your thoughts are louder than your words [open]

[necrocabbage]

Characters: Trahearne and you!
Date: Throughout April
Location: At the Dreaming Bridge
Situation: Here's some of what Trahearne is up to this month, including necromancer arts and crafts, a very large delivery, and magic practice on the roof. These are all open prompts!
Warnings/Rating: Nothing yet


A. Arts 1, Dreaming Bridge Cafeteria
This month finds Trahearne looking a little less withered than he has been after coming into the city. Now the leaves on his head are much more healthy, nearly back to their usual glossy sheen. He was sleeping through the night now, though it was with the aid of a herbal sleep remedy he had found at a local apothecary's shop. Perhaps that didn't solve the root of the problem, but he was at least getting more rest, and that was what mattered.

For the moment, though, Trahearne has taken up one of the smaller tables in the cafeteria. There's a hot cup of tea on the table amid the mess he's made - a mess including a couple of curamija leg bones, a chisel, pencils, green and black paint, and a variety of bone chips from the disaster that was a now mangled-looking bone, though thankfully one of the smaller ones. Trahearne has somehow managed to get smears of paint on his hands and face, and there's a definite air of frustration around him as he takes a long sip of his tea, giving the contents of the table a look of disgust. He usually wasn't quite so bad at this.


B. Sci-Tech 4, Quayside Wing
One day, Trahearne can be found awkwardly maneuvering a dolly down the hallway to his room, carting along a rather large and heavy cardboard box.

When he had gotten sucked into a conversation about hydroponic gardening, he knew it was mostly due to his appearance - and to be fair, he did know a little more about plants than your average person, though he hadn't grown anything himself in quite a long time. Trahearne had managed to interject with enough intelligent observations that she offered to let him try a set-up for growing plants indoors, and of course he had said he'd be happy to test it for her. He well understood the need for testing, and growing his own vegetables was quite appealing to him.

On the other hand, he had no idea the unit would be so large. Apparently, he'd been envisioning something quite different than what the scientist had in mind. Finding a place to fit it into the already-crowded room he shared might turn out to be a problem.


C. Magic Practice, Dreaming Bridge Roof (either wing's roof possible)
When you're living in both a dormitory and a crowded city, space does become an issue. It took a while for Trahearne to hit upon a solution to his problem, but then he found the stairs leading up to the roof, and that discovery made all the difference in giving him a secluded place to practice.

Trahearne can be found on the roof mostly at dusk or in the early evening, before the sun has fully set. Only the heaviest of the rain drives him back indoors; after all, what's a drizzle to someone that wears leaves for clothing? It might as well be like getting a shower. He has a collection of curamija bones that he obtained from a butcher that was willing to part with them, mostly leg bones mixed in with ribs, that Trahearne arranges in a circle each time he's about to begin.

And then... Trahearne stands in the middle of the circle and concentrates. Half the time, it doesn't look like he's doing much more than slowly waving around his arms. He's not trying to work proper spells so much as he's flexing the mental muscles necessary for it, and that doesn't always manifest as something visible. Show up at the right time, though, and you'll find the edges of the circle awash with a dark energy in shades of black and green, casting Trahearne in the sort of eerie light a Disney villain would be proud of. If his appearance looks a little shadowy on the edges, that could be a trick of the light. Maybe.


D. Wildcard
[Want to do something else with Trahearne? Hit me!]

Comments

[afoolsgold]

The entire scene from start to finish is one of the most peculiar displays of magic that the Fool has ever witnessed--and he's seen the figureheads of liveships quickened to life by the deaths of others on deck, and journeyed through Skill pillars with no knowledge of where he might land once he stumbled out the other side. The magicks of the Bingtown Traders and the Six Duchies were subtle, the effects felt or seen, but the magic itself largely invisible. To see portals opening before him in the air to admit the presence of two fleshy beasts, living enough to have their life's energy sapped by the power of Trahearne's shroud, but not alive enough to feel pain--

The sight of their collapse into dust still tugs something hard in his chest, and his breath catches. The Fool briefly covers his mouth with one hand, taking a few small, deer-like steps forward before he stops himself. At last he turns to look at Trahearne again, searching his face a moment before he looks back to the piles of dust where his minions once stood. "Where do they come from?" he asks at last.

[necrocabbage]

At first, Trahearne doesn't realize that anything might be wrong. When the Fool turns to him, he drops his death shroud entirely, the dark mist around him fading as he follows the Fool's gaze over to the piles of dust.

"Are you concerned about them?" he asked, some bemusement in his tone. "They're from a part of the Mists called the Underworld. It's the realm where the human god Grenth judges souls, but there's far less hospitable areas - like the Bone Pits, where it's said that magic animates the corpses of those who tried and failed to enter the Underworld while still alive."

It's a gruesome explanation, but there's little emotion in Trahearne's tone. To him, this was a well-tread fact of life, an aspect of his magic he's dealt with for years. It didn't even occur to him that such a thing could be alarming, not until he saw the Fool's reaction to his minions dying. "If it helps, most of the muscular and skeletal structure of the minions are clearly taken from animals. How those ended up in the Underworld, I cannot say, but my summons don't possess souls. They have no true consciousness to speak of."

[afoolsgold]

Despite Trahearne's words of reassurance, the Fool's gaze continues to return to the space where the lesser of the two minions had been standing before, as though he can't quite shake the sight of it disintegrating before his eyes. (Perhaps his sensibilities were more sensitive than he wanted to admit.)

"You can venture to the land of the dead, in your world?" This, like many other things, seems a particularly startling mystery to him. His expression is peculiarly vague; a little melancholic, a little bittersweet. "From what little I have known of death in my world, I am not sure that there is truthfully anything that follows the end of life."

He sounds very much as though he speaks from personal experience.

[necrocabbage]

Trahearne's expression now is a bit more sympathetic. That uncertainty was something he had been stopping to confront more and more often lately, even coming from a world like his, where many of those questions had been answered centuries ago. "It does tend to be complicated. ... My own people are so new to Tyria that we don't yet know what happens to us after we die, other than how the Dream keeps our memories. So far, it's one of our greatest mysteries."

He cast his gaze downward to the leg bone he had used as a wand, running his fingers over the cracks that had formed. Without the proper preparation, channeling that much magic through the bone hadn't treated it very kindly. "As for the Mists, it's easy to visit, but quite another matter to enter such a domain. Being able to find it, much less know how to enter, is so rare as to be the stuff of legends. Yet it's not at all impossible to find certain spirits, or speak to them from the material plane, if you know how to do it."

[afoolsgold]

“What you describe,” the Fool begins, quirking a pensive smile, “sounds most foreign to me. What comes after death is, for nearly all of mankind, a mystery where I am from.”

(‘Nearly,’ he says, and with good reason. Besides himself, he knew of only one other in his world who had died, and then come back to life again.)

By now, the sun that had been resting near the horizon when the Fool first stumbled upon Trahearne practicing his magic has sunken out of sight, and the cooling air around them is enough to have the Fool pulling his cloak more securely around himself. “I should consider hailing a coach back home before the weather turns,” he says, looking to the clouds overhead that suggest encroaching rainfall. Then he turns his eyes to Trahearne again and smiles, lifting his chin. “You should visit, when you are able. Are you fond of tea or coffee? I’ve an apartment just above Klaus’s new cafe.”

[necrocabbage]

"All these other worlds the Dreamfolk hail from are equally foreign from my point of view. One of my roommates comes from a world without magic or planar theory. I was downright shocked." He says it with some humor in his tone, though at the time it had legitimately disturbed him. A world without magic seemed like a dismal place.

While the threat of rain didn't bother him, Trahearne did have something of a built-in nightlight to remind him when he'd been working for too long. His bioluminescence was starting to show in response to the dimming sunlight, the purple glow only just visible. "It just so happens that I enjoy both, but I'd be happy to visit even if you weren't in such a convenient spot. Let's make plans for that soon."