Wanderlust (Olkhon Island | Baikal Lake, Siberia)

[Thalia]

For a moment Thalia looked surprised, and maybe a touch confused. She blinked. Her mind churned slowly, accepting the arrival of unexpected tides even when she was quite lost, but nonetheless taking a long time to acclimatise to them. The woman’s manner was as warm as sunshine sparkling on water, and it was probably the promise of that kindness which eased Thalia’s muscles to slump against the door behind her, like she was finally given permission to release the tension. No sign of the doctor, thankfully. Not that she dared look too hard. No point tempting fate; that one always liked to dance.

One hand still tangled the front of her tshirt, but she’d already forgotten why it had seemed necessary only moments before. Instead Thalia rubbed idly where she’d accidentally pinched the skin, and reached for the paper offered. If she seemed bewildered to have discovered company beyond her self-imposed bathroom prison, she did not seem remotely perturbed by the state she knew she must present to their scrutiny -- which she imagined to be somewhat like the mangy stray cat you feel sorry enough for to bring in from the cold, only to puzzle at what you’re supposed to do with it afterwards. 

The throbbing in her head was not an insignificant amount of pain, enough to make her squint a little to focus, but for such a small creature she had a surprising threshold for it. Particularly when her mind was caught on something. Her brows lifted. “Tuuru,” she said. Which, of all the things she might have been immediately presented with was so far down the (these days) quite bizarre list it was disorienting. The plant creature sent tiny rippling shivers up her arm, for a reason she could not quite discern. She remembered the small green shoot growing stubbornly through the wall in the city. How she’d paused despite the jostling of the busy crowds around her. It made her think of Noctua. But if her thoughts reached for an epiphany, they did not find it.

She didn’t answer about whether she was alright, still apparently considering her own drawing. The short answer was quite emphatically no, but all the heavy feelings swelling and cresting inside were not burdens she would lay down on a stranger. In any case, the longer and more complex answer was yes, she would be, and it seemed an acceptable shortcut to say nothing. Her stomach growled in lieu of articulate words anyway. A loan of dry clothes also sounded heavenly, although the woman was tall and willowy in a way that made Thalia feel a comparatively squat goblin. She gave an unguarded smile.

Then her large eyes took a blink, coming loose from the safe bubble. Before then she’d been making some unconscious effort not to look at Tristan, though she was aware he was there. The tunnel vision was a service of self-survival, a blinkering of herself she employed as naturally as breathing. But when mountains moved it was hard not to look. Back in Estonia she’d fled from Patricus the first time she’d recognised him from her sketchbook, though admittedly not far (not like the man on the metro). She’d avoid this situation too, if she could, but there wasn’t anywhere to run. And she didn’t even have shoes.

He had his hands out. Was moving slow. To calm her flighty nature, or perhaps to keep her at arm’s length (don’t think about the doctor). Either way she took his outstretched hand as an invitation to determine that he was, in fact, real. A relieved breath loosed from her lungs when it proved to be quite ordinary as far as hands went: warm, calloused, and far cleaner than the bloodied mess of her own. Not that she had truly expected a hallucination, but given the uncomfortable lie of her reflection moments before she felt justified in the fear. He was scruffier than she’d drawn him, but only like someone who spent more time outdoors than in front of a mirror. And without the tattoos, that she could see anyway. But he was smaller too, which was saying something considering she could probably wrap her entire hand around a single one of his thumbs.

“Oh.” She was internalising less of what he was saying than she probably ought, but her thoughts were fit to bursting. She probably looked confused. But the last things he said, at least, had permeated, and the rest would probably trickle through at some point. “No. No one hurt me.” The inference bothered her, though she couldn’t articulate why. She realised in the same moment it might have been a lie. Her memories were all shadowy recesses she was loath to explore, and would have preferred the privacy to puzzle over alone first. She ran a distracted hand over her arm, the flesh there tingling with goosebumps, the hairs static. “At least I don’t think it was on purpose?” 

The last was said mostly to herself. She tipped her foot at an angle to stare down at her bruised ankle. A kaleidoscope of emotion passed freely across her expression, colourful as an artist’s palette. Awe and terror and wonder, but it ended in a beam like sunrise -- not for what had happened in the lake, but for what it meant. She didn’t articulate the epiphany into words, but it felt like a breath of validation. To not be completely crazy. Or not alone in it, anyway, and that was just as good. She grinned at Tristan, her marvel a river overflowing its banks, and in no haste to explain herself. Like she even could. The feelings were too big. Maybe he would understand, and maybe he wouldn’t. At that moment though, he was the only one who even could, and that was also enough.

Practicality wasn’t exactly high on Thalia’s list of qualities. Two things stopped her bursting out the door (or the rectangle shape where the door had once been) to chase the whim of the lake, tugging them both along behind her, if either would even follow. The first a word that plunked deep below the surface, and disappeared, but broke the train of her thoughts. The second the realisation that she was less stable on her feet than she’d have liked. Reality anchored. She looked at Sierra as she was introduced. Seemed to remember where she was.

“It wasn't me you came to find. Else you’d already know,” she said to Tristan. It wasn't phrased like a question, but her head tipped curiously. Calvin had known about her apparent duality when he had sought her out in Moscow (though Thalia hadn’t believed any of it at the time). Patricus had known too, though he had attempted to reconcile her two halves, and she suspected he had been disappointed when she truly did not remember him. Tristan was asking it as a question, though. He hadn’t been forewarned. He wasn’t here because he’d been supposed to find her.

For a moment she wondered if she’d have died on those rocks if not for the remote chance of being found by someone who’d come for entirely different reasons, though it wasn’t the threat of her own mortality that struck her. It was knowing that had she woken up alone, the memories would have buried themselves. The goosebumps were distracting, but probably just because she was cold.

“You look different,” she said. Then, contemplating a dirty, blood-smeared hand, added. “Well, probably so do I.”

She paused then, but only for a moment.

“I don’t know how to explain. But I can show you?” It was a question; one that asked for trust. She was thinking of the intimacy in her sketches, unsure if he would want to share those secrets with his companion. Or even with her; it was one thing to live it, but quite another to relive it. It wasn’t the sexual images she was thinking of, although considering Sierra’s presence he might find that awkward for another reason. She was thinking of the teeth grown like tusks burst from his mouth. The candid pain in his expression, head in hands. He might not even like to see that himself.

[Sierra]

The word came out of here mouth and Sierra felt Never's reaction to the sounds. He didn't project any images but there had been instinctual recognition to the name -- the sound even if he didn't understand the words. Memories upon memories. Never projected a feeling of awe and wonder. The ancient tree was something more and something she might never see again.

But the girls stomach rumbled and Sierra dismissed herself to a corner of the room to find suitable clothes for their guest and find something to eat. She kept to a corner and rummaged through her bag grabbing some of her stock of rations -- it was all she had at the moment until they sought another food source in the village.

Sierra unrolled the bread and cheese from the travel cloth and presented a small bundle of clean clothes for the woman and placed on top of it the hard roll and hunk of sliced cheese. "It's all I have at the moment." Sierra stepped away and took up a spot on the floor with both of the pups. This was Tristan's friend. She could stay out of it. She didn't want to say anything she would regret. The green eyes of jealousy were too close at hand, and she had made him a promise to stay and she didn't want to break it. Best to stay her own self and leave Tristan to his dream friends. Though Sierra didn't stop listening or paying attention. The woman was curious, and she drew of things she could not possibly know about.

[Tristan]

The timid way she grasped his hand was concerning. Almost as if she feared him to be a figment, a spook in the distance, something not real. Tristan understood those anxieties. The stories of old spoke of not believing if a glimpse on the horizon was real or otherworldly. Such things were dangerous. Even if Tristan was a threat, he posed none at the moment. He allowed the girl time to decide the same for herself.

Proclaimed to be unattacked, the inclusion of purposefully was not comforting. Had someone harmed her. He could only fathom a shadow lurking just out of sight, stalking and waiting for solitude. His jaw flexed at the thought, but he was careful to keep the tension from snaking to his wrist for fear of disturbing the newfound trust built between them.

Her comment struck a surprising truth. Tristan’s brow furrowed. “No, I did not think you were here, but neither did you say you weren’t. You look different too,” he said in return. Sierra would piece together by now how they recognized each other without actually ever having met before.

He carried the book of papers to a chair, laid it open across the knees. His glance at Sierra was an invitation to join.

What struck him first was the urgency in the lines. The drawings were rushed, yet the scenes were full and recognizable. The lake was a sinuous omen. The tentacled-creature like something out of the dark recesses of imagination. If so, it was a shared imagination. But there was more.

The basalt column of his trollish uncle was featured on a hill. The angles and darkness like a cragged tower pulled from the depths of hell. Ever since he plunged his fist into that dark abyss, the troll was silent. But even Tristan wondered if the heart of a troll ever truly died; or if it was simply calcified into stillness.

He carefully laid the pages aside. It was one of him that he paused on the longest. The figure was sketched with shapes across the torso. Black war paint decorated his face. Furs draped his body and eyes glowed like the sun.

He solemnly showed it to Sierra before handing the page back to its owner. Quietly, and without explanation, he tugged the clothes from his shoulders. The shapes that appeared in the dream were not distinct, merely echoes of what he remembered. They were angular and harsh, almost like the stroke of a rune, but nothing was clearly demarcated as such. At their center was positioned a black ribbon, almost delicate compared to the jagged edges of the rune-like shapes. It was a sort of upside-down u-shape that curled at the ends. Not the Trollkors, but close.

“Before coming to this place,” he began, rumbling accent heavy and deep, “these appeared.”

“A monster lives in the waters where we found you. We are here to help it. We are all monsters here, yes?”

[Thalia]

Tristan took the sketchbook. Curiosity burned insatiably for a moment, like a current pulling her to follow, and she longed for the connection to a facet of herself she did not understand. But he was solemn and quiet to the task and it felt intrusive to linger let alone speak. Patricus had commanded a similar bearing, and he had spent a ponderous amount of time looking through all her drawings, but he never explained much of what he saw there. Whatever understanding had been gleaned, or not, he had kept it for himself. It curled a small flame of disappointment, remembering the exclusion, but only for a moment. 

Thalia gave them space. 

The sofa rushed up a little faster than anticipated when she sat, her wobbly legs glad to be free of the burden. Her head throbbed a moment afterwards, then stilled to an ache. A sensible person would take the moment’s reprieve to clean the blood from her face and seek a little privacy to change into her borrowed clothes -- a good suggestion, really, but not one she heeded. Her grim redecoration of the bathroom walls she was fairly sure she could ignore, but she was afraid to look in the mirror again, so she just stayed where she was, legs pulled up comfortably, the bundle of clothes and food in the hollow of her lap.

Her bruised ankle itched. She covered the red splotching with a hand, mostly for the relief of a cool palm against the skin. No point worrying about that. And she didn’t eat, at least not yet. Sierra had proclaimed the bread and cheese all the food they had, and it had the feel of travelling rations. Usually Thalia accepted kindness with the same open enthusiasm with which she offered it to others, but she was not wholly sure of her welcome here. There were no hostilities, so it wasn’t that, and she was not afraid of either of them (nor their dog-not-dog companions), yet it felt like ice cracked little hairline fractures beneath her feet. Maybe that was why she sat so still.

When her attention returned it was to the act of disrobing. She watched openly, but did not react until the explanation followed. Her eyes grew wider then, curious, a little enchanted. He offered back the sketch, but she did not need it to mark the differences between ink and flesh and know that it was not exactly what she had drawn. Oddly, it looked like the pale comparison; like something old dredged through silt until it reached the watery surface. Except the centremost symbol. That was something else.

“It looks incomplete.” The words were murmured, thoughtful. Her fingers itched to touch, but that was skin not canvas, and she was mindful of Sierra’s quiet presence. Thalia did not know if such things were normal, or even that it was possible to awake altered in such a way. Her thoughts were racing, and there was a waterfall behind her chest, frothing it all up with emotion. She didn’t try to parse sense from any of it, just swam in the strangeness, until a question arose and with it her gaze refocused to anchor on gold eyes.

“Do you... think it was my fault?” She asked it with a genuine sort of surprise, like she shared it aloud before she’d finished thinking it. Not because she felt accused, but because she realised it might be possible (don’t think about the doctor). Did Tristan think he had been coerced to come here? Like those marks were chains, authored in a script she could not even read? She’d call that preposterous until recently, and now she had no answers at all. Noctua had professed a need to save her soul. Told her she dabbled in dangerous things. With dangerous people. She didn't like to think it of herself; knew how it felt to be clipped, caged, expected of. But neither could she exonerate herself.

“Tristan, I don’t remember,” she said softly. A hand scrubbed the front of her own tshirt. “None of it. I never have. I wake, and I draw, and sometimes it’s--”-- a terrible experience. But she’d never even told Nox that much, and she didn’t want to feel the weight of pity from strangers for something she couldn’t control, even as the evidence of her oddness was right in front of them in full technicolour experience. For every answer she had found along this journey it seemed another island of certainty was stripped away. 

“She’s not a monster,” she said instead, glad to steer thought away from her own distress and towards something she could at least be definitive about. To have been included in the declaration of monstrousness herself did not appear to phase her, if she even noticed. “I can’t even imagine how long she must have been alone. No one deserves that.” A strength of feeling that pulled her across a continent, with Sage’s help. Not that things had gone smoothly, perhaps especially given all the blank spaces in her reasoning. “It’s not the wisest thing I’ve ever done, but I just thought…” Well, no, she hadn’t thought. She never did. Her hand lifted from her ankle, where, amidst the blossoming bruises were angry red welts. Round like suckers, as if from a tentacle.

[Sierra]

Sierra joined Tristan. Stood over his shoulder and looked at the iamges. She asn't ure what to make of it all. This girl didn't remember the dream. How was that possible? Never yipped, but his sendings were still chaotic. He didn't know how to tell me what he wanted to say. Either that or the concepts were too unhuman to decifer. But he knew who she was and maybe she was a little dangerous.

Tristan pulled the shirt off to view the lingering marks. The ones obtained in a dream gone too far. The girl who flinched at the name Tristan used -- wasn't her name began to babble about things being her fault. "Those are not your fault, no matter how he got them in the dream. He went too deep. He's lucky something didn't try to kill him."

Sierra backed up and dropped her gaze and whispered, "I'm sorry. I won't lecture." He didn't want her help. But he wanted her near -- that she could do. This was his friend. His quest.

"But who is not a monster? Who are we here to save, Tristan? If it's not her."

[Tristan]

A forlorn look connected Sierra with the pages in Sierra’s book. “The monster out there is in there,” he said, directing her attention to Thalia’s drawings. “But it seems that Thalia has already met her as we met her in the dream,” he said as he glimpsed the markings on her skin. A man of the north sea, he recognized the damage of squid suckers. Their tentacles were delicious, but once in a great while, a whale washed up with similar damage endured by the promise of a truly legendary beast.

Sierra’s overprotectiveness made him quirk a slim smile as it should be the other way around.

He’d not considered her not remembering the dreams, although he’d known that some people simply didn’t remember the next day. “If you don’t remember, then you don’t. We will have to tell you everything that happens come morning.”




((Didnt know what else to write. Sorry this was short.))

[Thalia]

Sierra’s correction had the whip of a parent admonishing a child for believing in fairytales. Thalia refrained from pointing out that she must have been too deep in the dream too at the time (whatever that meant) yet had not woken with any new and mysterious tattoos on her skin. She didn’t exactly want to court the blame, and had little intention of actually arguing for it, least of all when it meant explaining why she even thought herself capable of the possibility. Something in Sierra’s practical, no nonsense manner reminded her of Aylin, and she found it a disconcerting comfort. Thalia intrinsically understood the need to compartmentalise the things that could not be easily explained, lest they wear away the fortifications of sanity. Tristan’s tattoo was a mistake. A warning. A consequence. No more mystical than falling and suffering a bruise. She accepted it, easy as that. More than that, she was grateful for the moment of dry and steady land.

Tristan said nothing to the contrary. Presumably they had already had this conversation, the silt of it all stirred up again by Thalia’s unmajestic fall into their lives. He must have already accepted Sierra’s answer. Yet there was something so sorrowful to him, so quietly lost, that she wondered if what seemed like strength and certainty was in fact the stillness of a silently drowning man. Thalia had spent a lifetime of waking up each morning to the sharp sting of the unknown, and while she appreciated Sierra’s assertive and steadfast answer, she also knew how it felt to be at the mercy of something beyond yourself. 

How it felt to be told time and again not to dwell on it, even when the advice came from a place of love.

Admittedly their oddities weren’t the same. She couldn’t claim to understand the differences gold eyes and wolves made, and she didn’t know the dream as Sierra spoke of it. Thalia couldn’t offer advice, and she didn’t even really know what appeared to trouble Tristan so. He had Sierra, who, golden eyes revealed or no, was clearly gifted the same way, and seemed to know far more than either of them. But she plunged a hand into that still water anyway, to discover if there was a hand needing to grasp back.

“I’ll help you try to find what it means.” She tapped her own chest, to show she meant the shadowy ink across his own. “If you wanted, I mean. The sketches... sometimes there are meanings in them. The symbols look different the way I drew them.”

She watched for a reaction, a little curious. The last time she had reached out to a “monster” in good faith, it had bashed her head against rocks after all. Not that she exactly remembered the encounter beyond darkness, fear, and awe. Only the injury on her leg tickled the memory, coaxing it reluctantly toward the light (the light?). Tristan’s declaration made it somehow more real though, less a figment of her imagination. She shivered, and didn’t refute the claim. She didn’t recall much from watery shadows, but the creature’s image was burned into her mind. If it had wanted to kill her, she would be dead. And she wasn’t. That was both exhilarating and terrifying.

Tristan’s flat acceptance of her duality pulled her from the thought and back into the present. Her resultant smile encompassed them both, since he spoke for them both, though Sierra had pulled back like waves retreating from the shore. “Everything, huh?” She laughed a little, and wondered if he were the type easy to blush, though she knew he had not meant that. She did not keep him on the hook, though her tone remained light and teasing. “Are you intending to visit every one of my dreams now? I think you might bite off more than you could chew, if you did. The drawings come most mornings.” Amusement twinkled, though there was something both warm and sad in the way she carefully accepted the gift of those promises. A bridge to two lives offered so nonchalantly, and he could have no idea what it meant, or why her eyes shone a little as the emotion rippled through her.

She shifted then to pull the dry clothes into her lap, reached for her bag, and wobbled to her feet. The rush pounded her head. “I should patch myself up,” she said, blinking a little, because it wasn’t just tears swimming her vision as she padded her way to the bathroom door. Careful not to open it too wide and share the carnage of the walls inside. “Afterwards I’ll show you where I found her. I hope you are both good swimmers!”

[Sierra]

Never danced around Sierra's feet. The wolf pup was growing fast but his eagerness never stopped. This woman teased with familiarity, but Sierra wasn't sure if it was a coping mechanism or just her way. It didn't matter. There was jealousy where none was warrented. Tristan hadn't given her anything other than the possiblity of more and she had been the one to read through it to more than it was. She had done the same thing with Elyse, though the feelings had been returned. There was a pang of guilt, but there was also nothing spoken.

Guilt didn't ride on her shoulders -- Siera was never good with people. Thalia made her way to the bathroom to change leaving herself and Tristan alone with their traveling companions. Never's mind raced with images Sierra didn't understand. Her human mind didn't know the wolves' knowledge -- their instinct and communal knowledge shared, he was just a pup and knew more than she did.

Swimming didn't sound like fun. And Never jumped around her like the eager pup he was. Something about water triggered his eagerness. But Sierra couldn't translate his images. She reached down and patted his head. "I don't understand. I'm sorry." She looked over at Tristan. "Are we really going in after it, after what it did to your friend?"

[Tristan]

Thalia’s departure wafted scents of satisfaction, relief and anxiety, but they soon dissipated to that of his pack companion’s steady signature scent. Sierra’s steadfastness was broken only once, and Tristan knew the fault was his. Having nearly chased her off once more, he shook his head for fear that he would grow so distracted by the mystery of all this that she would be lost again. In Thalia’s absence, he positioned himself before her and took up her hand in his rough paw.

“I know this makes no sense. There is no knowing but to see. I wish I could describe-” but his voice trailed off as he stared into her eyes. Within the dull brown contacts, he could see the gold of his own in the reflection of her pupils. An idea formed.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the scent. Never lifted her head, noticing the change, but the image was for Sierra if he could form it.

The scent he tried to transfer was one of frantic fear. A mother wolf growling at a predator coming for her pups. It was a mix of fear and ferocity and fight to the death. Then of a pack coming to the aid of the mother wolf. But it wasn’t the natural cycle of life that they defended, it was against the hunt of men coming for the thrill of blood sport.

“I can’t leave her alone. She is threatened and does not yet know we are allies,” he said softly.

[Thalia]

When the door closed behind her she took a breath and leaned against it. The one-eyed man stared sternly from the wall, and Thalia frowned at the reminder, tamping down the anxiety he invoked. Her gaze traversed the scribbled landscape, following its path backwards. A strange and jumbled place of shadowy cave walls, impossible mountains, and a gaudy wagon at its centre. A wide-eyed child cowering under a bed. Moscow’s Arch and the city in ruins. She stared at that the longest, feeling it press on her soul the same way as the red painting. The one she had destroyed.

Bad dreams, that was all. It was what Aylin would reassure her, and it wasn’t true, but it was a lie she needed right now. 

Warm water soothed cold and tired muscles. She didn’t hurry, sure the two in the adjacent room would have words to exchange they’d prefer her not to hear. After washing she gingerly crouched by the mirror, still propped wonkily on the floor. Her knees drew up tight, gaze averted -- then eyes closed entirely when she acknowledged how afraid she was of what she might see. She counted her own breaths until she found the courage to open them.

“Oh.” 

The word tumbled out like relief. The tension drained. “It’s just you.”

And she looked like shit. Really.

Thalia scooted closer to assess the wound. The skin had split a little, back into her hairline, the wound still jammed with old blood. Mostly it was just an impressive bruise beginning to spill like ink across her forehead. The cut was a little awkward to see exactly in the mirror angle, but she’d lived alone long enough that it didn’t phase her. She shifted to dig around in her bag for the supplies she had bought for her injured hand, only to pause when she unearthed her Wallet instead. A message flashed, from hours ago. Aylin.

Just come home, Thalia.

Then, another.

Please.

Guilt gnawed. Sadness. She tapped out a reply before she could overthink it.

I’m fine, sis. Slept out under the stars last night. The fresh air here is good. T

It wasn’t a lie, but it felt wrong. She didn’t like the distance it created, or how alone it made her feel, but the remnants of their last conversation drifted like wreckage. She buried her phone back under the crumpled and loose sketches, didn’t let her mind wander down that tributary. She couldn’t afford the doubt, not now: that her mind had cracked, finally.

Afterwards she swallowed two pain pills (or, that’s what she thought they were, the box was in Estonian), and did the best she could to clean and tend the cut on her head. It could probably do with something to hold the edges closed while it healed, but after her encounter with the doctor … well, she was going to have to make do. For now she braided a section of hair close to her skull, pinching the skin as best she could. The pain watered her eyes and whimpered something like a low gasp, but her fingers were nimble and it was done quickly. After a final thought she rubbed some of the antiseptic on her leg, too, just for good measure, then pulled on the clothes Sierra had given her.

[[OOC: I'm not sure if we are all waiting for me. I was going to wait for you guys to finish talking. You can assume Thalia will stay in the bathroom until she feels like it's a good time to come out. Or, just let me know when you're ready to move on]]