Tenpuru (Solo)

[Lillith]

Tenpuru (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE2gs_DYvkE&feature=related)

1950

I search for the temple
It's steeple and mire my heart and mind
I long for the arc
The covenant calls

No mind set to stone
No heart set to madness
I am eternally wrought with guilt
Racked with faith.

Come to the Temple.

The Tenpuru.

Remember.



Set following the events of In Her Web She's Caught (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22018-In-Her-Web-She-s-Caught-(Solo)), Little Miss Monocle (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?21779-Little-Miss-Monocle-(Closed)&p=182806#post182806), Dancing With Ourselves (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22189-Dancing-With-Ourselves-(Closed)) & Fight For Favour (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22403-Fight-For-Favour-(Closed)). Preludes the events of Play That Country Music (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22752-Play-Me-That-Country-Music), and heavily referencing events foreshadowed in Ushinatta Josei (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?21403-Ushinatta-Josei-(Solo)) and On Drinking Tea With Friends (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?21284-On-Drinking-Tea-With-Friends-(Solo)/page2).

[Lillith]

Lillith looked into the long mirror and sighed. The day was long, the hour was growing late late, and still she was not satisfied.

"I still cannot get used to it."

Ruby, who had been rehearsing with her sister for several hours in front of the Prima Vista's only gallery wide full length mirror stopped in her tracks. She flapped her script laden hands with frustration, and stared at her sister's reflection.

"I am sorry, Lillith, but now really is not the time to come undone. It has been months, eight in fact. Do me a polite treaty and get a grip!"

High tempers at blade’s tip were the running emotions amongst the Tantalum of late, and Ruby, who was ever the fiery one had been no exception. The stage room of the Prima Vista might have had a new mirror installed since the return to active performance, but the dust and the scattered crates of props told a story clad in skeins of poverty. Lillith felt ashamed for being so self-centred, when she was needed in the light of the evening lanterns, clad in another life's attire, wielding another harlot's victory speech.

"I am sorry, I guess now is not appropriate." She let her left shoulder stoop for a moment, and cocked her stance whilst she composed herself. With a flick of her wrist she straightened out her own copy of Duffy's newest play, and scanned the spidery scrawl he liked to call penmanship to regain her place in their rehearsal.

"Good. Now, once more with feeling from the opening line of Act Two. Begin!" Ruby smiled with an air of self-satisfaction and they continued to read aloud with little drama or flourish. Memorising the lines came first in the professional world of the island's theatrical elite. You had plenty of time to go on to add to your character's persona naturally and sanctimoniously when the hubris of the role formed a life of its own.

Lillith resigned herself to bringing her troubles up another time, when the moment was right, and the desperation in the troupe's home was not quite as rife. Times were harder now than they had ever been, and change was afoot in the city of Scara Brae. She looked one last time at her fleshy toned skin and her slender, Caucasian body and wondered if she had made a mistake wishing so hard to be something she was not. She missed her home, she missed Akashima, and she longed to pray at the foot of her Tenpuru.

[Lillith]

"Would you at least listen to me?" Lillith began her line with a dull monotone that suggested she was still harbouring contempt. She caught Ruby's glare in the mirror and tried not to smile.

"I have done all I can, Sister, we are not to talk of it again. The matter, as they say, is decided."

The play was a trite offering, and certainly not one of Duffy's best works. It had been commissioned by one of the noble households for a dinner party in two weeks’ time, and was nothing more than a three act ball room drama with a flare of emotion woven into a simple, clichéd narrative. The people of the streets of Scara Brae would heckle and throw fruit at them if they ever performed this on a real stage. It would pay for food in their rumbling bellies for a few days beyond the other side of their porridge and cabbage diet, however, as even the foodstuff from their own homes had been brought low in recent weeks.

"So will you dance with me instead?"

"That I can abide by, that I will attest to," Ruby held out a hand and bowed at the knee, and Lillith took the offering to draw her close.

Ruby nodded and pulled away. She strolled to the far length of the mirror with heavy footsteps and heels digging into the planks of the Prima Vista's ancient structure. With her back turned she composed herself, and Lillith was left wondering blind at what her sister was thinking. She had become adept at reading people's faces for the subtleties of emotion and hindsight, but she got nothing but cold demeanour and hatred from the lattice work and silk ties in the halter and low cut back of Ruby's crimson dress.

"You wonder too...do you not?" Lillith asked with a meek curiosity strapped to her words. It filled the stage room with an awkward silence.

Death was a powerful transformational tool. Some saw it as a change, passing a soul into a new world for the betterment of that soul's existence. Few got the chance to use death as a wardrobe altering experience, and certainly not whilst keeping one's memories, skills, battle-scars. The stage shook slightly, and dust fell from the rafters and the sun dome that let in the last dredges of light from the evening sky. In the catacomb like rooms below Duffy and the orphans and strays of the troupe had returned, and laughter broke through the cracks beneath their feet.

"How could I not?" Ruby turned on a sharp heel, a tear in the corner of her eye and hands flailing with a gesture of sympathy and agreement, one of loss and fear.

"We have to talk. We must talk. If we let it go on like this anymore, we will lose a lot more than what we have already sacrificed...I will not give up on you, so please do not give up on me." The sisters stared into each other's eyes, and a spark of the bond that had formed before the war broke out crackled back into the world, shining as bright as the tears they both shed freely.

[Lillith]

"Let us have a drink."

Ruby strolled to the edge of the stage and jumped up onto the edge. She let her boots swing off and patted the dusty carpet to her left to invite her sister to join her. The silver tantalus and the silver tray that had consoled so many of the troupe's sorrows were to her right, eagerly awaiting use to be made of it.

"When I died...what happened?" Lillith padded her dress down and adjusted the flaps on her trapper's hat, and joined her sister. She eyed the glasses eagerly.

Ruby carefully pulled the crystal stopper from the bottle, and slugged two helpings of amaranth gin into the tumblers. The smell hit their nostrils a few seconds later with delicate undertones of almonds and the Salvarian Ice Mint root. The prospect of their favourite tipple cast a new hope on proceedings. She added two slices of lime with a pair of tongues and stirred them in three times. The chink of the tongues on the edge of the glass as she shook the loose liquid off brought life back to the room.

"I cried."

She had cried for a week, distraught and devastated. Lillith lowered her head but reached out instinctively to take her drink when it was offered. When she had been reborn in the twilight beneath the tall spires of the Tantalum's fortress overlooking the falls of the Windlacers, she had been so exuberantly excited to be alive that she had not thought about what it had been like to die.

"Duffy never spoke of the truth?"

"He kept it from me for all the right reasons." Ruby sipped from the glass and continued to let her feet rise and fall, hammering like a young girl's lazy Sunday afternoon against the wooden panelling of the stage. "When you came back it was like the icicle in my heart had been pulled out."

"Does it feel like I am the same person?"

Lillith had been reborn, by all means, but she was no longer physically the same. Duffy had been fortunate in his rebirth. His hair, and his physical stature had changed, but he was unmistakably the same person. It was like he had died his clothes and gone for a hike, whilst Lillith had not been so fortunate. Though tied in lineage and past lives to Akashima, she had been reborn a true sister of Scara Brae, a slinky, spunky daughter of the crumbling docks and the new nobility she had been raised in when she had come under Ruby's wings years ago.

"You are, and always will be my sister, Lillith. We have been gifted with an immortality that comes with a strange price, by all means, but no matter how many lives we live...that will not change." Ruby's earnest and heartfelt statement touched Lillith, and they drank from their glasses in unison.

Even if Lillith's dreams of returning to Akashima to reclaim her family's title and honour had been hampered by recent developments, she still had family here, though she was struggling to find that enough of a reason to stay, enough of a cause to fight for now that the war was won.

[Lillith]

"I guess that is something to be thankful for, <Sister>."

Ruby smiled. She had learnt only a few Spartan remembered words of Akashiman in her time, but sister, family and love were some of them.

"I am at a loss what to say. I know that it cannot be easy coming to terms with your transformation. It is not easy for me, I am changing as a condition of my connection to The Aria. I am being entwined with a past life and given new shape, and Delilah has told me what will happen when Celia breaks through."

"But you have the choice to reject that! You still have Scara Brae, your husband, the noble life and all the dowry that was given to you can afford!"

"So do you!" Ruby's eyebrows rose, partially in anger, partially in shock. She calmed herself by adjusting the feathers in her hair, tucking them behind her ears or into the long flowing locks of red and gold. "I am sorry."

They looked at one another longingly, trying to find the words to continue. They both felt pleased with themselves for finally confronting something that had clearly simmered beneath the surface for all this time. Even after wars were won, battles still remained to be fought closer to home.

"What do you want to do with your life Lillith, now that it's yours to lead?" Two sips of Gin and Ruby's glass was nearly empty, and her head now full of spiralling ideas. She made to refill her tumbler, gnawing on the slice of lime with her free hand as she did so.

"I think you know the answer to that question," was Lillith's flat response.

The swirl of liquid into crystal broke the awkward tension and gave Ruby the chance to consider a response. She set the decanter down and sighed.

"I want to hear you say it. I want to know that you mean it." She didn't look up, and returned the stopper to the decanter without offering Lillith another measure.

"I want to return to Akashima. I want to learn the art of the Spirit Warders."

[Lillith]

Long ago, before reincarnation had brought Lillith to the throng of the Tantalum in the tentative years of Wainwright Jones and his very first band of Thespians, the Kazumi tribe had lived in Akashima. Deep in the glades of the darkest, most rural parts of the kingdom, the spirit warders lived. They were divided into many clans and smaller tribes, of which the Kazumi where one of the largest. From that great line, Lillith was descended, and it's tale of woe and war settled heavy on her heart after she rediscovered the need to be part of what she believed to be her true family.

"I...hoped this day would never come." Ruby resigned herself to the impending conversation and reluctantly offered Lillith the decanter, picking it up with a begrudging hand and holding it at arm's length without looking at her sister.

"Thank you," she took it and went about fixing her own drink.

The Kazumi had been great evokers, powerful sentries that could summon the Greater Kami to do away with the malevolent Oni as they arose from their slumbers and broke free from their great subterranean tombs and temples. The Janelle grew jealous of this fame and power, and brought their own skill, that of Blood Arcana to bear against their new rivals and soon to be hated enemies.

Lillith set the decanter onto the stage gently and closed her eyes as she took a draught of the aroma of the gin. She let her imagination carry her over the rooftops of the city, out over the walls and across the sweeping grasslands beyond. As she let the courage in her heart brew to boiling, she flew over the sea that divided the island of Scara Brae with its political progenitor and set down on the tip of a branch in Akashima.

"The Kazumi Tribe still live in Akashima. I have to reconnect with them, I have to learn my heritage, my hearth, find my home once again."

"When will you return?" The question snapped from Ruby's lips as if she had been waiting to ask it for a long, long time. The sense of expectation comforted Lillith. Whilst her sister was older, wiser, and more learned than she, her sense of protection and care was paramount, and she smiled at Ruby with kindness.

"I do not know if I will." She sipped from the glass, and let her nerves fall away under the guidance of the peppermint liquor.

[Lillith]

Ruby's eyes turned into replicas of the chipped dinner plates she served sub-par food to hated family members, and she slipped from the edge of the stage in a fluster.

"I will not let you go!" Her voice whimpered with emotion, but she walked to the far end of the gallery mirror with her back turned to her sister, to hide the return of tears which started strolling freely down her cheeks. The feathers in her hair flopped eschew and spiked into little pangs of anger.

"Ruby..." Lillith felt a magnetic pull to follow her to embrace her lovingly and comfortingly, but settled on pouring the last of the gin in her glass down her dainty neck for comfort of another sort.

The stage room sang with the heavy rhythm of Ruby's heavy breathing, her chest pounding and her head rushing with sickness.

"You would really just up sticks and leave?" She turned with a flamboyant and regal gesture of a finger to her thumb in the air, and half looked over her shoulder.

Lillith bore holes into her sister's back, strong enough blows to drill holes in the mahogany rafters and the stonework of the pantry. She had expected resistance, but this was bordering on fallacy. She looked up out of the sun dome, half expecting thunder bolts and lightning.

"Oh Ruby..." she dropped back to reality with a sigh. "I do not expect you to understand."

With rising anger Ruby snapped about and stomped her left heel. Down in the kitchen, dust fell from the roof and the cackling and giggling post party brood of children and their bard overseer stopped in their tracks to peer cautiously upwards.

"You did not expect me to understand?" The shout pierced every corner of the Prima Vista, and very quickly, Duffy ushered the children out of the side door and into the cobble stone maze and the carnival market beyond. He had known Ruby too long, centuries in fact, to stay anywhere near her when she raised her voice.

Lillith flinched, but stood defiant before the already smouldering figure of her older, more emotional sibling. She began to picture four columns about her, building those brick by cracked brick until they rose thirty feet over her head. She set a lattice dome over her head, and gave life to vines and raised thorns which climbed up around the four pillars that formed the temple of her defence and composure.

[Lillith]

"I felt something awaken inside of me when I was caught in the jurugumo's web...I felt a kith and kin to the hills of Akashima, to my former life, to the histrionic allure of the spirit warder."

She had dreamt of that life for days, weeks, almost months. Each night, she had walked through the crystal glades of the Lo-Hei, clamoured through caverns darker and more deadlier than the one she had traversed with Arden and Ruby, and more deadlier than the nightmares she ran from. Each step, she had grown in confidence that this was the life she wanted to lead, at least for a time. Lavender scented candles and cinnamon joss ticks burnt in the alcoves of Lillith's spiritual temple as she continued to build on it in preparation for the coming conflict.

Ruby was redder than usual, and she opened her mouth to speak. As usual, Lillith rolled her eyes as a note rang out in a sentence's place. She guessed they had come too far to just talk things through. There had to be drama, unadulterated conflict through the expression of creativity.

There had to be flames in the embers of Ruby's heart for her to thrive.

She swallowed the nerves in her gullet and slipped from the edge of the stage. With a dainty stoop, she placed the now empty glass back firmly onto the silver tray. She wiped her lips clean and settled confidently on Ruby's cantor motions and waving hands as she gathered momentum in her warm up - emotion was pouring from her, and when she was this angry, things broke.

She plucked a strung from nothing, and set the shamisen strap over her shoulder with a ghostly hum. The Geisha memory recurred into the front of her mind and ordered her soul to give life to the memories that assailed it.

"I will show you I am ready, show you how to live, show you my devotion!" With a steadying breath, she played.

[Lillith]

If only...

Lillith folded her arms across her chest to cover her discomfort as she shed the illusion of her day dream. She remained in the comfort of her temple, far too afraid of her sister's wrath despite her bravado. If they had fought, there would be nothing left of the Prima Vista but a smouldering ruin.

"Will you ever come back?" Ruby was distraught, arms in the air in metaphorical questioning, hair dishevelled, make-up running amok under the barrage of tears that were now streaming down her cheeks. The saltiness of the emotion in the air reminded Lillith of Ruby's excellent but bitter Sunday gammon roast.

"I cannot say how long it will be until I find myself...but Akashima needs me. You saw the Jurugumo's wrath, when the other Great Oni awaken, I need to lead the Kazumi to war!"

"Sister. Come," Ruby wiped away the tears and looked into the gallery mirror. She shook her head and looked away, only to hold out her arms in welcome.

Lillith cast her furtive glance, one that suggested mistrust. She rose to walk, but sat again with hesitation. Ruby strengthened her command with a welcoming wave over, and Lillith relented with a slinky movement from the stage, for real this time, and without a battle cry or instrument in sight.

"You cannot go alone," she began as they embraced one another. It was a warm, surreptitious hug, the sort a mother gave to a daughter or sisters did to console one another through loss. Lillith awkwardly tried to look elsewhere to avoid the incoming kiss, but Ruby pecked her on the cheek affectionately all the same.

They stepped back from one another and Lillith adjusted Ruby's scarf and set the feathers in her hair straight. For a while they stared at one another warmly. Perhaps Lillith had been hasty to think Ruby would not understand. She was, after all, used to loss and leaving those she loved behind. She was a strong woman to have gone clawing back, certainly with her sense of self importance, and luckier still for her husband to have taken her in with open arms.

"You must promise me one thing before you go." Ruby cleared her throat and ushered them both back to the stage. Lillith's mind raced at the possibilities, comforted only by the relief of sitting back on the edge of the stage and the familiar rub of the dusty brown carpet on her chaps.

"Anything, sister, anything."

"Come back. When you are ready, I will wait an eternity until you are. Please, just come back." She tended to the glasses and refilled them with the last of the gin in the decanter. She shook the empty bottle with a saddened face, but she set it back onto the tray and handed her sister the smaller measure.

In the silence that followed, Lillith considered how she could possibly make such a promise. The dark spirit that raced about her veins had grown in strength for many nights now, tainting her dreams with spidery visions of silk and poison and great fangs lashing out from the darkened recesses of her mind.

"When <Home> is no longer <Home>, I will let the sakura blossoms fall from my mind and come back." She nodded gruffly, and brought up her glass as if to make a toast. The chink of the crystal connecting with its sister glass echoed through the stage and rattled down the rickety stairwell into the deathly silent living room and kitchen below.

[Lillith]

"It is not easy...is it...?"

The gin had gone from aperitif to full blown mood altering, and the sombre wave which fell over the emotionally charged women hit them like a wagon cart on market day. One which tended to 'accidentally' plough through the noble district and pick up a few extra items for sale.

Ruby looked up questioningly, but did not say a word.

"Living a normal life...in our bedrooms, after the war."

The crimson mistress nodded.

"I always thought things would get better, when he was gone. I thought we would get our lives back, perhaps find peace, and become real peo-" she juggled the syllables back into her lungs but stopped agog when she realised her mistake.

"We are real Lillith," Ruby's finger pointed accusingly at Lillith's glass. "We are more real now than we have ever been. Wainwright Jones may have carved us from the pages of that blasted book, but we have memories, emotions, dreams and hopes!"

How Lillith dreamed...and now Ruby hoped. Bridling with misunderstanding, the conversation died. The sisters spent half an hour sipping from their glasses and admiring the moth ridden tapestries that had once been lavish stage curtains and scene dividers as they swung in unseen breezes overhead. The sun was long gone, and the twilight of the dusk cast eerie shadows into every corner of the Prima Vista. Lillith tried to maintain the pillars of her temple through the rising anxiety, but she saw and heard cracks appear in the stonework.

"Oh I am sorry...I thought this would be easier. It never occurred to me you would...miss me."

Ruby's wry smile said all it needed to.

"You will miss me, will you not?"

"Oh do not be silly," they looked at one another once again, and the light-hearted spirit of their relationship popped back into existence, lightning up the room and warming their now sore backsides with inner fire. "I am not angry because you will not be here. I have always expected the troupe to fail once the thing that binds it together was destroyed."

Lillith wrinkled her face up in confusion and disgust, "No! The troupe will not fail just because the leading...the seamstress," she corrected herself, "is absent."

"Duffy always intended to take things back to basics. When the ritual is complete he intends to run on the streets for a while, reconnect with his youth, and run interference with someone he keeps calling 'The Bandit King.'"

"That cannot possibly be a good thing..." Lillith did not know Duffy as well as Ruby might, but Duffy's grandiose schemes were at best hair brained, and worst, disastrous.

"He knows what he is doing...I think." Ruby tried to re-assure herself as she slipped from the stage once again and walked over to the large pile of oak barrels that rested to the left of the stairway, two wide and two tall. They had been shipped long distances to Ruby's manor two years ago, their contents not to be touched on penalty of excommunication from the biscuit tin.

"I always save a few things up my haggard sleeves for occasions like this," she pointed over her shoulder with unnerving accuracy at the empty decanter.

Lillith pricked her ears as Ruby lifted the lid from the left barrel and ducked into its massive interior. Her backside waggled in the air and legs flailed to balance her attempt.

[Lillith]

Lillith watched Ruby as she re-emerged from the barrel with a semi-tipsy curiosity. The bottle in her hand was identical to the one they had just polished off between them, but this she knew was altogether more special, deadly, and full of all the subtleties and spice of a proper half-litre of gin. She rubbed her hands together eagerly, and pulled off her trapper hat as if she were preparing for an evening in devoid of her usual cloth armour and status symbols. She took off her beads and loosened her top button too.

"I cannot believe you kept a bottle of Sei's <Fire Tea> Ruby, we have not been to the tea house in so long I had started to think you had forgotten we ever used to go."

Drinking tea with friends had been the sister's favourite past time, many moons ago. They had spent a week one summer sat on the veranda, looking out at the tall maze-like cliffs which divided the main plateau's of Akashima's wild Eastern mountain range, and many evenings watching the dragon kami dance their spectral patterns along the mist-laden crags.

"They were altogether simpler times, Lillith, but I always thought it would be good to have a bottle handy." She shook it with a tantalising waver and strolled casually back to the stage, heels clicking on the floorboards with her usual mournfulness.

"You should visit."

"Oh I intend to, do not you worry. I cannot help but feel I may have...overreacted," Lillith chuckled at Ruby's forthcoming apology, and sat upright and alert to relish the rarest of moments. "I cannot help but feel you should have told me sooner," she scolded, not wanting her sister to become too comfortable with the idea. "But...I am glad you are going," she sat on the edge of the stage where her backside had made an imprint in the dusty carpet and ran her fingers over the fire elemental etched glass. Dancing flames and roaring dragons leapt with artistry from its slender neck, and spiralled down its long body to the silver base. It was Uncle Sei's finest delicacy, brewed in secrecy and said to contain the fire of the dragon kami themselves.

"After our little quarrel, I am not entirely sure that was a compliment..." Lillith picked up the glasses, removed the shrivelled slices of lime and dropped them on the tray. "What do you mean?"

Ruby smiled, "We all need time to find ourselves. I am sorry for acting so selfishly. You clearly need to do this, and though I do not understand," she pulled the cork from the bottle and titled it towards Lillith's glass first. The sound of liquid rolling into crystal broke up her sentence, and she spoke only when the tea was not being poured, as was custom. "I guess I can accept it and see you safely on your way."

She tended to her own glass, set the bottle onto the silver tray and collected her drink from her sister. They paused with a stare, until a subconscious link formed, and they chinked the glasses together in a low toast. They waited a moment then raised them high into the air for a more formal declaration of agreement.

"To new adventures!" Ruby cheered.

"<To old lives>" Lillith replied, and they downed their 'tea' as if it were Earl Grey on a winter's eve or Dray Bush from the mountains of Salvar on a cool spring morning.

[Lillith]

"I am not going on my own anyway," Lillith declared with a rasp.

They set their glasses down in unison, expressing what polite company might describe as bestial declarations of pleasure. They cleared their throats and wiped the dribbles from the corner of their mouths with the delicate hems of their finest attire. Blurry eyes caught one another and Ruby thought back through the various skeins of conversation to attempt to catch the reference.

"I am sorry?"

"You said I cannot do it alone...I am not. Arden is coming with me."

Ruby dropped her chin. She had not considered that Lillith would take someone with her, but given their adventures in the cavern fighting the spider daemon, she had begun to suspect the sibling bond that had been illuminated in recent months would begin to forge new heights of belonging between the assassin and Lillith.

"I thought Arden had plans here in the city?" She bit her lip nervously.

"He has settled the score you set him, and assured me the Thieves' Guild and The Scourge are at peace. He has to attend to some business for The Master in Akashima, so it is a mere coincidence that we are travelling together."

"Convenient," Ruby said smarmily.

"Oh do not start again, we just got over the last tiff. If you want to scold me for Blank's insistent on escorting me to Corone you can take it firmly up with him. He has to work out his own past, and there is no other way for him to do that than by going to the Janelle clan's homestead and finding out on his own terms."

"Delilah said he would not find the revelation at all comforting!"

She made a reference to their discussion in the Tantalum's castle when they had convened their council of war, but had not thought of the comment since.

"She said he would have to deal with his legacy, his father's curse in due course. Now his path has converged with mine so we shall do it together."

There were clearly too many loose ends in Ruby's mind to tie together in one conversation, which meant Lillith would no doubt be receiving lavender scented letters with a dab of wax to seal them behind the Winchester Seal for weeks. Ruby could not leave her be for long, and somehow, they always found her, no matter where she was on Althanas. They wormed their way through the cracks and the networks of spies and whispers the Noble houses maintained.

"I guess it is easy, knowing where you come free without question..." Lillith snapped, and saw the second error of the evening slap her back with a cold, forbidding stare.

[Lillith]

The pillars of Lillith's temple gave way all at once. Each tumbled into rubble and the roof fell with a crash and a racket. She flinched as Ruby brought her hand up, but it hesitated and she sighed. With a casual change of direction she wiped the make-up from her cheeks.

"I am sorry..." Lillith said meekly, looking up from her defensive cower.

"Forgive me also...you know it was not easy for me to come to terms with my past, with Albion's dissemination and the fall of the Witches..."

"At least Delilah showed you, at least you have those memories to work through in your own time sister."

"Celia has still to settle some issues I have pressing on my heart, weighing me down like the sun dome on these rickety old walls..."

"So why not come with me?"

Ruby almost, for the slightest second, felt herself saying yes. It would be too easy, they both knew, for her to just up sticks and leave again.

"You have no idea how much I want to. No idea at all, but my home, of all the many wondrous places is here in Scara Brae. I would miss the Market, the fountain, the smell of haddock slapping you in the face drifting from the docklands every morning whilst you dress for morning service...all of it."

Lillith chuckled, "I guess I will miss those things too, but I am only an island away and will visit whenever I am able."

"When will you go?"

Though Lillith's temple was cracked and sundered under the pressure of maintaining the status quo between anger, sorrow and happiness, as their conversation developed, Ruby found herself constructing a mental image in her mind of her own house. Brick by boring brick, she built up her temple with painstaking attention to detail, reforming the fireplace of ochre tiles in the library and the books in alphabetical order on its shelves as if she were a heavenly artisan. It was all she had to ground herself in reality, to keep herself anchored to what she believed in, in what she knew was real, in what was the Crimson Mistress personified.

[Lillith]

"I leave," Lillith paused to check her days with her dates and the arrangements of her passage over the narrow sea. "In a week from tomorrow. Details are set in stone but things could change if Blank's arrangement does not hold true."

"Arrangement?" Ruby had not remained partial to the twilight role of the troupe's swordsman of late. Last she had heard, he had been stopping a war, now he was supposedly a paragon of the cities under world.

"Tonight he is meeting with the man he has chosen as his successor to the title of Van of the Thieves' Guild."

"That was quick - who did he chose?"

"Some strange but honourable fellow with a knack for change, Ace Lawrence or, as Blank put it, the 'thing we call Knave'." Lillith had met the man only through Blank's vivid descriptions and recounts of their conflicts in the Citadel. Menhirs had been shattered and daggers driven into nape and chest in his pursuit of the right sort of man to take over.

"I trust his judgement as much as Duffy's, but I guess it is done and dusted."

She set about pouring a second cup of 'tea,' and started to whistle the tune Sei had performed to finish of the celebrations during their last visit to the tea house. The gentle melody touched on a lighter side of the evening's revelation. Things, finally, were getting back to how they were before Wainwright had reared his ugly head.

"Do you not think we have come far in such a short space of time?"

"Literally, or metaphorically?" Lillith had learnt to question boundaries of Ruby's riddles long ago.

"Into the frying pan and out of the fire, does the saying go?"

"<Something like that>" Lillith chuckled, handing the glass over with liberal generalness and complete disregard for sticking to socially accepted 'measures.' It was practically full, and it sloshed down the crystal and onto the carpet.

"If you are comparing Scara Brae to a griddle, then we are a right pair of sausages about to go bang!"

The laughter rattled about the sun dome and bounced down the stairs for almost five minutes, leaving the sisters practically horizontal and fitting uncontrollably.

[Lillith]

They drew close to one another and put their glasses to one side when the laughter died. Their motions were almost mirrored, and at the same time, they took one another's hand and shuffled together to lie back and look up at the evening sky through the rafters and stained glass.

"<Pretty>", Lillith whispered, as if she were afraid to spoil the moment.

Ruby lolled her head to one side and stared at the dressing curtain and the assorted rails of dresses, props and costumes that were clearly visible from the holes in the drapes.

"We are, rather..."

"No, silly, look," Lillith nudged Ruby on her shoulder and pointed at something sparkling in the sky.

Almost instantly both sisters gave up attempts at building psychological defences and cast down their cobblestoned streets, ancient relics and temples to the wind and beauty of what they saw overhead.

"Is that a comet?" Ruby asked with uncertain suspicion.

"<Home>", Lillith replied absent minded.

"Home?"

"The shining star of the North...you can see it in the winter from the Temple of the Scorpion...it is nor the village of Tokyun...my home."

Ruby struggled to peer back into their childhood, when Lillith had recanted wondrous tales of an idyllic childhood under the scrutiny of a vast cliff, atop which stood a great arch, blazon with fire in summer and shuddering with tempest gales in the icy winter. That was another life, but the freshness of insurrectionist rebirth must have afforded her the comfort of remembrance, free of the curse of the Dark Bard...

"Lillith...do you still think you are that woman, or the girl in Salvar?" Ruby admired the sparkle in her sister's eyes, and imagined what her own must look like aflame with the blue light of heaven.

Lillith looked into her sister's eyes and tried to speak. The words she put into her mouth did not match those in her head, so she only managed to gasp for air like a fish.

"I did not think so..."

"It is hard, trying to remember who I am now, who I was then, and that we are all entirely different people yet one and the same."

"Live for us, but live as me."

The motto spoken by every iteration of the characters of The Phoenix & the Bard rattled up into the heavens, as if time was being repeated for the fiftieth time. Ruby had not believed it when she had first read the book, and she still did not believe in it now.

[Lillith]

"No." Lillith stopped the conversation dead.

For nearly twenty minutes, both sisters watched the bright blue comet stream across the night sky until the stars started to shine like diamonds in the midnight sky, and it fell from view without fanfare or celebration.

"No?" Ruby replied, as if the nervous pause had never happened, or was perfectly natural.

"I am tired of living for us."

"But..." Ruby thought hard, and carefully, but settled on squeezing her sister's hand and nestling closer to her. She took in her scent and the coarse fabric of her well-travelled attire as they had done on many a lazy summer afternoon when they were younger, prettier and more innocent. "I thought that is what you wanted?"

"I want to live for me, not us, not our past lives." She squeezed back.

"Are you not doing that now?"

"It hurts too much to remember..."

They both stared back up at the night sky and pursed their lips in contemplation, neither of them certain about how to continue. When they were younger, they would simply let the silence speak for itself, but now more rested on simple statements and oratory passion.

"What do you mean?"

"I am speaking about Willard."

"Oh." Ruby pulled a face that resembled an old woman sucking a lemon rind, and pushed her upright. She half dragged Lillith with her, and slid slightly to one side to bring the silver drink's tray between them. "Speak." Her command spoke power and drive, and she tended to refill the glasses with Uncle Sei's tea whilst she waited.

"I am struggling to come to terms with the curse of knowing he is alive, yet knowing he would never understand how it is I am still alive."

"And having died twice since then no less..." Ruby nodded all knowingly, and placed the stopper back into the neck of the bottle. She set it down again, and once more, offered a drink to her sister and confidante.

"He is dealing with your dissemination well enough, you do not need to worry that you have left him heart broken." They gulped from their glasses, to return their levels of inebriation to tipsy instead of the slowly dumbing down the senses slumber that came once you had gone too far beyond the wall.

"That does not help in the least..." Lillith let her head droop, and she stared into the bottom of the crystal glass to try to divine the confidence to be stronger than she thought she was.

[Lillith]

"It is not supposed to be easy, Lillith!" Ruby waved her arms and flapped them like a river crane and mocked it's mating cry.

Lillith smiled weakly, and rubbed her neck to ease away the growing tension and tiredness.

"Will it ever be easy?"

"Good heavens, no. We are immortal, we are doomed to watch people we love age before our eyes and pass into the afterlife and into the palls of eternity forever. We cannot love anyone truly, but there is something we have that many others do not..." Ruby leant forwards and rested her hand on Lillith's shoulder, squeezing it gently and friendly.

Lillith struggled to work out an appropriate guess whilst the grand cuckoo clock which hanged over the stairway's exit rattled and crowed its ageing and cranky cry that it was midnight. On the twelfth sounding, it suddenly dawned on her.

"We have each other?"

Ruby smiled. "Precisely!"

"But I want to see Willard!"

Their marriage had been far too short for anyone to have noticed the ring on her finger, before she had been taken from the world by Lucian's dark brand of magic. Willard, as Ruby well knew had been taken aback by the emancipation from his love, and she had sunken into a worse depression in the months after, having lost her moment to be chief bridesmaid and her only real family she cared enough for to miss.

"You lost that chance, but look upon it in another light...you have lived through loss many others could never weather, and here you are, stronger for it!"

"I do not know about stronger, but I am certainly happy to still be here..." She did not believe it, even as she said it, but she distracted her thoughts with another draft of the sweet and hedonistic 'tea'.

"Oh please, you running off to another continent I can about come to terms with, but you are far stronger in here," Ruby pointed to Lillith's heart and then her mind, "than I ever will or can be. I ran away from everything I loved and treasured because I was scared, and it nearly cost me dearly. I would have lost Duffy, you, my husband, my home, title and prosperity...all because of the need to be validated."

"What made you go back?" Lillith looked up from her abyssal pit and took on a charm offensive. Her smile brightened the darkened room and made her realise that only the moon and starlight illuminated the stage. Its natural light cast a wide circle of dusty light into the heart of Scara Brae's theatrical intellect.

Ruby finished her tea with a hearty slug and held the glass up into the moon beam. She watched the sparkling prismatic effect as it passed through the crystal and frowned.

"I needed a temple to pray in, a god to worship, and a reason to live."

[Lillith]

"You still hold that fable to heart?" Lillith sounded surprised. She thought she was the only sibling to still treasure their imagination. She slowly began to rebuild the pillars of her Tenpuru as she waited for Ruby to continue her recollection. It was something they had both done as younger selves, but she had thought Ruby had grown too old to still care.

"Of course, sister. I remember everything about your life in Scara Brae, all the good times, and especially the bad. I remember what it was you first said to me all those years ago when we first met."

Lillith cocked her head to cast her mind back to the summer ball. She had attended her debutante ball a protégée of the Tolsten family, and appeared no less as a meiko, much against the Akashiman custom. She had never been trained in a Geisha house, nor had she in this life, but she was expected to be culturally different so as to be treasured as a curiosity.

She laughed, as if she had just remembered a joke, and they both repeated the line in harmony. "Excuse me gentlemen, but the lady must prepare for her dance!"

"Good lord, I did not think you would. I believe you have been performing that dance ever since, Lillith Kazumi. It is your strength, and your home is your shield, sword and boon."

"But I left it behind...clearly. Look at me!" She gestured down at her waistline and referred to her transformation into someone, who at least appeared to have been born on the island of Scara Brae, not in Akashima. She looked like a pale skinned villager from the fisherman's haven north of Jadet, or perhaps a market girl, selling turnips to weary passers by coming home from watch or going to tend the night lanterns for the weary eyed Paladins, guarding against the goblin hordes and the darker things of the deepest seas.

"Who you are now is who you could be, but everything and everyone inside here, in The Aria, cannot simply be left behind. You abandoned Akashima when you came here, when you were cruelly sold into this life, but now, I think I understand. I understand why it is you must go to the Spirit Warders and find out who you were..."

"Does that mean I have your blessing?"

"Yes, Lillith, you do. Do you remember what else we spoke about when we first met?" She raised her eyebrow with curiosity, until she practically cracked her own skull with suspense.

Lillith thought hard, but through the fog of the alcohol she could remember only the waltz, the glamorous top hats and the shimmering candlelight of the ball room's many candelabras.

"What did you say?"

[Lillith]

"You cannot hear home, or The Aria, because you have forgotten what home is. Join us, be part of the Tantalum, show us the glory of Akashima and the culture you have come to hate - through doing so, you will awaken the powers within and become the woman you have for so long sought to be."

The memory struck Lillith like a well-placed dagger to the heart. How could she have been so foolish to forget something so important? Foreshadowing had always been Ruby's on stage skill, but never had she been blindsided by the past so much.

"I...I promised to take you to Akashima...when I finally found myself, when I became all those people and honoured all the traditions I was remembering..."

Ruby nodded heartily, and slipped from the edge of the stage once more. Leaving Lillith to her own devices to recover, she waltzed back in front of the gallery mirror and twirled several times to fan out the hem of her dress and to take a moment to tend to her haggard visage.

"You promised to show me the Great Temple in Akashima's capital, the yearly ritual where the orphans of the kingdom were given sweet rice and bunrei to stave away the long winter's bitterness. I still intend to see the Temple of Shinkyru, mark my words," she glanced over the shoulder and gestured to Lillith to join her. "But you must find who you are now, and come to terms with your past lives, honour the traditions you have lived, by all means, but set them aside and live for you - now, here...before it is too late..."

Lillith started to cry free bitter-sweet tears of joy and sorrow. She skipped across the floor with a ladylike gait and fell into Ruby's arms like a summer breeze through the reeds of Tokyun's mighty fishing estuary. Like the Akashiman wilds meeting the limited coastal access points to the rich sea over the mountains, east met west, and they both lost the will to be angry with one another.

Midnight eeriness crept into the stage, and silence hanged over them both like a veil of possibility.

Ruby stroked Lillith's hair as she sobbed freely into her shoulder, her cries muffled by the rich fabric of her dress. Images of the ball flooded back to both of them, and it gladdened them both to be able to remember another life, even though it still very much felt like their own.

"You called me something, back then. Do you remember?" Lillith whispered, a trembling voice of innocence and vulnerability.

It was Ruby's turn to fight senility and she furrowed her brow to try and recall what she had said on the balcony of the Tolsten manor, after far too many glasses of champagne and more canopies than her hemline could stomach.

[Lillith]

"Ah...<Ushinatta Josei>," her rusty Akashiman paid her no favours.

"Lost woman..." Lillith repeated in trade-speak. "You said I was lost, and you promised to help me find myself. Though I am still lost now, without you, I would never have lived!"

A single tear rolled down Ruby's cheek that was larger than the rest, but shining with joy. Her heart pulsated, and her chest tightened. She pulled Lillith closer into her chest as if it were going to burst, as if her life and her rapidly beating heart depended on the comfort and the warmth to thrive under duress.

"I feel the same. You do not need blood to be sisters..."

Lillith snuggled the silk affectionately, and finished their sisterly motto "But sisterhood boils the blood and gives life to the bond."

They began to rock and cradle one another until they both burst into spontaneous singing. It was a lullaby Lillith had been taught as a child, and one she had sung for hours whilst casting the nets into the fisheries for her family's small but prosperous business. Gentle, whispered harmony gave life to a future they both stared at without knowing the outcome, and in the delicate arrangements of their voices, the pages of their destiny turned closer to the end of another chapter.


"Love, lost to the sea of time,
Childhood, a distant memory,
Hate, that which fuels my heart,
Song, the drive of memory.

Notions, the things that instigate,
Weddings, times of joyous rain,
Sisterhood, my bond unbreakable,
Family, my distant binding chain."


Spoils:

The Sister: Lillith has begun to identity with her new self, The Sister, and can attest to her bond with Scara Brae and her sister Ruby with a pre-natural ability to communicate with her via The Aria. This in essence is a form of limited telepathy between the sisters, and allows them to speak in mind speak whenever they are both conscious. It grows in strength the further apart they become, and in times of deep trouble, and deep strain, there is a slight chance they can feel one another's strong emotions...

[Silence Sei]

Story (8/10): There was a lot of story here, and I really enjoyed it. The way Lillith and Ruby went back and forth at each other made me think of real sisters. You did your homework here and it paid off.

Continuity (7/10): You seem to be keeping up at least a little bit with the going-ons of your area. I especially liked the brief history of the warders and the Kazumi Clans space among them. Try to see if you can implement more interesting history tidbits next time for a higher score.

Setting (5/10): Like most Tantalum threads, this one tends to fall short in setting. It was not necessarily bad, but it was not great. Here’s a little tip, next time, try to find an area similar to the one you imagine your character in. Close your eyes, and try to write down, or remember, everything you can hear, feel smell. Try to implement those observations in your setting.

Creativity (8/10): I really do enjoy the thoughtfulness you put forth into your little conversation pieces here, Cyd mah man.

Character (9/10): Your characters are a family, and I can feel it man. You don’t sacrifice the emotions of one character even if you’re using the account of another. That’s one of my major flaws, and the fact that you pull it off so fluidly makes me jealous.

Interaction (9/10): Everything was true to character, at times sweet, at times not so much. Either way, if you did a thread just on the dialogue and way Ruby and Lillith react to each other, the score here would not have changed.

Strategy (6/10): There wasn’t too much to this thread in terms of strategy. I expected the other members of the tantalum to at least fall into either a Ruby or Lillith camp, and plead their cases as to why or why not our favorite former geisha should or should not go to Akashima.

Mechanics (4/10): There were several errors in this thread, which just stemmed from words that were wrong. I’m fairly certain you meant to say ‘tongs’ instead of ‘tongues’ when describing dropping the cubes, for example. Sometimes, its good to go back over your post 2-3 times and make sure every word seems right.

Clarity (7/10): At some points during the thread, I had to re-read to make sure I got the descriptions right. It was hard for me to place where the sisters were at times, and

Wildcard (7/10):A great with great characters.

Total Score – 70/100


Lillith Kazumi gains 2000 Exp, spoils pending the RoG approves em, and 50 GP for the sub-par play put on :P

[Silence Sei]

GP-EXP added.