[God Quest] I haven't really made time for thinkin'

VESPER

The Mourn has never struck Vesper as an unsuitable place for his mother’s shrine, though perhaps that says as much about him as it does about Safrin. Around him, the barrows rise in long, sleeping humps beneath Deepfrost’s silvered dark, their grasses stiff with frost, their stones glittering where moonlight has found old edges to sharpen. The cold sits cleanly in his lungs when he breathes, biting but not cruel, and overhead the sky has opened itself into something vast and bright enough that even his constellation freckles seem to answer it, shifting faintly beneath his skin as if remembering where they came from.

At the top of the highest barrow, the altar waits bare to the heavens, unchanged by season or sorrow. Vesper is careful as he lays the snakeskin across the stone, letting the lightweight opalescence catch the moonlight. He lights the candles one by one, silver rings glinting as flame takes to wick and gathers itself into trembling gold. The small motions help; they give his hands something to do besides curl too tightly, besides reach for the peppermint bark tucked into his coat, besides betray any of the weariness he has carried all the way up from the darkened paths below. When the last candle is burning, he sets a dagger down beside the snakeskin, its blade narrow and bright, its point shaped from the tip of a star. 

Over a year ago, when Safrin had given him this task, the world had been arranged differently. Or perhaps he had been. It is not an excuse, and he knows better than to dress delay in prettier clothing and pretend it is anything else, but explanation has always had a cleaner edge than apology. His fingers pass back through his pale hair, leaving it momentarily disordered before the moonlight seems to settle over him again. He exhales, weary enough that the sound nearly becomes a laugh and too controlled to let it. Tilting his face toward the stars, Vesper lets their cold brilliance fill the spaces where lesser company might have expected confession, and when he finally speaks, his drawl is soft, familiar, and stripped of ornament. "Ma?" he says, the word offered upward with the candles and the snakeskin and the silver-bright dagger. "I finally finished."

---

Vesp (finally) completed his quest from under a veil of hanging clouds
Vesper has been given a quest! He must

1. Leave the Viper skin out all night beneath the moon someday soon this dust's gonna settle Left it out at Colt's ranch
2. Complete a training thread focusing on something not being what it seems [Training] the blood runs slow Fought a molten tiger, that was actually an ancient.
3. Complete a thread encountering some sort of illusion [Training] Made you look! Nova uses her illusion magic during a spar
4. Complete a thread getting Nova's measurements for the armour. everything in its right order Gets Nova's measurements!

Will I ever quit playing with matches?
Why am I making angels in the ashes?

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

Safrin

The candles burn higher before the stars descend, with their flames drawing long and pale, gold thinning into silver until each wick seems to hold a little piece of the sky, and the opalescent snakeskin laid across the altar shivers beneath a wash of light that has nothing to do with the moon. Frost brightens along the barrow stones. The offerings gleam. The dagger, narrow and star-tipped, catches so sharply that for an instant it looks less like metal than a sliver cut from some distant constellation and brought, at last, back home.

Safrin appears in the heart of it, not stepping so much as arriving where the night has made room for her, radiant enough to turn the cold beautiful. Her gaze moves first to the snakeskin, then to the dagger beside it, and though approval warms the curve of her mouth, it does not quite become the first thing she gives him. Instead, as she looks at Vesper, her head tilts slightly to one side, starlight caught in the dark fall of her hair and along the fine, perfect line of her cheek, and the expression she wears is wry enough to be almost mortal, if not for the impossible brightness of her eyes. There is no disappointment in it, no displeasure sharpened and waiting, but there is a question threaded through her stillness, delicate and deliberate as a hook cast into deep water.

"Given that you began this because of your concern for your sister," Safrin says, her voice soft against the frost and flame, "I admit I am surprised it has taken you so long." She knows, of course, everything that has elapsed, and the look she gives him carries the quiet weight of that knowledge; the long detours, the wounds, the distractions dressed as obligations, the loyalties he has tested and been tested by in turn. She has seen him bend beneath things he would rather have made elegant, seen him delay without ever quite forgetting, seen the shape of what he has carried even when he has carried it handsomely.

Still, she lets the question remain between them. Not as accusation, exactly. Not even as reproach. More as an invitation to decide what sort of truth he means to set beside the snakeskin and the dagger, now that he has finally come.

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

VESPER

Vesper lifts his pale eyes as his mother appears, the movement measured beneath the sudden brightness of her arrival. Safrin’s thoughts are not thoughts as mortals understand them, not corridors of want and memory and fear, but something vast and star-born, layered with old devotions, beautiful cruelties, and the endless pressure of a gaze that has watched kingdoms rise, kneel, and rot back into flowers. Even born beneath her light as he is, Vesper feels the edge of that immensity press against him, though he lets it pass over his mind like cold fire without mistaking endurance for mastery.

His mouth shifts faintly, though it does not become a smile, and after a small sigh he lowers his gaze toward the altar again. The snakeskin gleams between them, lovely and late, and the dagger’s star-tipped point catches the candlelight as if it means to accuse him with beauty rather than sharpness. It would be easy to place a reason beside them and call it honesty: the Family, King's End, Jack, the long tangle of duties and wounds, and Colt most of all, whose name still feels like pressing a thumb against an old bruise. He knows better than to offer any of it as an excuse, least of all to a mother who has already seen the shape of his delays from angles he has not yet faced himself. Letting his head hang a fraction in acknowledgement, pale hair slipping forward before one ringed hand stills it, Vesper exhales softly.

"I am too," he says at last, his drawl quiet beneath the silvered candleflame. That was the truth of it, though, for all his composure, surprise remains the cleanest name for what has lingered in him. He had thought he would set it down cleaner than this, that shame and grief and want would obey the boundaries he gave them, but Colt has remained threaded through the seams of things, quiet and stubborn and more difficult to remove than he’d had any intention of admitting.

Will I ever quit playing with matches?
Why am I making angels in the ashes?

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

Safrin

For a moment, Safrin merely looks at Vesper, and though there are questions she could ask, because she is what she is, they would not need to be questions at all. Safrin could reach beneath the careful arrangement of his silence and draw every ugly little thread of it into the candlelight: Colt’s name held like a bruise, the long ache of pride refusing to become need, the inconvenient humanity of wanting and grieving despite all the clever architecture he has built around himself. "Mm," she says simply, as if that small sound is enough to gather all the things she will not pry apart tonight.

Turning toward the altar, Safrin lifts one hand and the opalescent scales ripple as if remembering life, moonlight sliding across them in liquid bands while the delicate length rises from the stone and twists through the air. The skin folds in upon itself, not shrinking so much as becoming more perfectly arranged, its pale shimmer deepening into something stronger, sleeker, and impossibly light. Starlight threads through it like fine wire, binding scale to scale until what hangs before them is no longer an offering but armour, supple and luminous, beautiful enough to be ceremonial and sharp enough not to be mistaken for decoration.

"There," Safrin murmurs, approval finally warming her voice as the armour settles with a faint, silver gleam. "Before you go, there is something else." Her attention returns to him, and this time the tilt of her head carries a different weight, not quite warning and not quite amusement, though both live comfortably in the curve of her mouth. "I have created another demigod, as I am sure you have heard. Flora."

The name is allowed to rest between them for a moment, bright and inconvenient. Safrin watches him through it, well aware of the tangled threads gathered there: Flora, Jack, the old wounds, the fresh humiliations, the quiet resentments no one involved has ever worn as discreetly as they would like to imagine. Then the goddess gives a delicate shrug, as though mortal drama is something she can acknowledge without permitting it to become important enough to obstruct her purposes. "I expect, if necessary, that you will be able to work together?" Her brow lifts, elegant and rhetorical, the question shaped like silk drawn over steel. Whatever answer he might give, Safrin has already placed the expectation where she wants it, and the stars above them burn with the serene confidence of someone who does not often confuse preference with permission.

"And also," she adds, her gaze shifting briefly beyond him, past the barrows and the frost and the dark paths that wind away from the shrine, toward something much farther and less easily named, "there is something strange happening in the Oerwoud." The silver around her seems to cool as she says it, the candleflames drawing themselves thinner beneath the pressure of her attention. "It is worth keeping an eye on."

---

Vesper has completed his quest and received: 

Vernal Viper Snake Skin Armour | Lightweight opalescent armour that, when struck at close range (melee), releases hallucinogenic pollen that causes the attacker to roll with disadvantage on their next turn. Uses Type 1 Stats

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!