CoR Break

Everything was fucked up, in all the wrong ways.

It wasn't that Rhetta didn't expect things to be screwed up. That was the default state of things, as far as she was concerned. She'd been raised in the Bloodstones. Something was always screwed up, and someone always had to sort things out. It was just that things were usually screwed up in a certain set of ways that were at least somewhat predictable - and, more importantly, the people figuring out how they got sorted were not her.

She was all for doing what needed to be done, whatever it was that happened to be. That was what she was good at. That was what being an Enforcer was all about. Someone pointed her at a problem, and she solved the problem. That was how it had been, and it was how she'd expected it to be when she got back.

Things had changed. People had changed. Some of them were dead. Others weren't doing what she had expected them to be doing. Others expected her to do things that she didn't expect to be doing, and it all felt wrong.

The attack would have gone better, if Baron had been there.

She dragged herself out of her thoughts, not for the first time. She'd done what she could, to fix things up. Some things didn't need a whole lot of direction. She could still spot problems, deal with them before they became bigger problems, because part of what she was supposed to do was keep things from getting to the point where they needed to bother whoever was in charge. Eventually, though, she'd run out of the obvious and had to deal with thinking about things. It hadn't gone well.

She'd tried to sleep, a bit, in little cat naps. That hadn't gone well either. It wasn't safe. It wasn't actually the potential threat of attack by horrifying monsters that made it unsafe, at least, not in her head. It was that the Den was the place where things were safe, and she didn't have that to fall back on. None of them did. The Railyard was trying to be something like that, but it wasn't, not yet. Not for her.

She'd gotten out, instead, and just rode her bike around the city for a while. There wasn't much going on at night. It was quiet, and gave her something to do besides think about things. It gave her a chance to see if the city had changed as much in the last five years as everything else had. She didn't cause problems, even if it was tempting, but stirring up trouble was the sort of thing that you didn't do when half your Pack was in the hospital. Mostly, it was just an excuse to be out, moving around, not being locked in a box like she had been the last five years. That felt strange, too.

Dawn happened. At least that was still predictable. Riding around squinting into the sun wasn't as enjoyable as riding in the dark, so she let herself find somewhere to stop. It ended up being the same little coffee place where she and Ragenard had started having it out with each other. There was a lot of unfinished business in that conversation, but she'd have to have it later, once he'd gotten over the whole being unconscious thing. She was a little pissed off at him, for that. Among other things.

The place was open. Rhetta supposed that was normal, for a coffee place. It smelled like coffee, which was familiar in a comfortable way. It was a shame how it tasted, but it wasn't like she was here to drink any of it. The guy who ran the place had very obviously had some sort of history with Ragenard, and history was exactly what she needed right now - something to go on, something to make sense of all of this. Something to give her some sort of understanding of exactly what the fuck was wrong with everything these days, and why it couldn't just be fucked up in the usual sense.

She pushed the door open, scanning the room for threats. There were always threats, it was just a matter of marking them and finding the best place to deal with them. She picked a seat off to one side, where she could watch the room and the door. It was quiet. That suited her, she thought.

"Yew cannot seeing into back door from there," Man said from behind the counter, as he straightened out his short form and stood from where he had been bent down, rummaging beneath the counter. He placed two boxes upon the counter without a further word, their tops covered in a light dusting of dark gray dust. He did not move to open either of them, nor did he make any further commentary.

Above his right shoulder on the wall opposite the counter were the expected series of signs any small shop was virtually expected to have: A pithy saying warning against requesting credit, the local ordinance on advertising truth, a calendar with the handy age cut-off for alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, a cartoon coffee cup proclaiming the virtues of caffeine, and a sign which read: "Counter service only".

"It's your place," Rhetta said, in the same even tone he had used. "You're watching the back door." She'd been there before, after all, with Ragenard, and she knew where the back door led and how carefully the proprietor had paid attention to anyone who might be going through it back then. He wouldn't be the sort to leave it as a weak point in his defenses - and he was defending this place, even if he seemed unassuming. Ragenard had implied as much.

She moved, though, towards the counter, as that had been indicated. She wasn't precisely here for service, but it would have been impolite just to take up space. For some businesses, that was just part of the arrangement - having a Bloodstone or two around taking up space as a deterrent to unwanted individuals was something that had happened often enough, at least back in the times when there had been enough of them. These days, she wasn't as certain.

This wasn't one of those places, though, and so she came to rest against the counter, scanning the room she'd just left and the way she'd come in, with a flicker of her eyes for the area behind the counter and the door to the back, just in case.

"Are you going to tell me what that is, or wait for me to ask?"

"Wait, patience testing." Man replied with a beaming smile. "Not big Bloodstone thing, easy how do you say, lever?" he added with a small gesture that looked like digging a hole. "You're..." he seemed to grapple with the words, pulling them out of the air with the flexing of his fingers, "Rapid? Too rapid, for the one meant to be the slow-burn, yes?".

It was quickly evident that Ragenard understood this man better than Rhetta did. He was trying, though, and she gave him credit for that. She'd wondered, on their first encounter, if he had less words than Draaven. It seemed he didn't. His Lutetian was shit. She didn't begrudge him that, either. At least he'd answered her question.

"I don't know what you're asking. Who's the slow burn?" She never knew how other people saw each other, at least not until they'd told her. Ragenard, maybe, but he wasn't here, and she wasn't his. Maybe that was the point. She contemplated, and went back to the part he'd been direct about, since that was at least comprehensible.

"What's that?" He'd wanted her to ask about the boxes, and she wasn't going to play games about whether or not she would or not. Asking didn't bother her, and she did want to know - less because she was curious about what was in the box, more because she was curious about what it meant to him. Cues were important, when figuring people out, and he was still a relative unknown. Since he was a relative unknown who evidently knew something about Ragenard, that meant she needed to figure him out enough that he'd be known sooner rather than later.

"You are the slow burn, yes," Man said with a twinkle in his eyes. "Slow watching. Slow seeing, to go with the slow being." He punctuated the last by raising his left fist and contorting his fingers in slow and jerky motions before snapping his hand into the shape of a canine shadow puppet. He laughed, as if hearing a good joke only he was privy to. "One of Rah-zhuh-nar's favorites—you are, Margarhetta."

He tapped the first of the boxes, releasing a small puff of dust that did not seem to faze him, despite the cloud hanging around his face. It was a square box, perhaps two feet deep, made of Losenjian Blackwood, a darkly gleaming wood that radiated opulence—wholly incongruous in the dingy shop. A shape like a long, sinuous serpent with clawed feet was burned onto its top, which opened smoothly despite the apparent lack of hinges, the corners unfurling like petals in an intricate display of wood joinery akin to art.

"Old gift from faraway place," he said with an exaggerated nose wrinkle. "No coffee there, then." He turned the intricate box around towards Rhetta. In contrast with the dustiness its exterior displayed, the inside was a collection of neatly arranged small vacuum sealed transparent sachets of loose tea. Their packaging was covered in an intricate calligraphic script that appeared to have been hand-drawn with great care. Flecks of gold and something green like crushed glass—emerald to be precise—were mixed into the ink.

On the middle of each small bundle was a small paper tag marring the centerpiece design, with the tea's name written—with run of the mill marker—in Lutetian. Several varieties of green, white, yellow, red, and black leaves and powders were awaiting inspection. "You no order coffee, time last here. Hospitality, important to me."

He tapped the second box even more gently than the first. It was much thinner, perhaps only deep enough to hold a sheaf of papers...or serve as a display space for things that were as flat as their provenance. Its cheapness was evident, barely particle board next to the thick box of tea. It was nowhere near as timeless—they were in fact always on sale at the military surplus store next door—yet it was imparted full of mystery all the same, by Man's deferential handling.

It was a medal display case. Like the tea box, it bore a pyrogravure, though methodical and utilitarian rather than artfully balanced. Man turned it around but did not open it. It read:

His Majesty's Loyal & Honorable Legion
[Third Mobile Armored Division - Leftenant 1st Classed]
[R. Guiscard]

"This one, full of tales that a man is made up from, is right words?"

She considered this first statement, without hurry. It was cryptic, but she had to wonder if it was cryptic because he didn't speak the language well enough, or if it was cryptic because he liked being cryptic, or possibly some combination of the two.

"Just Rhetta," she said, eventually. She wasn't surprised that he knew her name; she would have wanted to, if she were him. Margaret was not a name she'd ever gone by, though. She'd been Rhetta since she was old enough not to want to be Maggie.

They'd called her Margaret in prison. It was that sort of place. Mostly, she'd thought they'd done it to piss her off - little microaggressions, trying to get a rise out of her, trying to get her to do something that would give them an excuse to keep her in there longer. She hadn't taken the bait. She'd known the Bloodstones needed her back.

They'd needed her sooner, but that hadn't worked out. "And I've never been much of an arsonist." Slow burn, he'd called her, but fire wasn't her thing, and never had been, even before the grenades. She'd stopped being bothered by that, when the ghouls had attacked. It was strange how things like that had a way of putting things in perspective. It was possible that particular bit of trauma would resurface later - her mother had said it was like that - but if it did, she would deal with it then. She had other things to deal with now.

The box he tapped was intricate, probably worth at least as much as its contents: maybe more, depending on what they were. The dust that covered it wasn't worth much, though, and she shifted her breathing to something short, exhaling rather than inhaling, waiting for it to settle. It didn't seem to bother the man behind the counter, but she didn't trust it.

The box proved to hold tea, and it was stated directly enough for her to pick up that this was not something she could get away with declining. Hopefully Ragenard's trust of this person wasn't misplaced. Rhetta checked the room once more, then let her other senses take guardianship enough that she could bend over a little to read the labels - both sets of them, the Lutetian and the strange handwritten script. It was unfamiliar, but that made it all the more important that she commit it to memory, just in case it showed up somewhere else or ended up being important.

Many of the offerings were things that she'd never heard of. That wasn't as complicated a challenge as it might have been, but she wondered if some of them were unheard of even to a proper connoisseur, which she certainly wasn't. The labels told her a bit of information, the scents told her more. "That one," she decided, tapping her finger outside the box but in front of one of the sachets. It didn't smell strong, or complicated. She didn't tend to like things with complex flavors - most things were better separate, in her opinion. Whatever this was, it was something lighter, not blended with too many other things.

The second box she nodded at before he even turned it around: she'd read the words upside-down, at a glance. Ragenard's time in the military wasn't something she was privy to much of, but few were. He didn't tend to say too much about it. She wouldn't have expected this box to be here, rather than... she didn't know. Her mind wanted to say the Den, but that wasn't around any more. She wondered if it had been there once, but the dust suggested otherwise.

"Is that something he asked you to show me?" Rhetta didn't ask would he want you to show me that, because if Ragenard didn't want something, people weren't likely to do it, at least not if they knew what was good for their continued existence. Whether he'd asked or not, that was a more interesting question.

"Hah!" Man exclaimed with mirth as he grabbed Rhetta's tea selection, tapping it lightly to punctuate his words here and there absentmindedly. "Rah-Zhu-Nar, do asking, with like words?" He doubled over in laughter. "Him grandpa Yis-Cart reborn him, in stubborn, heh."

He laughed good-naturedly for perhaps another five seconds before straightening back up and scrunching his face in apparent concentration.

"Is manly agreement, in shape," Man explained, his face wrinkling as his broken Lutetian struggled to become metaphorical. "Him say: 'Man, I can't stand to look at my shineys anymore, but it would be wrong to toss them. Keep them for me.' And I say to him, 'The price is the same as our other deals,' and him agree."

The slight shopkeep opened the sachet containing the tea, releasing its delicate scent further. "Ginshū," he said, lightly shaking it. The paper tag upon it read: Silver Veil.

"Is good choice. Tea of baby white. Single origin, noncomplicated, but very fine. Light sweet, smooth body."

He reached beneath the counter for a copper kettle, filling it from a tap on the small sink to the left side of the counter.

"You next think, 'Ah! Price!,'" he continued, watchful eyes upon Rhetta, but still with a twinkle behind them. He did not pause, despite the theatrical air the calculated rush lent—or perhaps because of it.

"'Now we be getting to the meat of understanding,' maybe, if cynical like," he mused. "But maybe not. Maybe not."

Man placed the kettle onto one of the hotplates of the intricate mechanical coffee machine that occupied most of the rightmost portion of the space behind the counter, beneath the various kitschy signs.

"Because is always same, when I do this." He groped in the air with one hand, as if trying to pull words or letters from nothing, while his other hand turned some knobs—presumably adjusting the heat.

"Helping nudges?" he asked, before shrugging his own question away.

"Is tales. Is price. Some true tales." He nodded gravely. "I only talk to friends, and I like to help, so audience is not big. But tales are for telling, when their songs will best fire." He tapped his temple meaningfully. "That is how they have power of helping. So Rah-Zhu-Nar, him know I'd share when I felt."

He squinted carefully at Rhetta.

"Him no good at talking like me. That’s why he trust." Man smiled as he pulled the kettle off the heat and dropped some tea in to steep. "That's why he give shineys and tales to go with, you be seeing?"

This man was old enough to have known Baron's grandfather. That was an interesting fact, one that Rhetta noted and tucked away for later. For shifters, age was often merely a number, but experience was another matter entirely, and what experiences a person might have had determined a great deal about them.

His amusement gave her time to contemplate the situation, with little result other than an awareness of it, but perhaps that would be suitable enough. He ducked down for a kettle, which gave her an opportunity to study the tea box a little further.

The scent hadn't been the only reason she'd picked that particular variant, after all. Of all of them, it was the only one that contained a description that could have been dangerous, in the right hands.

Silver Veil. Rhetta leaned forward just a little bit, and there was a flicker of - not motion. Stillness. Every motion was deliberate, after all. So, in a moment of deliberation: nothing. She studied the script, strange words that she didn't know in a language that wasn't familiar - but languages tended to have commonalities. What she was looking for wouldn't be repeated, in any of the other tags - something unique. Which parts were nouns, which were descriptors? From such a small sample, it was difficult to say, but the small selection also meant little room for error.

He was talking about price, something that he'd already brought up tangentially when he'd spoken about his deal with Ragenard, and Rhetta didn't correct him if that was actually what he thought she was thinking about. She acknowledged it, certainly, something sequestered aside; words remembered, to be dealt with momentarily, once she had finished with what she was focused on for the moment.

She didn't answer the question about trust, or seeing, or perhaps her lack of an answer was an answer enough. The stillness had ended, and her hand moved, or had moved - there was a knife in it, anyway, a comforting and familiar presence there with her, ready to strike at anything she might think was a danger to her or hers.

The tip rested, an inch above the strange scrip, not hesitant, merely indicative.

"This word. That's 'silver'?"

"Eh? No. Losenji speech is right side, compared to Lutetian," Man said casually as he pulled the kettle from the heat and placed it on the counter. His hands brushed the bottom of the hot vessel briefly as he turned back toward Rhetta, but he did not seem fazed by the heat that must have been within the gently steaming vessel.

"But is not 'veil' either. Is trick of tea. Non-complicated flavor is light, but holds tight, understand?"

Two ceramic cups found their way to the countertop like a hospitality magic trick as Man reached beneath the counter once again. He began to pour the tea into each cup.

"Is good tea for simple flavor, even if mixed in... anything."

The wizened man arched a bushy grey eyebrow—just as wild as the head of hair above it— and reached past Rhetta’s finger with an unconcerned air, tapping the word she had indicated.

"Shū is piece of sound that change meaning of neighbor sometimes, but also is neighbor of masks—like the Nyms of Anton and Sym in silly Lutetian, but together at once."

He smiled another seemingly carefree smile and tapped the word again, "Alone, Shū unfurls to Shūuna in mind’s reading. Means 'Poison.'" he pushed Rhetta's cup towards her. "Like I say before; is good choice, for you.".

"Hm." Rhetta thought that she didn't quite understand the entirety of his explanation. Some of it made some sense, but other parts not as much. She had always been good at learning the interesting parts of languages, but her studies had rarely been academic. Maybe she would ask him to teach her the fun phrases in Losenji, in case she felt a need for variety one of these days.

If nothing else, she would remember what he'd told her, in case she could make more sense of it later. The tea didn't steep for very long, the scent light, barely there - a whisper, maybe. His hand moved a cup towards her, with a little more linguistic explanation that seemed to be as much a commentary on her as it did on the words themselves. She set her fingers on the rim of the cup, tracing the smoothness of it.

"I don't like being alone."

She raised the cup, taking a tiny sip of the liquid inside and letting her attention stray to the other box, the one that contained the relics of the unconscious Bloodstone. "What is it you want to tell me about him, while he's not here?"

Man nodded carefully at the first truth of Rhetta's tale, shared at last. "Yes. Is many years of bad company before good guest, Alone." He spun his tea cup in his hands thoughtfully. "Is journey start with one cup, and many steps," he added wisely, reaching finally for the medal box’s lid.

"First step is understanding why Rah-Zhu-Nar is biggest idiot of Bloodstones—because love for brother," he explained, left hand tapping his nose in a gesture whose intentionality was unquestionable despite its complete lack of cultural significance to a Lutetian. "Is trouble with pack walk; steps connected often."

The whimsically loquacious proprietor at last pulled open the small box. It opened with a soft whisper as the cheap rubber lining the box’s lip separated gently from the waxy cardboard underneath. The sound seemed almost an apology for the limits of reasonable expectation.

Inside, the medal box was lined with cheap felt, faded to the same shade of purple as Lutetia’s erstwhile monarchy. Tucked neatly into the upper right corner was a small group photograph, with two people Rhetta would readily recognize amongst them.

One was a much younger Ragenard—sometime in his early twenties. The other was, curiously enough, an only moderately older-looking Iverian man whom Rhetta had recently become acquainted with through an earlier, explosively charged magical fracas than the one that had recently plagued the Rail Yard.

Beneath the picture, quietly pinned in defiance of everything Ragenard may have ever claimed about himself—and leaving ample room for honors that would likely never come—were only three medals, each accompanied by ribbons in subtly contrasting colors.

At a glance, for any with the civic knowledge to decipher their quiet tale, these medals embodied all the prejudice and hypocrisy of Lutetian society. Each represented the highest honor conferrable in their respective domains without formal presentations, parades, or public accolades. None had been awarded through bureaucracy or traditional chain-of-command nomination, but rather directly by royal edict:

The Monarch’s Cunning, The Sovereign's Tear, and The Cross of Valorous Shadows.

The first medal was a tacit acknowledgment of qualities often hidden in the man by his own boisterousness.
The second, an impossibility—an explicit recognition of grievous injury, defying everything known about Ragenard’s legendary regeneration.
The third, a backhanded accolade and poignant reminder of the chains binding their kind in perpetual retribution; the second highest honor available to bestow, but subtly altered.

"Tales of three I know," Man said solemnly, indicating the medals with a small, delicate motion of his tea cup. "But remember, even if hard of belief you—Rah-Zhu-Nar tells of himself, not Man guessing at. Is important."

Rhetta thought that the man must be quite close to Ragenard, if he was calling him an idiot. Mere acquaintances did not call Ragenard an idiot. That sort of thing was reserved for friends, and for enemies. She was not sure about his being the biggest idiot in the Bloodstones, but only because the competition was somewhat stiff. His love for his brother, though, that she would not argue with.

She didn't think it made him an idiot, though. The Pack was supposed to be like that. It was a strength, not a weakness.

The photograph garnered a moment of attention, the sort of uncertain attention of feeling it out of place, something slightly wrong. The resemblance was uncanny, and the time frame was off by hundreds of years. That was something she'd known, from the moment the strange werebadger had appeared in the scar and been... not exactly recognized, but something of that sort - yet seeing a photograph was more concrete. She wondered if he smelled the same, but a photograph wouldn't tell her that.

This was interesting information, and she had no idea what to do with it. Ordinarily, she might have mentioned it to Ragenard - but he wasn't in the position to listen to anything she might have to say, at least not at the current moment. Desmond, maybe, but she didn't know what he would do with the information either. At least he knew Iverian, though. She was not sure if that was relevant.

Rhetta studied the photograph, committing its details to memory - not just the man beside Ragenard, but Ragenard himself. He was younger, in the image - much younger than she'd known him. Wolves aged slowly, or stopped sometimes, at least in the physical sense. The experiences they went through often left a mark, though. She wondered what her latest ones were, and whether they would show in a photograph.

She'd never known the Ragenard in the picture. It would have been taken before she was born. He didn't talk about that time of his life often, either. Sometimes he would, if he were in a particular mood - usually the particular mood needed to be kickstarted with quite a few shots of strong liquor - but the stories were always light. Light, in the sense of touching only the surface. She knew there was more lurking below it, because sometimes the stories stopped short, abruptly, and no one pressed for more, by unspoken agreement.

Unspoken, and not entirely unspoken. Her father had warned her about it, when she'd been a small and curious child - not the sort that was going to hear those stories yet, but the sort that he knew would some day. It was one more restraint she'd had to learn early, because some day it would be needed.

The medals themselves seemed dull in comparison, though maybe that was how they were stored, or where they were stored. Ragenard hadn't wanted them to be around him, but he'd kept them nonetheless, closed up in a box, lying on the surface of the foam. She'd never gotten especially interested in the military or military honors. Possibly, it was because everyone had known that would be a disaster for all involved, or possibly she'd just been deep enough in her other interests that it hadn't seemed to matter as much. Still, there were a few that any Lutetian could vaguely recognize, and some of these had the note of that tangential familiarity, something that came up once in a while, over the course of a lifetime. Important enough to know about, at least a little - not important enough to desire.

She doubted Ragenard had particularly desired them either - he didn't seem the type. Her host - she didn't know what he particularly desired, other than that she believe him. Rhetta moved the teacup on the counter a little bit, a tipping-circular, like swirling the liquid but without lifting it from the surface it rested on.

"You haven't given me any reason not to believe you." She had certainly been watching for one, in case it were needed.

"That is careful talk," Man replied, a smirk gently curving his lips. "But, it confirms. You watch. You wait. I too, once," he added with a shake of his head. The curve of his smirk shifted towards something more rueful. "But is not tales of you time," he concluded, taking a deliberate sip of his tea and clearing his throat.

"Now, Rah-Zhu-Nar. Know him well, you. I know because know him better, me. So it no surprise probably, to hear him awful at…at…" Man paused abruptly, a crease furrowing upon his brow, deeply.

"You friends with old men, yes? Understand 'old-school,' as kids say?" he asked, gesturing meaningfully towards Rhetta's tea cup. "Tiny sip and swirl is look like poison check. I cannot fail at hospitality; is only rule of protection from me."

Careful talk. That seemed accurate enough - maybe less careful, more deliberate. Rhetta said what she meant. Sometimes it surprised people. Sometimes she had a lot to say, other times... well, other times, not as much, especially with people she didn't know as well. Talking to people fell into one of three categories. Talking to people in the Bloodstones was easy. They were Pack. Talking to people who were enemies was, likewise, easy - because she didn't particularly care how the conversation went, especially as often only one of them was going to survive it.

Talking to the neutral strangers, that was harder. She was currently classifying him as a Pack-affiliate, which simplified things, but it wasn't as simple as talking to someone who was in the Bloodstones. So, yes: careful talk.

He'd started a tale, maybe being as careful as she was, maybe not, but stopped suddenly, directing his attention to the teacup, along with his opinions. Apparently he was insulted that he thought she was testing for poison. He wondered if he'd be insulted if she told him that if she did think it was poison, she might drink it anyway.

Well, not now. Not while she was here alone.

"It's not about poison," she said. It wasn't. He wasn't going to poison her. She'd already figured that much out, and there was no reason to doubt her own judgment there - or Ragenard's.

"I like the cup." He'd said he wanted truths, he could have that one. "Smooth lacquer, good balance." She lifted it by the rim, loosely, turning her hand so that it rested under the vessel, balancing it on her palm, openhanded, with barely a tremor in the liquid held within. She reversed the gesture, taking it by the rim again and lifting it to take a drink - still not too much at once, but not because she thought it might be poison, just because she wanted to feel the difference in the weight.

"Do you want to tell me a Ragenard story, or do you want to tell me about hospitality, where you're from?"

The coffee shop proprietor didn't speak for an extended period encompassing several heartbeats while he stared at Rhetta. He stood stock-still—unnaturally so for most beings, human or otherwise. No outward menace or displeasure suffused his features, and his right hand remained curled delicately around his tea cup. The old man didn't display even a hint of a tremor within those fingers, nor anywhere else. Not so much as an upturned eyebrow marred that expression of perfect, serene reflection.

Then came the smallest of movements; his nostrils flared.

They did so with gusto, forcefully releasing a rush of air that droned on for a moment in a staccato rhythm that would seem familiar to Rhetta. It was the same motion Ragenard often made to disguise when he felt like letting go of his metaphorical reins, but didn't want to deal with the consequences. Man continued to stand utterly motionless, except for a subtle yet noticeable shift in the air, which lingered even after his outward breath ceased.

A gentle, low vibration resonated quietly outward from where his fingers curled around his tea cup. It spread softly through the countertop and into the chair Rhetta occupied—delicately but unmistakably felt rather than seen. It was subtle in the way distant thunder might rumble—a sensation recognized not through sight but through a primal, intuitive resonance.

Unlike Ragenard’s thunderous unfurling of menace or Baron's slow smoldering buildup—though both men were apt examples of the effect nonverbal cues could have, to say nothing of Rhetta’s own ludically tight grip on her control—this rumbling carried the same understated force of personality that inspired men like the Guiscards, past and present, to pause and reassess. It came without contrivance, without intent—a reflexive motion, as automatic as a dog barking or a snake striking. And though the vibrations held no outright malice, they threatened to continue building in careless intensity, conveying uncertainty, deliberation, and aggrieved ancient etiquette.

At their crescendo, the tea in Rhetta's cup trembled lightly upon its surface, and it seemed the trembling would continue building until it had nowhere left to go except Rhetta herself—

Then, abruptly, another deeper yet lower trembling emanated sharply from Man, carrying almost a wordless murmur: 'This one, I will spare today, and not harm.' The newer vibration swiftly overtook and annihilated the original trembling, leaving behind blessed stillness.

Man smiled once again.

"Is one of favorite cups, for guests of potential," Man said amicably, gesturing toward the cup with his left hand. He raised his own cup and drank deeply, smacking his lips before continuing. "Tales of me too long," he said, waving away Rhetta’s suggestion. "Too long and too dangerous for slow burn who actually listens, and is hospitable, heh," Man added with a good-natured chuckle, settling more comfortably into his seat. He pulled the medal box back towards himself, studying it for a moment.

"Rah-Zhu-Nar," he began, then frowned deeply. "Rah. Rah. Zhu. Bah, I be hating this. This no work. You’re one of Rah-Zhu-Nar's choānel's—word for family of blood, not water. You keep secret or he pays, easy," Man said cryptically, before smiling once again.

This time, however, his grin twisted crookedly with some unknown yet quantifiable amusement. "Piece of this thing, is show out here," he explained, gesturing around the counter at which they sat. "But bigger part, is show inside mind. If you want to see, mind must be of open and curiosity."

Man pointed at the leftmost medal pinned within the box's fading felt, then tapped it once.

It was an intricately carved disc the blended color of oxidizing bronze, set upon a ribbon of plain midnight blue. Loops and swirls filigreed its carved edges, while a shape in bas-relief occupied its center. Though it might take more civic acumen than Rhetta possessed to identify every significance in detail, one thing about it stood notably apart—indeed, stood out in all of the medals—as it would be reckoned in Lutetia by anyone with even a cursory knowledge of grade-school social studies.

This notable detail was that the carving was clearly meant as a stylized chess knight, but where a helmet should have been was carved a wolf's head instead. Man tapped the medal a second time, as if drawing Rhetta's attention to the minute details. Flecks of gold and amethyst were set into the wolf's eyes, confirming the intentionality of the design.

It was nearly a blemish upon the medal's otherwise austere—if finely woven—simplicity, and Man's eyebrows furrowed deeply as he tapped it a third time.

While a glance about the shop revealed nothing amiss with the lighting, Rhetta would find that looking away from the medal produced an effect like stepping from indoors into a day too bright, giving the air around the pair a subtly discomfiting radiance, as if only the space around the medal were fully real.

Man's voice danced with a glimmering delight as he began his tale. While Rhetta could still hear slightly maladroit fragments of broken Lutetian if she focused, doing so required active effort, as if the air itself warped against her efforts—which indeed it did.

Far easier than resistance, however, was simply to hear. Hearing, and listening, as what sounded like Ragenard's echoing words drifted inward from the shop's walls, where they might have bounced long ago:

"The thing you gotta understand," Ragenard said in the same grizzled voice Rhetta knew best, "the very fucking worst of it, if you catch my goddamn drift, is that I would have done it all over again—the exact same fucking way—even if I'd known that Royal Son-of-a-Bitch intended to commission these fucking insults."

The man was still, and Rhetta didn't find herself thinking of it as holding himself still at all. She wondered if it was at all like she had been, a moment ago, distracted out of continuous motion - but it seemed less like that, as well. It was simply a state, immovable. He was not still like stone. He was still like time.

The motion came after the moment, and its familiarity was somewhat interesting, a little exhalation of breath that she had seen dozens of times on a man that was not this one. That, she recognized as well, and wondered if the meaning behind it was the same, and whether the motive had come from one, or the other.

She might have asked, but the motion deepened into something entirely different - a tremor, perhaps, not in the air but in the earth. Rhetta felt it on her skin, sensation without contact, and she resisted the urge to run her fingertips across the back of her arm to still the motion. Instead, she stilled herself - not quite as much as he had, less stopped and more simply waiting, analyzing the resonance like a song she might recall later, if she cared to. It built, intensely, somewhat uncomfortable, and her stillness became more conscious, a matter of willpower now, resisting the urge to shift, to bring change. It would have been a challenge - to hospitality, perhaps, and this wasn't the place for challenges.

The tea echoed the frequency, a reflecting pool, and then there was a canceling out and everything was, once more, as normal as it had ever been. The vibrations faded, and now she let herself move, raising the cup once more and taking a drink, as the story started anew.

It came in stuttered fits, words not reflective of the gravity that had come moments before, struggling into being in a way the stillness had not. The host seemed more bothered by it than she was; Rhetta mentally added chōanel to her list of vocabulary: Shūuna, poison; chōanel, blood-family. Shūanel, poisoned blood? Poisoned family? She wondered, but did not ask. Perhaps it didn't divide like that. Unfold, was the word he had used earlier, like a living thing, or a thing that had once been living - tea leaves, untwisting themselves in hot water.

The host tapped the medal, drawing her attention once, twice: the first a sketch, the second gone over in ink. It seemed to come with its own vibration, or perhaps merely a pulse of some sort. Not light, not shadow, merely reflection.

Ragenard's familiar voice echoed beside her, overlain by a story being told. Rhetta was there, and not there, and the voice was there and not there as well. Her sigh interjected; exasperation without interruption; she couldn't touch the past.

"Fucking magic."

Of course it was. At least she still seemed in control of herself, aware of her own surroundings in addition to whatever this was. She still didn't like it, but she knew better than to start fighting before she had a strategy to find out how to win. Better to sit back, and glean what information she could, and assume that whatever the hell was happening here, she could take it.

Just like always, right?

She drank her tea, because at this point she might as well, and settled in for whatever this was without too much further complaint, other than a single, direct:

"What are you, anyway?"

The Man, Ragenard called him. Rhetta was sure he wasn't. No more than the rest of them, anyway. Maybe less.

The proprietor smiled, the delight in his face evident. Man raised a single finger—not as a pause, but as punctuation to a sentence that had started long before she asked it. Ragenard’s voice continued to fill the space in a natural cadence:

"You understand, right?" Ragenard’s echo asked. "I swear it feels like I can babble anything and you understand. How come? What are you, really? Don’t be a stingy old man—give me something."

Man’s smile widened even further as he looked in Rhetta's direction before replying. The air around his head shimmered in tune with his words, which notably did not echo off the walls of the small establishment, despite their clear and hale ringing:

"I am a remnant," Man explained. "A prisoner of this city as much as you are, adrift in time and space." His voice was oddly unaccented, but there was no hint of subterfuge in the corners of his smile—only amusement.

"Fucking spooky, is what you are," replied Ragenard. "But I’ll drink to being stuck in this goddamn hellhole."

His voice paused, and for a moment, the sounds of hearty quaffing filled the room. It seemed as though the scent of Ragenard’s preferred brand of Iverian whiskey might waft through the air—and then that was precisely what occurred.

The air around the medals appeared to tremble and then solidified slightly, forming a blurry rectangular aperture between Man and Rhetta, angled just so, such that only Man’s eyes were clearly visible above the newly formed shape. It did not take long for its purpose to become self-evident, as the blurry image of Man’s kitchen visible through the rectangle shimmered and changed—into a vision of predawn darkness upon a grimly frozen tundra.

Rows of tents were neatly staked across the field, forming a quadrant of a greater grid, hinted at by the presence of parked vehicles to one side, a greater command tent on another, one flank left empty, and the last occupied by a furrowed strip of earth upon which a multitude of ramshackle huts perched. Anyone with eyes could surmise the nature of the set pieces glimpsed through the window.

"We weren’t even hiding our mobilization," came Ragenard’s echo as the view shifted to the flap of a tent—one that promptly disgorged a younger version of him.

"That’s one thing they don’t put in the history books. Sure, the whole world knows the Aanarians were behind the war’s opening with their expansionist push, but it’s funny how no one remembers that King Rubindeaux was the one who sent us right into Aanar’s shiny new capital. Just a collection of freaks, misfits, and performance-enhanced monsters with no back supply line and some imaginary air superiority."

His voice dipped so low it almost seemed the magic had vanished, save for the persistent presence of the window made of time, still focused on the young Ragenard. A cold wind tousled his longer-than-regulation hair as a grim expression overtook his face.

"I was always a monster, so it hardly made a difference to me... but with his orders, he made me turn many good men and women from soldiers into base assassins," Ragenard barked in a harsh whisper as the sound of a bottle being opened rang out.

"Do you understand? That’s what Dad wanted us to do too. And I was so ready to say yes again—if it weren’t for James..."