in the living room and dining room.

Sunitha has lowered her hands. She simply nods to him. "Let us eat tonight," she says. "Then we will fast for a night and a day, before we enter the underworld. There are rooms upstairs for you both. Eleanor has told me that you swim," she adds, specifically to Richard. "Perhaps tomorrow you will go into the sea."

Richard Levasseur

So that is what they do.

They eat tonight. It is late, and later still by Richard's body-clock, and the fare is as meatless as Eleanor's is. He discovers he has an appetite all the same, and it is prodigious: he devours whatever is set before him, lentils and rice and millet and peas and spinach and cheese and buttermilk. He mops his plate clean with his naan. He goes for seconds.

When they're done, it's late in the night. There was perhaps a little conversation over dinner. Mundanities. Or perhaps they spoke little if nothing at all. Richard doesn't mind either way. He is becoming accustomed to silence. Used to unburdened quiet.

He helps with the dishes, and then they are shown to their rooms: clean and neat, but comfortable. Everything they need, plus a little extra. Nothing wasteful.

Richard doesn't go immediately to bed. He showers and he brushes his teeth and then he sits in Eleanor's room for a while, crosslegged on the floor beside her bed. He stays there for her company, and to provide her with his. It is all he knows how to do when she is like this.

--

They fast the next day. They eat nothing; they drink only clear water. In the morning Richard meditates a while, but his heart does not calm easily today. He soon gets up, and then, for lack of anything better to do, he helps out around the house: the minor daily upkeep necessary when one lives so close to the ocean. Sand gets on the porch. Salt must be wiped clear, lest it crust and corrode.

In the afternoon he wades into the ocean. He swims, and this time it is swimming. He pushes himself: cuts through the surf, pulls himself stroke by strong stroke through the choppy coastal waters. The salt spray that flings in his face. The waves that pound over his head, rolling him under again and again. When he breaks past the surf it is calmer. It is cold and it is bottomless, and when he turns on his back to float, the waves bear him back to shore, beat by beat.

The sun is beginning to set when he washes up. When he walks up from the edge of the sea, tired, weak from exertion without sustenance. Mind emptied; that silence, that unburdened quiet. In the evening, he reads.

acarya

[Despair]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

acarya

The meal is a surprisingly fragrant and filling one. Eleanor is a good cook, and since coming under her tutelage Richard has likely found himself eating more meatless dishes than he ever really had an inclination to do otherwise. Sunitha, however, knows what she's about in the kitchen. Unlike Eleanor, it seems that Sunitha does not keep or tolerate meat in her house even for guests, but unlike Eleanor, Sunitha's vegetarianism is religious. They eat richly seasoned food that has a kick, but not as much of one as it could.

They eat quietly, for Sunitha is not a talkative person and because all three of them are preparing for a ritualized death the following night. There is a funereal air, particularly in the lateness of the night, as though they are holding a wake. Eleanor does not eat as much as Richard, nor does Sunitha, but Sunitha keeps placing food before him, keeps nodding when he looks at the spoons and platters as though to inquire if there is more. She smiles less than Eleanor does, sitting on the floor cushions around the low table that they eat at. When the eating has slowed, when most of the food is gone, they clean. Richard clearing the table, Eleanor putting away leftovers, Sunitha loading the dishwasher, Richard wiping the table, Eleanor wiping the counter, Sunitha then guiding them up a narrow staircase to their rooms.

Soft and comfortable. Quiet. The windows are cracked and the air has a chill to it, breeze moving the drapes. There are quietly ticking clocks. In Richard's room, there is a god standing atop a desk that faces the bed. There is a mirror behind the god, also facing the bed. Brahm is large, and made of sandstone. He has four heads, four faces, four arms, his clothes painted red. He holds prayer beads, a book, a scepter, and the Vedas. Parts of the god are accented with gold leaf, chipped in places. He rides a swan, and atop his crown is a lotus flower. Laid out on the desk before him are flowers, freshly cut flowers that have not yet, not quite, begun to wilt. This was prepared for him. The Creator, to watch over him.

Sunitha bows to him before she leaves him there, Namaste again. He has time to bathe and to wash up and then he is at Eleanor's door, coming in to find a similar altar in her room, but this one is not to Brahm . On the desk, which has no mirror, there is a large god, but this one is Shiva. Shiva the Auspicious one, the Simple Lord, the Destroyer, the Transformer, slayer of demons, father and householder, both fearsome and benevolent. The god in Eleanor's room is also surrounded by flowers, red and yellow and white. He is a yogi in lotus position, watching the room with his third eye, wearing a serpent around his neck, and the crescent moon and the river Ganga both flow from his hair. His hands hold a trishula, which resembles a trident, and a damaru, a small drum. He sits on a tiger's skin. His wrists are encircled with bracelets made of human skulls.

Eleanor is already laying in bed when Richard comes; she doesn't get up but tells him to enter, and when he hesitates, she tells him to come in. So he sits on the rug beside her low bed, and if they speak, perhaps they speak of the gods in their rooms. Perhaps she tells him, if he does not know, who they are, and how they connect to the eternal forces of Dynamism and Entropy. Perhaps she tells him, because she knows, that Sunitha is one of those Euthanatoi who almost never kills, that this is why she wanted Sunitha to take them on the Re sojourn, among other reasons. But perhaps they do not speak at all, and simply listen to the ticking of the clock, with Richard's head leaning against the side of the mattress and Eleanor reminded, on each breath that sometimes hurts to take, that she is not really alone, not entirely.

--

The morning comes early. Sunitha is up before them. The kitchen has been cleaned. She has already washed herself, dressed, braided her hair, re-applied her tilaka. She is wearing a dark blue sari that looks to be dotted with stars and trimmed with gold braid. There is water set out on the table, a tall pitcher and a tray of glasses. There is no broth, no gelatin, nothing else.

Eleanor is also awake before sunrise as well; she is washed and dressed simply, in charcoal-grey leggings, bare feet -- as Sunitha -- and a loose, long top of muted yellow. She and Sunitha have saluted the sun and practiced yoga, and when Richard leaves his meditation, he is quietly offered water. There is almost a joyful, anticipatory air; Eleanor seems refreshed, seems more alive today. Her hands are warm when she touches Richard's arm in greeting, there is more color in her cheeks and no darkness beneath her eyes. She likes it here.

They go about their day, sipping water here and there. Richard sweeps the porches, front and back, head ducked to not hit the overhang at the very edge. There's a rainy wetness to everything. Sunitha plays music, and the windows are opened. When he goes to the ocean, the older Euthanatoi do not follow him, not at first. They leave him to the sea, into the salt water that purifies, that saps his strength and cleanses him deeply, washes him with the rituals of heartbeat and livelihood.

When he leaves the water he finds Eleanor standing on the beach, her feet still bare, her hair loose and windblown, the way it seems to be most of the time, always a bit chaotic near the ends. She has a huge towel for him, because it is autumn and it is cold outside. They don't speak, until they're back at the house, and she tells him -- though surely he knows -- he should drink some more water.

--

At sunset, flowers are cleared from the house. Sunitha takes them to the living room, atop the enormus rug. Furniture has been moved to the sides of the room. They are clean. Their bodies are purified with rituals both shared and individual. The windows are closed. Incense is lit, and the three of them sit together on the rug, meditating.

Sunitha took him aside before this. She told him some of what would happen to him. She told him to breathe deeply. She told him to break down his outer walls, to let himself be taken by whatever comes. She told him that the injection would take him to the very edge of death, and by magic they would cross that edge, and by magic they would return. She told him that Eleanor will go first, so that she will be waiting for him when he crosses over.

She is speaking now, in this dark room with the waves pounding the shore outside, with smoke filling the room. After a day and night in such a clean, crisply-aired home, it is becoming oppressive trying to breathe here. It is becoming difficult to focus. It feels like they will die like this, asphyxiated on the floor.

Sunitha is speaking in English now, not in Hindi. Richard must help her lay Eleanor down. Eleanor has the tiniest of holes in her inner arm where Sunitha has removed the needle. Eleanor is growing limp, and does not fight, does not resist, as Sunitha places her hands over her heart in prayer position. Sunitha is chanting mantras still, pouring something from a small vial into Eleanor's mouth; it only looks like water. Sunitha's magic, pure and reverent and clean and violent, is warping the room, turning it dark at the edges, making it hard to see anything through the shadows, through the smoke.

His acarya is dying, and dead, and motionless on the ground, a searing picture with her hair spread over the rug and her face at peace. He smells flowers and ashes; Sunitha is smoothing something on his brow with her thumb, his head swimming. It's hard to breathe. Sunitha, who is very strong, is gently easing him to lie on his back beside Eleanor. Something is tight around his upper arm, and something cold enters his veins, rapidly heated by his body. He can feel his heart pounding in every limb, feel it in his head, feel his life, his beautiful creative athletic funny friendly life slowly draining from his limbs. Even if he wants to resist, it is difficult.

For there seems no other way out. The room is dark and the air is thick and difficult to breathe; if he lets go, if he gives in, perhaps then he will find relief.

Sunitha is holding his hands over his heart in prayer position. All he can see in the darkness is the gleaming white of her tilak, the thin white lines that meet between her eyebrows and streak upward to her hairline, the red dot between them pulsing like the heartbeat, like the life

that is slowly

leaving him.

Richard Levasseur

At sunset the flowers fade. There is something in Richard, something older than his years, older than this brief span on earth from the normandy coast to the californian bay to those young jagged mountains of colorado to this point here, again, at the lip of the sea,

something ageless, something endless, something ever-dying and ever-renewed, that understands that. He helps with this, as he has helped quietly and unasked with all other things since his arrival. Gathers the flowers and takes them outside. It seems disrespectful to toss them in the trash when some of their number lay offerings to the gods, and so Richard takes them to the sea. He lets the surf take them as the last of the western light clears from the skies.

They are far from major cities here, and as the horizon turns red, then purple, then black, the stars overhead seem innumerable. Their light is cold and clear. He stands there a moment in the night, breathing in salt and wind, thinking of the time it takes for those stars to shine on his face. Eight minutes from the sun to the earth. Years, years, decades, centuries, millennia for those far-flung astral bodies. The light that reaches him now left those stars when rome rose, when carthage fell, when the first aryan sects painted their faces and bodies with the first ritual marks of their gods,

when dinosaurs roamed the earth,

when life began in the sea.

--

Inside the room is filling with incense. It feels oppressive; it feels a little like the way Eleanor's magic can sometimes feel, though smokier; hotter. Eleanor's magic is so cold. Like those benthic depths he knows he can sink to if he swims out far enough, if he flags, if he just

lets him go.

He helps Sunitha lay his acarya down. He helps Sunitha arrange her body, lay her hands. Sunitha is chanting a mantra and there is poison in his acarya's veins, something-that-is-not-water on his acarya's tongue. Sunitha's magic rises, clear as the water they drank, deadly as the salt in the sea. The edges of his vision are warping and shredding, and his acarya is dying,

his acarya is dying,

he is suddenly and entirely overcome and he cannot speak of it, he cannot say why, why now when he has prepared for this for a night and a day, a week, nearly a month. He cannot say why. Only that it is. There are tears on his cheeks. He is overcome and weeping in silence, his hands gripping Eleanor's as Eleanor's hands gently, gradually, slowly grow still and slack and cold. He bows his brow to his knuckles, and he knows it is his turn now but he cannot. He needs a moment. Surely Sunitha understands: it is grief and it is sorrow and it is the panic of being left alone. He is briefly ashamed; is he not a death-mage? is he not a student of the Wheel? why should he weep, when god has decreed for him and for her,

another and another and another?

It does not matter. He forgives himself: when Henrik was taken from Eleanor, she pulls the very moorings of reality loose in her wrath and her grief. She was a stronger mage then than she is now, and a stronger mage then than he can imagine being now. It was a transgression, and a sin, but: it is for forgiveness that we are made to sin.

--

And then it is his turn. His breath has evened. His eyes have cleared. It occurs to him that he gets his wish after all: to die in a house with those he cares for and those who care for him. He does have an audience, true, but it is a small one and one cannot expect everything.

He does not resist as he is eased to the floor; he helps her at first, and then he does not do even that. He lets go, passive, trusting, letting her strong arms set him down. Once upon a time he was not so tall, he was very small indeed, and once upon a time his mother and his father bore him easily from place to place. Laid him down to sleep. It is like that. There is a brief sting and then a brief chill. He shivers,

and then it is only instinct to fight. It is the great struggle for survival, which is what burns alight in us all. It is what gives the Wheel its momentum. He is not ashamed of this,

not ashamed of the way his limbs tremble and convulse, not ashamed of the way his lungs gasp for air, not ashamed of the way his heart pounds and pounds and races and fights until it begins to skip,

and skip,

and flutter,

and fail.

There, the gleaming white of Sunitha's tilak. Those thin white lines streaking up toward heaven. There the red dot between, beating like a heart, burning like the setting of a sun. The light fades. The stars have grown silent. Night falls; and so he dies.