These shots don't ricochet

Iskra

BREATHE IT IN, IT'S JUST SNOW, WE'RE JUST FALLING
WE WON'T ALWAYS FREE FALL BACK TO NOTHING

The bar was alive with steady conversation and firelight that swayed below the chimney. It was the type of place that let you be lonely without being alone. In a corner Iskra leaned against the wall, his coat shrugged off and hanging on the chair as the warmth of the house filled every space, even his bones where the day's chill had settled early. A mess of wood chips speckled the fabric, one was even tangled in his hair at the back of his head where he couldn't see, each testament to the man's profession and lack of a wardrobe that wasn't just his day's attire. Unlike some of the other patrons, Iskra hadn't come here for a good night or a date. He came here to ensure the night did not become bad. He came here to forget. He came here to become numb; the trees he carved all day, each day, put aches in his body that screamed when the sun went down and it was too much noise to handle when his heart had been screaming too from the moment he woke up.

Tonight was especially noisy. He stared at the drink in his hand but did not see it, his thoughts taking him miles away. Maybe it's because the memories were happier than usual, or perhaps the drink wasn't as strong as he preferred, but nostalgia came and Iskra let it settle into him. He was just a child again, running down the Torchline shores with the other kids, mischief and laughter in their wake as they spent the summer full of wonder and hope. There was a girl his age he'd explore with, her auburn hair gleaming in the sunlight, the smell of honey wrapping around each moment while her unyielding kindness and bravery inspired him. Then there was his best friend, a boy who's smile could light up the world and who always stood at his side as they adventured and chaos unfurled around them.

A smile tugged at the corner of Iskra's lips. He'd once believed he was gay, such was his love for his friend, only to later find his attraction was certainly aimed at womanly persuasions. So starved for affection, Iskra had thought those feelings of joy must be what everyone was always talking so passionately about. He'd learned then that there were many different kinds of love, and that those born of good friendships were no less substantial. Love bonds us with others, and in family, friends, and mates we find different ways to be strong and to conquer the trials of existing so that we can live.

Iskra tilted the drink up to his lips, wondering where all those friends that held bits of his heart had gone now after all this time, and if they were part of why he always felt so hollow. He hoped they were grown and well and that their lives were full even if his wasn't.

At his feet, a gray bundle of fur stirred in his sleep; just another piece of Iskra's heart.

I'M JUST STARTING TO LEARN
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN CHASING GHOSTS

to be lit up from within

vein by vein

An appearance within the Hollowed Grounds was a rarity for her – but nosiness and curiosity beckoned like old friends, just as much as bedlam did. The opportunity to lay waste to the Spire (with the range of her audacity and boldness) may have been part of an inspiration, and the other, simply for some portions of nostalgia.

She hadn’t been sad or despondent to leave this world behind. It laid like shadows over the depths of her mind with all the other brimming scars of lost souls and rapacious claws; fitting to see it still striving to survive, even after all these years. Where some prospects seemed to be catching, like fires and infernos, others remained cool and stonelike, disappearing into the ruins and regions, just like so many of its surviving inhabitants.

The Honeybee fought the edge of her wrinkled nose down as she entered the bar – recognizable in some edges of her uncle’s touch, the lights a bit too much, but no one seemed bothered by her presence. Some could’ve recognized her, and some had long since forgotten, and it didn’t seem to matter to the woman one way or the other. Fangorn bobbed alongside her ankles, avoiding the usual bout of stares, while Sila sat perched on her shoulder, one move away from hiding in her curtain of hair.

Turning to the bartender, the smuggler snagged a drink of choice, before sauntering further into the midst of the familiar and strange alike, scouring for an unclaimed seat.

to be the sun

MELITA

Iskra

BREATHE IT IN, IT'S JUST SNOW, WE'RE JUST FALLING
WE WON'T ALWAYS FREE FALL BACK TO NOTHING

His haunted gaze found her over the rim of his glass. He nearly choked as he finished his sip, the burning liquid caught in his throat as his heart lurched up into it. His eyes watered with the burn as he quietly wheezed, choking it down as he set his drink on the counter with a thud, leaning over into a pained cough.

When he recovered, she was gone, having slipped from the bar back into the crowd. Iskra's gaze swept over everyone like a spotlight, even as some quiet part of him hummed about doubt. You've done this before the little voice inside said with complaint, as if he were nothing more than a frustrating child who could not learn from their mistakes. Iskra ignored it and kept looking, craning his neck to try and peer around a corner better. She isn't real, the voice purred more kindly. It was patient and rational to oppose the hammer of his heart in his chest. You were just thinking about her, that's all. Unable to find her again Iskra let out a sigh and slouched back into his seat. He probably did conjure up this ghost of his past; this is what he got for letting the memories play out, he looked like a madman.

Drink more, the voice crooned, promising to keep the ghosts at bay with some foul heat.

Iskra reached for his drink in defeat, but some other part of him still had hope and cast one more sidelong glance. His hand fumbled, tipping his drink in the same moment he swiftly rose, his chair and boots kicking against Goose. "MEL!" he called out, exasperation strangling him as much as the threat of the ground coming up to hold him as he tripped out of his chair in his eagerness to reach that red hair he caught a glimpse of in the crowd.

Madman the voice hissed as he crashed to the floor and his dog yelped.

I'M JUST STARTING TO LEARN
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN CHASING GHOSTS

to be lit up from within

vein by vein

No haunted factions clouded or distorted her gaze, maneuvering through the throng with little effort, casting a cooler glance towards those who might’ve glared at Fangorn’s appearance. A few eyerolls and less than subtle threatening chords later, and she’d found herself a spare table over by the corner, until –

Well, someone screamed her name.

And a chair fell. And then the man.

Brows furrowing, and maybe pretending it wasn’t her being called out (due to some past circumstances that she’d rather not repeat, but she recalled where her knives were instinctually), her eyes followed the same as many within the confines of the bar: straight to the tall, muscular man with the dog.

It took her a moment of calculation, but the familiarity of the individual’s face meant he wasn’t a stranger at all – features once pressed against glass, peering with her towards the bottom of an ocean, laughing alongside her sister as they cheerfully drove themselves through waves and sand.

Ordinarily, she might refuse to believe it, but this world, and so many others, worked in mysterious, enigmatic ways, and she shouldn’t be surprised now if the past billowed upwards and slapped her. Not after so many years of painstakingly carving it away from her bones, or welcoming it with open arms, foolishly, dangerously. So she gripped her drink harder, and only advanced away from some gawking onlookers, to a feral whisper in his direction, cautiously moving towards the felled beast. “Iskra?”

to be the sun

MELITA

bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones, bones.

---

You've encountered the OG random event! This allows you to skip one levelling requirement with the character in this thread. (Unfortunately does not count for characters over level 10, how sad.)

Iskra

BREATHE IT IN, IT'S JUST SNOW, WE'RE JUST FALLING
WE WON'T ALWAYS FREE FALL BACK TO NOTHING

The din of the establishment quieted down around him as his spectacle caught the attention of the others nearby. He very well might have been escorted out due to this disorderly conduct, believed to be wasted despite barely buzzing, but the barkeep currently had their hands full wiping up his spilled drink and hadn't yet summoned the bouncer.

His name drifted over the returning noise. That it snaked from her lips was a promise of reality.

Propping himself up with a groan, Iskra paid no mind to anything else around him as he fervently looked for her again, looked for that voice that itched at the familiarity in his head, yet did not quite satisfy it. He appeared panicked for a moment (madman), such was his eagerness to ensure he hadn't lost her, but it was for no need because there she was.

"Mel!" Iskra yelled out, softer now that the distance between them had closed a bit. He got back to his feet enough, no worse for the wear aside from a barely cut lip that threatened to swell more in the next hour. It did not impede the great crack of a smile that found its way onto his face as he beheld her. He rushed forward to embrace her in a massive hug that'd sweep her off her feet for a moment, his eyes shining with the threat of tears while he'd murmur "gods I have missed you."

- -

POG bones!

I'M JUST STARTING TO LEARN
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN CHASING GHOSTS

to be lit up from within

vein by vein

A thousand pulses and waves circumvented through the Honeybee’s mind – ghosts, first and foremost, of ruined and mired individuals, of ones she’d figured had gone the way of Mort just like everyone else. Outstretched limbs and foolish hearts, gone and broken beyond repair, dissipating back into the earth because that was what happened to nearly everyone she knew. Iskra had been amongst and amidst the many in her impulsive, speculative haze; conjectures and casualties, mourned and lost and never quite knowing how to take it. Forging onward, instead of becoming a shell, had usually been the trick, taking on bolder enterprises until she knew power and bedlam like the back of her own hands, waiting on the precipice, watching to see if someone else strived to take another thing away from her.

The crowd murmured, parted, and dissipated after a few moments, either disinterested or unimpressed when nothing violent came of the commotion. Melita though, stilled within the confines of the embrace, uncertain and unsure, brows furrowing in the platitudes of confusion. Maybe it was him; grown and parted and not dead. Maybe her head was playing tricks on her. Maybe everything spun beneath her feet, and she clenched her jaw so tightly that she’d saw stars.

But if this was her once best friend, then, a myriad of other currents pulled… ”Where the hell have you been?” She uttered instead, as quiet as she was able, caught in the turmoil of bewilderment and reunions.

to be the sun

MELITA

Iskra

BREATHE IT IN, IT'S JUST SNOW, WE'RE JUST FALLING
WE WON'T ALWAYS FREE FALL BACK TO NOTHING

His joy was a candle that burned bright and beautiful, it swayed with eagerness and warmth. Her rebuke was a harsh breath, it billowed through him and snuffed out the flame. Regret and shame marred him, a myriad of soot stains and messy wax drippings. With the glow of the fire gone, the ugliness of the candle was all too visible against the cold dark.

She was not pliant in his arms, and against the breeze of her words, he stiffened in turn. She was not so sweet as he recalled, and unknowingly he inhaled deeply, searching for the honeyed aroma of his memories.

He let her go, pulling away with a visible hurt. His features fell in turn, pulled in with misery so deep it felt like it summoned its own gravity. She wasn't happy to see him? What's more, she was upset - his absence had left a mark; he had caused her pain. The knowledge of that was there, in the spaces between her query, and it slammed against him until his heart splintered. He stilled, afraid to breathe and send the pieces of him scattering, exposing the cowardice he harbored within.

Iskra had played hide and seek a little too well. When the countdown stopped, he kept running. When they all called ollie ollie oxen free, he kept hiding.

Iskra slunk back to an unoccupied table against the wall they were near, needing the stability of a chair to face the disappointment he would lay before her. Quietly Goose crept towards him, offering the hand on his lap a soft lick of reassurance. The dog seemed to sense the tension and he remained out of the way after the outburst, and perhaps he'd been stunned for a moment, unaccustomed to seeing Iskra so free with anyone, however brief.

"I moved to Halo," Iskra finally gathered the courage to say, glancing at her sparingly, otherwise staring at the table as if the answers were written in its wood grain. "After..." he trailed off, unable to bring himself to tell her of the ways he carried his grief around like he was the only one who knew the weight of such a burden.

That's always been the problem with candles, they don't weather well.

I'M JUST STARTING TO LEARN
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN CHASING GHOSTS

to be lit up from within

vein by vein

Sweetness, kindness, generosity, and benevolence weren’t direct fixtures of the path, but they’d been marred, dragged, and covered with the spitfire vehemence of every ember she’d learned to wield. Protection from the way worlds had damned and stolen from her, snagged at the loved ones in her grasp, tearing them apart with bare hands and then coming for her thereafter. But Melita didn’t let the land do the same to her – she raised her chin and defied logic, odds, and defeat with such impudent, insouciant boldness that she survived, somehow.

It didn’t mean she hadn’t been hurt along the way, just that the molten flames lingered far too often for her to give way to the pain.

While she would’ve dearly loved to cherish an old friend’s return, wrap her arms around him too and laugh and entice and lure with all the generous wonders of the earth, the rancor was too harsh and the bitterness too unrelenting. Confusion amidst the turmoil had been a culmination too, and her brows furrowed as he turned, billowed away, and she pondered if this truly was a ghost, and he’d simply recede into the hollow walls.

Moved to Halo. After…didn’t give her much clarity.

Her hand grasped the drink tighter, and she moved to his table with all the passion and ardor of her former life, and the daring parallels too, grabbing hold of a nearby chair and plunking down in it. Fangorn did his best not to glance at the dog, wrapping his viney tendrils around the leg of the vessel, and Sila’s tail was the only visible thing behind Melita’s curtain of hair.

Perhaps she was meant to invoke sympathy, but for what, she didn’t know. “I thought you were dead,” spiraled out of her instead – waiting for some other frame of explanation.

to be the sun

MELITA

Iskra

BREATHE IT IN, IT'S JUST SNOW, WE'RE JUST FALLING
WE WON'T ALWAYS FREE FALL BACK TO NOTHING

Painful as it was to face her and own up to his selfishness, it was equally terrible not to behold her after all this time. As she settled with him - thank the gods she did - he couldn't help but glance up and meet her gaze. The barest whisper of a smile emerged; the kind that couldn't spread to the eyes because it was too weak, yet was strong enough to overcome the despair and simply exist. Next to him, Goose stared into the curtain of her hair, certain he'd seen movement there. If Iskra saw the beasts too, he did not say, perhaps didn't even consciously realize it, such was the haze the rest of the world had drifted into as Iskra's entire being devoted itself to this moment with her.

Though it was a brief moment of respite before she spoke and damaged him all over again, it was long enough for Iskra to notice that she wasn't exactly the way he remembered. The features of her face were different in ways he couldn't quite place, as if just a single crease from laughter or sunlight had been undone. Were he more trained in music, he might recognize that the lilt of her speech wasn't the one that played around his head at night; just a music box of memories playing marginally off-key, the result of being dropped one too many times most likely.

Ah, but what won't a decade do to change a person, all the while each memory is just a duplication of the last time you remembered it, steadily decaying into nothing more than a fantasy your mind was tricked into believing was reality.

The whisper died under her honesty - no joy could exist in him now.

"It felt like I was," he admitted quietly, frowning as he glanced down at the table once more. "Sometimes, it still feels that way." A haggard sigh shuddered through him, and it seemed to carry a visible weight as Iskra's body slackened in its absence, becoming a crumpled husk in that chair. He grew quieter still.

"I lost so much of myself when she..." his mouth was too dry to hold his tongue anymore. Where even did that damn appendage normally go? It seemed impossible now to have it in there, and his throat, was it too narrow now to breathe? Gods, why was the fire so hot suddenly? Iskra wiped his palms on his pants.

"She died Mel."
He found some morsel of strength and looked back up at her, his eyes falsely bright with saline. He had not spoken of...any of this. He'd just run, run and buried it so deep it had nowhere to go but inside of him to rot.

"She died and I couldn't face it. I couldn't face this world without her and I couldn't face how angry I was that she left me like that." Iskra's eyes flashed as he leaned closer, his clammy hand an abrupt fist on the table, teeth gritted into a sneer as the boy sobbed about his damn mother and the shitshow that he'd experienced growing up. All the while, blind to how he'd been no kinder to her in the end.

I'M JUST STARTING TO LEARN
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN CHASING GHOSTS

to be lit up from within

vein by vein

She wasn’t going to begrudge or mourn the way she’d been changed and altered; only perhaps the events that had led up to it. Some beneficence lingered and honey remained, but the stillness in her from betrayed all the sedition spread from fire to flame to blood and back; strength rendered because she’d had no other choice. Melita couldn’t be the saccharine laden babe who’d once skipped from flower to flower any longer; stopping to smell the blossoms had died with the sound of her sister’s laughter fading into nothing but her memories, or her mother’s sacrificial motions.

She wouldn’t expect it of him either – to be the joyful lad who’d smiled and protected and shielded without so much as a blink of an eye. Because people changed – even if one had believed them simply gone.

His answer wasn’t something she would’ve ever concocted; Iskra’s mother had been formidable in so many ways – and her gilded gaze watched as he slumped and explanations were made clear, swift, and harsh. “Sorry,” she apologized, uncertain what for – the question, the action, the events that had led to here…Given the opportunity, she would’ve bared her teeth for him too – against the world, lands, scorn, and derision. But he’d ran instead, fleeing to winter worlds, telling not a soul, and she couldn’t help the feeling of betrayal pumping through her veins, even if it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Not really. He was allowed to be angry and spiteful, afraid of what was to come next.

Sighing, unfurling the way her breaths had built up in her chest, the Honeybee reached across to his fist, tapping lightly on it, some little signal to let her in. “And now what are you doing?” Existing? Living? Roaming?

to be the sun

MELITA

Iskra

BREATHE IT IN, IT'S JUST SNOW, WE'RE JUST FALLING
WE WON'T ALWAYS FREE FALL BACK TO NOTHING

His anger simmered, balled in his fist, and steadily dissipated into the tabletop in waves. Now that he'd said it out loud, now that he'd let these feelings rise to the surface and remain instead of hurriedly pushing them down into his depths, he didn't understand how they'd had such a hold over him.

"She died." he heard himself saying again and inside a voice asked, so?
How many had died since? What of his siblings - of his friends - did they still live?
He should have been there, then he'd know. Why had he run? Scared... of what?
He was not a child anymore damnit, he couldn't keep hiding behind his mother.

Her touch grazed him and he inhaled suddenly, the sound audible as his gaze lifted from the haze of self-hatred back to the halo of fire that framed her lovely face. He did not respond at first, not audibly anyway, just that whisper of a smile for a moment as he considered, opening his hand to clasp hers. He'd been worried about the past for so long, that he hadn't considered the future much beyond the current day's rising. "Making amends," he finally admitted, leaning forward into the table more, towards her. "Enough about me," he'd need time to reassemble all his splintered bits into something whole, but at least it felt like that was possible now. "What have you been up to after all this time?" He nodded at a waiter who passed, asking for another drink, but one he wasn't planning to use to numb himself for once.

I'M JUST STARTING TO LEARN
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN CHASING GHOSTS

to be lit up from within

vein by vein

Grief had never been Melita’s shield, but she didn’t begrudge him for the way he held that shelter over his frame. Despite her anger, and perhaps all it had come down to was being left behind (again and again), she remained one of those unrelenting forces; potent and powerful, despite her smaller figure. Casting a glance back at him through her curtain of fiery hair, she snorted. “And how are you going to do that?” When he didn’t readily take her hand or let her in, she continued tapping, leaving a little drumming pattern on his skin.

The question pinpointed back at her led to some amount of a furrowed brow, gaze sweeping over to the waiter and hinting at actual food too, before pondering where to begin. Perhaps where her own tragedies laid, and then the forging onward, into the bristling components of who and what she was today. “Mom and Clem are gone,” which was the basic truth of it all – uncertain where they’d left things and even he’d known before all of these other travesties. “So I’ve been mostly on my own. Getting stronger.” Fighting the world with her bare hands if she needed to. “I work on a ship called the Ark. Took down the KingMaker during the war.” No atonement for the Honeybee; who’d rarely lamented her mistakes and errors. “Exploring too.”

to be the sun

MELITA