Fate - First Reply Cathedral Spouts and Weeping Moons

[Pneria]

Spoiler: Music

The cathedral gargoyle stared at her, water vomiting from its mouth and eyes, the rest spilling down the sides of its horns. The rain overflowed every spout and caused a cascade of water to flood the streets below. Pneria could see it. She perched near on height with the rusty sabre of the moon that shared her new name, weeping with the rest of the heavens, barely visible.

Lessat, the larger moon, loomed on the other side of the curtain of rain, like the blueish dome of some alien temple in a faraway realm, the only other witness to Pneria's climb. Pneria knelt besides the gargoyle, which was petrified in its snarl, scaring away nothing but pidgeons seeking shelter. Crabbing below vaulting architecture above her ledge, the heavy drops thundering on her hood receded; and so leaned into her cover, fingerless gloves patted the dark wall, seeking a different surface than stone. Eventually, her dirty fingernails tapped glass. There it was.

Despite the flutter of her heart at having Death himself breathing down her neck, not more than a pace or two away to open air and a long fall, Pneria allowed herself a satisfied grin. She had bloody done it. She had reached the Whispering Gallery. Without the magic of House Iskandar helping her -- allowing her quiver to be filled with rope-bolts enchanted by magical, growing vines -- she would never have made it up here. This had to mark some sort of record of scaling tall buildings for footpads and crack-clerics such as herself. Oh, she would definitely brag about this one.

But first, she had a task to do.

Pulling a sharp implement of Emril steel, she cut the stained glass, a tiny circle at about the height of her ear. Next came a strange plant of purple petals, which stuck to any surface, used to pull out a tiny hole for herself. Pneria squinted and peered through.

The Whispering Gallery circled right below her, like a coiled snake of a balcony with a railing, boasting a grand open space that allowed view to the nave of the cathedral. It was famous for carrying acoustic sound in a unique fashion, hardly spilling into the consecrated halls below, only echoing within its high architecture. Pictograms and vivid imagery of Celestianism decorated the circular walls of this dome. The cathedral had shut its doors to most everyone at night, even the bell-tollers and servants had gone to bed by now. She couldn't see the two she was meant to eavesdrop on.

But she could hear them. The priest and the beggar. It was a genius cover -- the beggar had come seeking sanctuary, now asking for the wisdom of the priest to amend his ways. Only their trades belied their black souls. At least if Pneria's contact could be believed.

". . . it is time we do something about . . ."

"What? Snuff her? We can't . . . many risks . . ."

"They already suspect . . . Watch . . . Iskandar . . ."

Pneria strained to listen, but their footsteps had taken them farther away. Perhaps inside a stairway. They might be ascending, coming closer to her location.

A flutter of wings caught her by surprise. Pidgeons flew out in scattered disarray from one of the vaults, startled by something. Her iron-grey eyes glanced up there for a long moment — but she saw nothing but rain, stone and shadows.

Pidgeons startled easily. Perhaps by themselves. By Astra, who else could damn well be up here? No one, that was it.

 

[Rhenn Willowood]

Rhenn Willowood had not planned on company.

The man crouched in the empty space between two ribs of flying buttress, where the rain slid past without ever quite touching. The stone was slick, and the night loud with water and wind, but none of it belonged to him. Rhenn belonged to the dark, and the dark had long since learned the shape of the Darkwalker.

The climb had been irritating rather than difficult; Too many decorative excesses and watchful angles. Irritation was never enough to ward him off, though. Especially not from places like the Gallery. Relics slept best in places like this. Old bones wrapped in gold. Chalices kissed by a thousand liars. Saints who’d bled just enough to be profitable.

His single working eye was mapping his entry, tracing the rain-dark stonework until he saw movement where there shouldn’t have been any, a shape resolving itself against the night, nimble and stubborn, hauling itself up toward the apex like it had something to prove.

Well, I’ll be fucked.

He watched her climb, irritation giving way to something sharper. She was good. Not perfect, but competent in a way that demanded attention. She moved with purpose, trusted her tools, trusted the wall.

That trust would get her killed someday.

Maybe tonight, depending how unlucky she was.

She reached the gargoyle, knelt beside it, worked fast. The glass cutter came out, clean and precise. He caught the faint tick of metal on stained glass even over the rain, and watched her peel open a listening hole like she’d done it a hundred times before.

Rhenn shifted his weight by a hair, just enough to peer down through his own angle, letting the cathedral’s strange acoustics do their work. Voices drifted up, distorted but legible enough to sketch intent if not faces. A priest. Someone else. Fear, urgency, calculation. Words about suspicion. About action. About watching the wrong people too closely.

Assassination, maybe. Blackmail. Church politics. None of it his concern.

Then, the pigeons scattered. Somner's sake, it was always fucking pigeons. As if they were the only damned things that had no trouble seeing him. For a moment, her gaze passed close enough to where Rhenn clung that another man might have panicked. The rain did its work. The shadows behaved. The moonlight broke where it should.

Rhenn moved.

Not across stone. Not through rain. He stepped between shadows, where the moonlight failed to agree with itself, where it broke against the Cathedral’s angles and left thin seams of dark behind. To anyone else, it would’ve looked like nothing at all, naught but a blink the eye forgot to finish.

He was suddenly very close.

"Fancy bolts." His voice was low, as rough as gravel dragged across silk. "Don't you think that's cheating, though?"

Pneria

 

[Pneria]

The shock nearly killed her. She jumped back, then barely caught herself, fingers clutched inside the nostril of a nearby gargoyle.

"Herald's balls--"

Fear and surprise skittered all the way from her toes in her boots sliding through rainwater, up through her quivering legs and spine to her throbbing temple. Throbbing, because she had whacked her head against a nearby buttress. But better that than being a smear on the streets below.

Composing herself, she curled back into the safety of the ledge. She couldn't get much farther from him -- limited space demanded uncomfortable proximity.

But she could draw her saw-toothed knife from her boot. It whipped out before her in the blink of an eye, affording her some measure of safety against the wraith that had decided to haunt her tonight.

Even up close, the weak illumination of Lessat fell upon him strangely; as if the larger moon reluctantly acknowledged his presence, grudgingly revealing him to mortal eyes. What Pneria could see was a face wrapped and muffled in mask and hood, the sliver of flesh and eyes twisted, deathly pale and asymmetrical in colour. A white orb flared next to a dull, brown iris. Aye, if it hadn't been for his cocky words, she could well believe him to be some revenant unhallowing the cathedral spires.

"Don't know what you're gabbing about. This ain't a game of cards." Her heavy breathing and the side-eye she gave the merciless edge reaffirmed this for her. She lifted the knife a tad, like it was some holy symbol she could use to ward off this ghost. "There's only breathing or snuffing out. And if you inch any closer, I'll snuff ya faster than a sarding candle, mark my words."

The snapping breaths between her hissing words hollowed some of her threats, more akin to a cornered animal than a hardened killer. But a beast backed into a corner could still bite.

Rhenn Willowood

 

[Rhenn Willowood]

He looked less of a man and more of an echo as he stood before her, head cocked to the side and eyes glimmering not unlike the pale disc lighting the rainy sky above. Rhenn didn't move a muscle as the woman recovered from her brief stumble and drew her knife, bringing that toothed blade level with his chest in warning.

Even in the shadows of the night, the shape of his smirk could be seen twisting the fabric of his mask. At least some of the annoyance at her presence levied into amusement. Within a breath, Willowood's hand snapped up to grasp her wrist, a grip like iron using her extended limb against her.

"If you're going to threaten me..."

Rhenn wrenched back on her wrist, pulling the stranger closer until the teeth of her knife were pressed against the side of his neck, nestled along his lifeline. Then, he released her just as quickly as he'd grabbed her.

"...Have the decency to do it right."

She could have ended him then and there. Rhenn wouldn't have blamed her. Hell, if their roles were reversed, he'd likely have already tossed her limp body over the edge to the streets below. Maybe there was some piece of him that would have welcomed an ending at the hands of another prowler of the night.

But, he suspected, he'd meet no such conclusion.

"Of course, if you were so keen on your ability to 'snuff' me, you wouldn't have needed those magical toys to get up here in the first place."

Pneria

 

[Pneria]

She should have slit his throat. Would have, too, most like, if it hadn't been so bloody dark and difficult to see.

It was probably how he had snatched her wrist in the first place.

She felt the edge of her blade press against fabric and something firmer beneath; but for all his shimmering mirage, it could as like have been a satchel as his neck. Confusion was the main author of her mercy, and as he shoved her back, the phantom touch of his iron grip radiated danger all up along her arm.

The next time he reached for her, she vowed to simply plunge the blade straight and hope for the best. With this shaky resolution, Pneria gripped her weapon in both hands, steeling herself. Her teeth punctured her lower lip, tasting blood, but she didn't care. All she needed was to get away from him.

Get away. Get down. Anything. By the dark ones, she might even be tempted to try smash through stained glass and escape him in the cathedral below.

When she thought of this option, blood drained from her cheeks. Shit. She nearly forgot. And as she listened, she could hear their voices closer now:

"Can't you do *something* about her? You have cutthroats aplenty. Plant one of those, what is it, Black Coins on her?"

"No good. She is protected by the Court."

"Well then lift her protection, in Astra's name! With her every breath, we risk all out civil war. She has enflamed the other bulls beyond reason. Her and her cursed drow pet. And what is this about a nun I hear, wantonly wielding arms the size of the commander himself?"

"She has gathered a menagerie of exotic creatures about her, that's certain . . ."

Pneria scowled. They were damn close now. She didn't have time for this. But this fellow bilker stood too close for her to use her crossbow. And too far for her to stab him, without betraying movement. With either option out, she had to do that thing she loathed.

Tongue-wagging.

"You going to keep haunting me and waffle on about my efforts, or are you going to move your bloody rear? I'm working." Not much diplomacy, but it was the best she had at present. She planted her feet, going from an awkward squat to a balanced kneel, knee sinking into rainwater, ready to lunge. "Drakon's breath, it's as if you're the ghost of some former tea leaf, come to bother fellow footpads. I owe you duke's faces or something?"

Rhenn Willowood

 

[Rhenn Willowood]

For all the flaws he’d picked out in the spunky little upstart, there was fire in her eyes; It was an ember he recognized all too well. He’d carried the same blaze for the better part of a decade, back before he knew better.

Rhenn had expected her to fold, but the side of her blade, ever so briefly, gave him pause. It never tasted his blood, true, but it lingered at his throat far longer than anticipated before she finally eased it away.

“There,” he murmured. “You didn’t kill me, and I didn’t kill you. I’d call that even.”

Maybe the pup had teeth after all.

It was a shame she was so easily distracted. The voices from within the chapel pulled her gaze away again, each word carried clean and sharp by the Whispering Gallery’s treacherous acoustics. This time, Rhenn didn’t exploit it. Curiosity tugged at him instead. He tilted his head, eyes slipping past her as his hand settled loosely at his hip, a brow lifting at the fragments of conversation drifting up.

“Sounds like you’ve stepped into something a little messy, pup,” he said with an audible smirk. The nickname could only have been worse if he'd pet her on the head as he said it. “Lucky for you, those two happen to have something I want as well. So I won’t impede. In fact…”

He raised both hands, palms open, and took an unhurried step back toward the ledge. Rain smeared his outline, the darkness around him bending and blurring as if it had decided to keep him. Then he tipped backward and vanished over the edge.

No thud followed. No cry. Just the storm, swallowing everything it could.

Was he gone? It felt doubtful. Yet all that remained were the voices below growing clearer and closer, exactly where her attention had been all along.

Pneria

 

[Pneria]

Pneria blinked. Where had he gone?

She leaned her head over the edge, cautiously. Nothing. She even prodded the air in front of her with her arm, just in case he had turned invisible or something — still nothing.

"What in the gods-damned-shitter, where did he . . ."

Just like that. Gone.

Maybe her overworked brain had cooked him up. But the phantom feel of his touch on her wrist confirmed that he had been as real as the stones around her. And what was that about wanting something from them? Drat, maybe this was somehow a member of the Court of Gallows or some other agent come to add complications. She hated complications.

"Just my luck. Pissing rain and magic ken-millers pissing around. Sod it all . . ."

Thus grumbling to herself, she crabbed back to her previous spot, eavesdropping again.

Now they had gone quiet. Where had they gone? Oh, damn it, if she had missed them . . .

She squinted through the hole she had cut. A shadow passed by her hole, and the shock jolted her as well as any electricity.

"So what else can we do about her? What else would you suggest?"

This time, the voice was right below her. Her heart beat in her throat; and the quiver of surprise shot down the whole length of her.

A marked sigh issued from the other. She could see the backs of them, if she angled herself right, leaning against the railing, glancing down from the Whispering Gallery to the nave below.

"Well. She might be under their protection. But whatever agents she have? They are not. The drow, the nun, and whatever else hired help she might enlist . . . they are private hands. Few will mind a few accidents on their account."

A contemplative pause rose among them. Pneria strained to pay attention, keeping her ears out for a name. Any name. Drow, nun or some mysterious female didn't narrow things down in Alliria very much.

Rhenn Willowood