[R. F.] (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
unflagging) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
poly_chromatic2013-04-10 03:31 pm
unflagging) wrote in poly_chromatic2013-04-10 03:31 pm
Entry tags:
[ нуρиσρσмρι¢ || иιиє ]
[A traveler might, some night in a dream, happen upon a desert road. It lies in sunset light, and the road stretches away into the distance like a black river, like black ribbon. Beyond are hills and cliffs and stones. They rise against the flatness of the desert before them and the order of the road below them. It is sunset, but the heat of the day still rises from the road and the air still shimmers with the heat a while yet. Behind the traveler the sun squats on the western rim of the world in the blooming colors of the red clouds.
Let the traveler walk along the road a while. The road progresses. The road moves.
In the utter austerity of this landscape all shapes and things are given a strange equality and no one thing living or dead or never to live nor die nor bird nor tree nor plant nor animal can make a claim of superiority or ownership. The very clarity of these things inverted their familiarity, for the eye of man understands the whole of a place beginning with some first part and here was nothing brighter than another and nothing more shadowed and in the lucid and luminous democracy of such places all preference is made irrelevant and a man and a stone find between them unexpected and hitherto unknown shared blood.
This is a place where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish.
The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lie like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and the traveler will pass lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of beasts who had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather hanging from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them.
Cross now a vast dry lake with rows of dead mountains that ranged beyond it like the works of enormous insects. To the south lie broken shapes of stones from some fallen or ruined mountain as far as they eye could see.
Strange how fast the night falls. Strange how quickly the darkness descends. Strange how the darkness swallows up stones, sky, all.
The hills and cliffs rise up in the dark, drawing closer now. The shadows lie blue and black in the stone folds of those corrugated mountains. Beyond them there must be more, crushed in butcherpaper folds or standing blue and footless beyond a field of salt. The ribbon of road curves and draws the traveler on along now, snakelike, writhing. The road moves but the road does not move.
It is dim, but not dark. Against the last light of the sky, there rises the line of smoke from a fire, etched and straight in the still air and an answer to the road--indeed its twin, for both straight, black lines are signs of man (are they not?).
Go into the hills. Seek the brightness of a misplaced star among the hills. Find then, traveler, a fire and come into its light.
It is built from the dried wood and dry desert plants and the wind moves the embers as though with the heartbeat of some immense beast dead and eviscerate upon the ground. Go it all the same. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be. For fire does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles.
The traveler shares this fire with a man under a black hood who sits on a stone on the opposite side of the fire and says nothing at first, but only shuffles a deck of cards and waits.]
[ooc: This is an open dream post, with no requirements for continuity or reason. Fletcher (Flagg) will be present in this dream, but it won't be clear that it's him (that hood is staying up!). To be quite honest, dreams are kind of his "thing," so he's actually rolling along with all this fairly well. In the context of this dream, if you would like, he'll turn over some cards and tell your character's "fortune" (or tell something, at least) because it's been a while since he's been The Man In Black in the desert. Ping me if you want something specific to turn up. Furthermore, based on the turn of the cards, the dream could go from dream to nightmare and the nightmare could itself be based on the turn of the cards. As before, ping me or leave an OOC note and we can make it happen~ Sweet dreams~]
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Or would you rather I draw another card?
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Somewhere nearby us sits the lady in judgment, the Lady Justice, with her sword and her scales. She is not blindfolded, as so many would like her to be. She sees clearly. I mention her only in passing.
I do not think this will be she.
[The card he draws, though, does show a lady. She is dressed in white and she is blindfolded. She sits on a marble courtyard open to the sea. The sea is behind her and small islands rise up through it. The moon hangs over her left shoulder. She has crossed two swords before her heart, balancing each on the opposite shoulder. She sits stiffly and rigidly, as though on guard.]
But perhaps one of her sisters.
[He turns the card around. And he sighs a little.]
Well, you can hem and haw and dodge and dance and say yes but no and deny deny deny, but the lady here argues otherwise.
You refute, but she knows. Denial and hiding, that's what this balanced lady knows.
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[He repeats it without even meaning to. It's strange how well all of this fits, and yet... couldn't it fit anyone? He wants to believe that, but somehow he feels that the stranger is completely capable of seeing through any arguments he might make. The cards could mean anything, but this mysterious stranger... he's very perceptive. Too perceptive. Meyer shifts nervously again.]
So isn't one of these cards supposed to tell me what I'm gonna do? What my fortune is? Not just a bunch of stuff about how I'm a bad person?
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Are you a bad person?
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I don't really care, I'm just asking you. What things you've done or left undone are immaterial to me. I've done such things and left undone such things as have we all. So I'm only asking for the sake of argument.
You anticipated the reading of the future. There are cards yet. But, still, I ask.
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No, I don't think I am. I think a lot of people would say I am. I think they're wrong -- I think I do what I need to do.
[He also has very little concept of normal morals.]
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A fair answer.
There are two cards left to you yet, sai. We have seen the past. We stand now in the present. These two cards should bespeak the future. In their full array we can best understand them.
Shall I?
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[He's giggling as he draws off the next card.
A black, heavily caparisoned horse stands riderless in a plowed winter field. It could be a farmer's field, it could be a battlefield. It is empty at present, regardless, save of the horse. There are no hills or mountains here: the sky is gray or pale and falls to the horizon. The horse stands looking to the seeker's, that is the one who draws or studies the cards, right.
This must be another one of the cards he devised himself.]
Black Horse.
[There is a pause as he considers it.]
The Black Horse is a curious card--yes, curious indeed. For he stands riderless. Oh, he had a rider once, and doubt it not. He was a messenger first, and then soldier, and then perhaps a lord, and then perhaps a king. He has pulled plow and hearse. He has been ridden in triumph and with boots turned backwards in the stirrups. But what the Black Horse is, sai, is an arrival or a departure. The Black Horse stands waiting for the one who will ride him and thereby set into motion what is to come.
Sai, there is something which has been done. Perhaps it is something you have done, perhaps it is something another has done. Perhaps it is that which the lady of the two swords defends against and denies. Perhaps, although she remains silent, the news has already reached other ears.
There is a discovery coming, sai. The plowed field. Something will be unearthed. Word will reach the city, sai. The acts of the Red Hand will be carried by the rider of the Black Horse. The lady of the two swords defends, but the lady of the nine swords weeps. There is news. There is word. It involves you and it will be brought to the ears of another. Which other, sai? Is this news good or ill? You can answer these questions. Neither I nor the cards can speak to that, though we can guess. The Red Hand has acted and now news of its acts will be carried by Black Horse.
You have a card left. Herein we shall see, perhaps, to whose ears this news will travel. Herein we shall see, perhaps, what shall become of this news in their ears.
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For a few minutes, he doesn't respond to the things the stranger has said, maybe because he's processing them, maybe because he doesn't have anything to say -- rare, indeed, for a facile liar and eloquent speaker like himself. Finally, he swallows hard, looking away from the card, and looking at the stranger.]
You might as well finish, then.
[His discomfort is extremely obvious by this point. There are many things he'd rather nobody heard about.]
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A tall and princely figure dressed in armor reminiscent of a Roman soldier rides a chariot with a starry canopy. He carries a wand of authority, like a scepter, and bears a sword. The chariot itself is drawn by two sphinxes, one white and one black. On the front of the chariot is a winged shield bearing a sign like a wheel and its axle. The white sphinx is for mercy, the black sphinx is for stern justice. A city rises behind the chariot--whether the driver of the chariot is setting out on a journey or is leaving the city as its conqueror, it is not clear.]
The Chariot.
It bears its rider into war. He hears the news from the rider of the Black Horse and he sets out. He hears and he seeks. There are those who will guide him forward. He proceeds by his will. It betokens conquest. It betokens foes. It betokens vengeance. In time, the Red Hand may point to him. Perhaps it already does, but not in this constellation. It is a card of those who could achieve greatness.
[A pause.]
The wheels of the Chariot are the same as the Wheels of Fortune.
[Another pause. He holds up the card, letting it flutter in the night wind. And he grins--he is nothing but a grin under that hood.]
You will reap what you have sown. Sai.
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Reaping what he's sown doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, but in the context of what the stranger has already told him, in the context of the other cards, which have been very dark, he can't imagine it's meant to portend anything particularly pleasant.]
There're those who'd say that we always reap what we sow.
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Quite so, sai, quite so. Such is the way of things. The wheels of fortune turn in their tracks and ways even as the seasons and stars turn in their cycles.
[Another pause.]
Did you expect to see Death in and amongst these seven, riding on his white horse, bearing his banner, as all fall before him? He is not the one who will hear the news. The rider in the chariot will hear.
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Given the way the cards were going, I wouldn't've been surprised to see Death. I guess it couldn't be that simple, though.
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Perhaps his absence is his presence. That is, death--but not for you. Or, perhaps, death--but still unsuspected.
Well, perhaps even that has changed now.
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[Without even consciously realizing it, he's taken a step back from the fire, a step back from the stranger. He suddenly feels the urge to get out of here, and quickly.]
I should go. I have... business to attend to.
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[He's already tucking the cards back into the deck and shuffling them again.]
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[He's polite enough to offer a farewell, at least, and then he's gone, moving as quickly as he can away from that stranger, from whatever his cards have to say.]
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Still, it's entirely possible that, before he flees this little desert dreamscape entirely, the sound of bright laughter, far too wild to be sane, will drift down from the hills to his ears...]