Promises and Deals

[Bainrigh Mab]

"Which one?" she asks with an amused smirk. "The shaggy one?"

[Kathleen McManus]

"Oh yeah, I guess she uh... has a thing going on but... she's the one I spent the most time with."

"Her deal seems pretty cool?"

[Bainrigh Mab]

"Quite cool indeed." she says, some of her mirth dieing on her lips.

"I can guide you, but the Sparks are fickle. You'll have to tightly hold the wish in your heart, the stronger the better. There'll be distractions on the path vying for your attention. Do not let them lead you astray, you understand?"

[Kathleen McManus]

"So I have to really want this."

"This is... uh... pretty heavy."

[Bainrigh Mab]

"Even should you be a 'late bloomer' you will always be at the mercy of the secret whims of your heart. The Sparks tell a story like the mute who has been shown a book written by the blind as sung to them by the deaf. They know naught but what remains in conditions of absolute truth. Are you prepared?"

[Kathleen McManus]

"...just gonna get my soul flayed if I screw up. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool."

She straightens up, mustering her courage.

"I'm ready."

[Bainrigh Mab]

The Fae grins and sweeps her hand through the air, catching the little glowing mote of light and bringing it to her mouth and swallowing it down. Her chest heaves with a wet crunch and her mouth opens like a flower with petals of thick butterfly wings. From among them something squirms free. A pale worm with a single fin that winds along it like a spiral. Barely two inches long it turns and slowly screws itself into the air as if it was swimming. Almost translucent with it's own faint glow it hangs in the air for a moment like a tiny living aerial screw before tilting and rushing towards Kat with sudden burst of speed. There's a brief moment of white hot pain as it makes contact with her skin and burrows into her and the pain dilutes and fills her vision with light.

When it fades she feels weightless, fuzzy around the edges like a dream with thoughts flitting at the edge of her mind, jumping from one to the other with perfect clarity that would slip her conscious mind. But right now it makes sense, so much so that it threatens to sweep her along if it wasn't for the steadying hand that falls on her arm. No longer a strange butterfly-lady but a creature of pale fins and water-clear skin and needle-teeth. Somehow this too make perfect sense. It's her guide, the self-proclaimed Queen of the Unseelie, stripped of one veneer and clad in another. Fairy turned mermaid. If she tilts her head one way she can almost make her look like she did before. A little further and she's a harpy. Then an old crone. Then just Sam but thin and emaciated. How often and how far has her head tilted? Too far to still be attached and yet she feels fine and just as upright as before.

For a moment she can feel something unseen settle around her like a cloak. Turning head. Lone figure, aloof and fearsome. Birds of a feather. Raven cries that trail into those of an owl. She can feel her thoughts fall into connections and trenches dug by her own associations yet beyond her control, something clawing for purchase in her soul. Making her hands tingle with scaly claws and her hair rustle with feathers. And then it is ripped away, her Guide firmly grasping the ephemeral cloak taking shape around her and casting it to the winds, currents, sands, tiny little stones flowing like water yet tough. Once more the feeling of something tugging at her being, offering, granting, settling. Once more she's stripped of it by her companion and it becomes undone.

"Do you see now? How it flows into you? Be careful and swift, little one. Find your calling before it finds you, I can only scatter them for so long..."

[Kathleen McManus]

"So they... they want to be here. They want to be in me. I have to be something that calls to the right thing..."

She closes her eyes and thinks of great shaggy shapes that stalk forests, of golden eyes and teeth bared in warning.

Then she tries to think of herself as a hollow in the deep woods, a spot a wolf could shelter to weather a storm, or sleep after the hunt is done and its belly is full.

[Bainrigh Mab]

The response is immediate. Kat's thoughts are pushed and pulled towards tangents and associations but she manages to hold on enough to not be drawn down rabbit holes. Still, the flickering of possibilities around her is seemingly endless. Stalking the woods, ancient things that move and prowl in the shadows and return to rest. A sense of reaching out and touching the wilderness, beckoning it's creatures to heed her call. No, she wants to be the creature. She has something very specific in mind, but as her guide had warned her, the Sparks don't understand 'wolf' the way she does and while she's made a shape inside of her it's more like a number of stakes placed to guide a flowing river. The flow is caught in whorls around them but it doesn't stop the stream.

Some are easier to dismiss than others. Hunt. Natural cycle. Nourishment from death. Preying. That one feels like it's bend towards her less from her own thoughts and more pulled in by the gravity of her guide, briefly catching in the hint of similarities before dissipating in a tangle of bloodied fur.

Some of them don't even arrive at 'animals' at all. Shapeless shadows. Raising bedrock and soil into protective shields. Gripping stormclouds to quiet or hasten the sky's wrath. Hollow. Protection. Nature. Weather. Bony spikes that shine white like long teeth sprout from joints and cover her skin, coated in poisonous gleam. Teeth, warning display, toxicity. Forest guardians of all kinds and varieties, some shaggy moving trees, a long-legged deer with her human face. Some tangents still happen and in them she can sometimes see entire people and lifetimes from decades, miles or even worlds away. Protectors of the forests loop around to guardians, tugged towards a cat-legged winged person at the side of an unfamiliar-looking Samantha. Sister. Girlfriend. Sheltered. Golden Eyes. All of it only makes sense in the strange dream logic she finds herself in and she doesn't really understand how one thing follows another.

Every once in a while she feels things passing that to her seem wildly divergent. Empty shelter. Loneliness. Home. That one catches a snag she didn't intend but cannot fully banish. Sam left her behind, leaving an empty space in what was once home. It's an old feeling but these currents find purchase in less. Calling something home. Summoning. Opening paths through the metaphorical woods. My what big teeth you have. She's found her way back towards the shaggy beast but this one's not nice. It devours like the monster that took away Sam. The monster she summoned. Her nightmare. Her creation. For a moment a swell of power turns stream into raging rapids. A terrible beast calling forth horrors from beyond, powers that twist matter and reality to find home for terrible things that act on her worst impulses. When previously she felt a gentle plucking from her guide relieving her of things seeking to settle in her, this time it's like a blow to the chest as a near panicked Cailleach thrusts Kat away from a flame that still clings to memories of being a conflagration.

They both tumble, away from something that scared even the Queen of the Unseelie. She grasps one of the whorls and with a shove it ensnares Kat. Shaggy beasts, creating 'monsters', a place for beasties in her chest. Too many bits that cling to her, that fit. Animals are drawn to her and into the hollow she's made, creating a strange hybrid that releases them back into the world with pieces swapped around or missing, multiple animals fused into one. Human eyes in a rabbit stare back at golden eyes set into a wild mish-mash of fur and limbs with too little control to catch the hare before it runs off with Kat's eyes, splitting her vision into a dizzying mixture of view-points. She can feel the potential settling into her, a sense for wild and untamed characteristics, not just fang and claw but nose and eye, flexible spine and muscles that tense without twitching or tiring in long moments before a pounce, balancing tails, whiskers that tell her things her eyes might miss. Gifts to take from animals, to borrow or keep, to return to them or others and making it harder and harder to reclaim the soft, pink human parts that whittle down with each exchange.

But all those insights and details fall away like the memory of a dream while others settle into instinct and intuition...

[Kathleen McManus]

Kat is flat on her back in the end, panting, sputtering with the feeling she'd been drowning for a moment there, regardless of 'where' they ended up.

"Oh god, that... that was..."

[Cailleach]

"Well done." Cailleach finishes Kat's sentence. They're neither in the strange dream-like place they'd been, nor the forested Fairy Court. The large rocky overhang vaguely follows the curve of the canopy but the vegetation hanging from it is strange algea and a couple of stubborn roots. The outcropping extends further than the ground does and waves are lapping at the rock and misting them with the salty tang of the sea. The moisture and slippery surface against her back tells her this cavern probably spends half it's time underwater. At a glance it is unclear how one gets to or from this place without having to swim.

Cailleach herself looks, well, she looks like Sam if she starved herself and relinquished any hair-care in favour of muddy saltwater, which makes her look more like a relative than a twin. Crouching on a nearby rock doesn't help.

"You kept quite true to your heart's desire."

[Kathleen McManus]

"Is this... really you?" She asks as she sits up, pressing the heel of her hand to her throbbing forehead.

"Without all the glamour?"

[Cailleach]

"You'll find just because something's in your head doesn't make it any less real, dear. But I am always in the flesh, pliable as it may be." she says, grimy hair sweeping back into fleshy butterfly wings that frame her face.

[Kathleen McManus]

"But you have things you return to, don't you?"

"And one of those could almost be my sister."

[Cailleach]

"Ah." she makes a kind of guttural sound. "Clever girlie."

She fully reverts back to Gremlin Samantha. "Things come to rest in familiar shapes. You heard the story of the Three Queens, from worlds apart. There's many more but maybe there's magic in triads."

[Kathleen McManus]

"So you're... her, in a way. And she's you, and the other one too."

"I wasn't sure before. You like to talk in circles. But I know why you wanted to see me."

[Cailleach]

"I am her but I'm not like her. She's indecisive and kind where I'm not."

[Kathleen McManus]

"Oh yeah, you're all business," she says with a faint smirk.

"Look, I get that you don't wanna be Sam. I don't wanna be Kat sometimes."

[Cailleach]

"And now you don't have to be."

[Kathleen McManus]

"I guess? I don't... really know what happened back there. It was super confusing and I'm having trouble remembering half of it."

[Cailleach]

"A fading dream, but I feel it's roots inside of you. How far it's reach and wide it's net I cannot tell. When you close your eyes, do you feel anything at all in the distance? Close by along this coast is a town and beyond it woods." she says, then sweeps her arm out across the rolling waves. "And though you wished for fur, there are things with teeth not far below."

[Kathleen McManus]

"This is so weird to just try," she sighs, but plays along.

She closes her eyes and tries to just perceive what's around her. In her limited experience that's sounds and smells and the like, but she does try to keep herself open. To what, she's not sure.

[Narrator]

There's the smell of the ocean, the light misting of salt water that hangs in the air, the rhythmic crash of waves against rock. But beyond that there's... something. Just at the edge of her perception and without anything to compare it to it summons up scraps of familiar senses. The gentle rumble of a purr, sudden loud flashes of barking, the electric buzz of adrenaline and scampering claws. Logically she can kind of piece together a picture of distant pets clashing, but what her mind seems to grasp onto is smaller pieces of the whole. Abstract bits that come with a kind of tugging sensation and it takes her a moment to realize that it's her who is plucking at them as if there was a kind of magnetism between what she can sense and herself. Fingertips tugging at claws, haunches humming in tune with her arms and legs. And more abstract things. A flexibility in joint and spine. A proportional strength clicking in her jaw.

They're far and grasping at them feels like moving through molasses, distance tensing against her like a compressing spring and she somehow knows that if she was touching that cat and that dog those traits would fly to her almost of their own accord. Meanwhile the things squirming and skittering in the water and the soil barely register for how close and ubiquitous they are. Maybe they're just too strange for her to understand right now or maybe the twitchy, cold and strange are beyond her domain. No great loss if they are, compared to tooth and fang and pelt of even these diminutive pets.

[Kathleen McManus]

"...huh. That's..." She pauses, feeling things out.

Experimentally, she lifts up her hand. At the same time in her mind's eye she's reaching out, sliding it into the dog's paw like it was a glove.

[Narrator]

Short brown fur sprouts and she can feel her fingers shortening, withdrawing into softs pads as fingernails fold lengthwise and thicken into dull but sturdy claws. It's not quite the paw of a wolf, but it's close. Boxer or shepard of some description maybe.

[Kathleen McManus]

"Holy crap!" she exclaims, jumping up and down in excitement. In the process she loses her concentration, the tension along that connection to the animal slipping and snapping back.

"...aw," she huffs in disappointment.

[Cailleach]

"Practice. It's quite impressive the reach you have already." Cailleach says, watching Kat's experimentation curiously

[Kathleen McManus]

"It's hard," she sighs. "I can feel there's animals closer, but they don't feel... right? The ones up in the forest feel better, but they're harder to reach."

[Cailleach]

"You need the woods." she nods and for a moment her skin grows pale and almost translucent like those pictures of deep-sea creatures. A fallow light rises through her throat and she disgorges a little glowing mote. At the sweep of her hand the mote follows the motion and beneath it's arc a shimmering surface shows woods. Dark but mundane-looking

[Kathleen McManus]

"...guess that wasn't the only trick you've got over Sam," she mumbles, looking through to the forest.

[Cailleach]

"Only for treading where she does not dare. Deep down she knows she's seen the Truth just as I have. Bound in spirit and flesh we mold ourselves to match." she says enigmatically.

[Kathleen McManus]

"I don't get it, do you want to feel like you're better than her, or do you want her to... uh... follow you down?" She muses as she steps through.

[Cailleach]

Cailleach makes a non-committal grunt as she follows Kat through the portal and into the dark woods of rustling leaves and distant sounds of nocturnal birds.

"When I first laid eyes on her and understood the truth of who she was I sought to destroy her." she admits perhaps a bit too casually for talking about murder. "When I learned more I wanted her to realize her potential and join me in swimming the depths. Now I've seen where that path leads... I don't know. Our paths diverged too long ago. I do not understand her. I do not understand why she does not revel in the power we can wield."

[Kathleen McManus]

"You're just enough alike that it's hard to see why she'd do something different, yeah?"

[Cailleach]

"She still has things to lose." she scoffs. Then her form begins to shrivel and change until she's turned into a giant owl, having shed her human form and with it the faint bioluminescent glow that had kept the forest from being truly dark. "I will wait to the south. Use your gifts to follow me or find your way home. They're yours to do with as you please now." her voice echoes in Kat's head as Cailleach takes off on silent wings and disappears into the night.

[Kathleen McManus]

"Juuust... gonna leave me in the woods. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool," she sighs, and leans against a tree as she starts figuring out what the hell she's going to do.

[Narrator]

The woods are dark, darker than Kat is perhaps accustomed to night being. Out here no light pollution makes it past the foliage and underbrush but in turn it's far from quiet. Rustling, creaking and snapping of wood, haunting bird calls. As if to fill in the lack of light the world is swaddled in sounds. But many of them are not as hidden from Kat as they might have been before. She can feel many of the things around her. The nervous energy - even in sleep - of a group of chipmunks huddled in the crook of a nearby tree, something stalking through the underbrush that Kat only recognizes by what she can feel being drawn to her. Bushy fur, narrow but sharp fangs, a nose that promises to reveal a whole layer of reality currently taking up entirely by just the slightly musty smell of the woods. A fox, not quite a wolf but not a million miles away either. There's more as well. A bit more distantly she can feel what's otherwise the perfectly silent glide of an owl and a vision that offers whole spectrums between the shades of darkness around her. Further away she can even feel a couple of bats flitting through the night and every rustle and snap is suddenly a drop whose ripples reveal the zig-zagging of branches and twigs.