Saffron lost little sleep over her interaction with the hourglass. She'd been a resident in Rhy'Din for less than a year. Her arrival had left her memories a wreck that she had yet to salvage fully, save for a dark, horrid box of a place, followed by the persistent sensation in her stomach of being dragged behind a speedboat approaching a rocky coastline. Nevertheless, and as much as she sought some facade of deterministic philosophy, she succumbed to the desire for knowledge, however frivolous, however damning it may have been.
Many of the events that transpired simply happened with someone else in her place:
One of the other seamstresses, possibly S'jira, outfitted Kai with a dress made to keep clean during her healing work in the Sanctuary; it was a bit less flamboyant, less intricate, yet the gift was received well all the same, and constructed with a sturdy stitch. She had nothing other than her white sundress for her date with Nickandros, and got an opportunity to see that, in spite of his celestial duties, he cherished her for who she was, much more than how she presented herself.
Mayu's life continued on its path with little to no incident, save the vacant spot where their strange and tempestuous relationship once was. She traveled to her spirit world all the same, rewound time for herself and Toby all the same, and picked up and dropped admirers with simply one fewer to add to their number, each one inevitably left out as a chew toy for Toby's jealous maw.
Magenta would still have died at Velvet's hand, and the car Edith would have been rescued all the same. Marie Chalfont would have indulged in her favorite pastime of suicide all the same. No vacancy, no short, stocky, fox-eared hole seemed, at first, to manifest itself.
Saffron seemed to bob back in forth in confirmation of these images as they rose from the hourglass, hidden in her booth with her boots on the floor, legs in half-lotus and her toes scrunching against the seams of her faux-fur-lined jacket piled into her lap. She set her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, staring from between the tresses of her fine red hair's feral mess. She sighed through her nose, the scar across its bridge bringing her ruined sinuses to add a creaking, snore-like rumble.
"Yah, what a great idea, Saffron! Let's go see how much you aren't needed here, while you're stuck here as a carrier for a spiritual infection! Woo-F*cking-Hoooo!" Saffron's words rattled with the sheer sarcasm in their cheery delivery, her eyes manically wide and her white-furred, vulpine ears drooping at the ends. She took a moment, just a moment, to glance at her own wrist, pondering the big, healthy blue vein that popped out beneath her so very, very pale skin.
A split-second of warm water and a sharp razor flashed in her mind's eye, peeping in behind the vistas that laid out for her, easily shrugged off as something from outside, from some alternate timeline; certainly nothing that she'd considered on more than one occasion in a month....or at least twice a week. "I could....just do something for myself, for once..." Her voice went flat and her expression heavy, with every last drop of luster taken out from her eyes. "....no one would miss me for long, eh?"
Another arm of the whirling galaxy of time-fragments swung back around, delivering a fresh deposit of suppositions, scattered across her time in the realm:
Mist Gul, journeyman mage, collapsed to his knees in exhaustion during the pirate raid on the Docks as the building in front of him toppled in from structural damage, his spells exhausted. The screams from within rang with a chorus of his own as he stumbled forward, catching only the sight of mangled bodies and unavoidable gore. Two patches of black fur stuck out from under a collapsed ceiling; the crunch of bones and gurgled howls would stick with Mist for years to come. In the chaos, none had the capacity to help him rescue the citizens trapped inside, between all of the battles and the call for glory.
Abby Dekker, fractious beastie and home to a few diverse personalities, writhed in horrific pain upon a dusty operating table, a bloody palm print upon her bare belly releasing curls of smoke and potassium-like spits of seared skin. To her left, a severe-looking woman with dark-gray skin, licking a cut on her own hand that disappeared in its passing. To her right, De Rousseau II, descendent of her since-departed nemesis, peeled his lips back in a leer that displayed every last one of his teeth, somewhere beween burning hate and sadistic euphoria as he lifted a petrol can and emptied its contents over her body. As he and the woman stepped away, a young transwoman with sunken cheeks and eyes hollowed by abuse stepped up, staring enviously at Abby as she lit a wooden match and tossed it onto the gingersnap. Had Saffron not traveled back to Arras and challenged Sophie Moreau to take up arms and run the city's nocturnal affairs, De Rousseau II would have had the opportunity to exact his revenge on his adversary, robbing her of the chance for the redemption that now rested in her reach.
A flashlight shined on a tiny, dirt-caked girl, her legs rapped in fetid bandages and her hair matted with all manner of offal and debris. She snarled at the flashlight's bearer, stalking back and forth on all fours, and leaped at him, twin razor-sharp points popping down as his neck came within range. Two large gray blurs intersected her leap, greatswords wielded by Watch members in armor that buzzed with arcane power. Her legs hit the ground, then her head, as her torso's bones scattered across the rest of the hunting party. Without Saffron's passage opening the way for Bea Howell's arrival in RhyDin, Fleck would have had too few of her own kind left to shepherd the wildling to safety, to keep her from actions that would bring her to cause more harm than she would ever have intended, and to bring an end to the Chalfont line.
Audrey Horne put a cigarette into her mouth and lit it, with the same hand. She reached over to touch her right shoulder, feeling the pad of her jacket's folded-up sleeves over the mangled socket that once held her arm. Still in poodleskirt and saddle shoes, her eyes had accrued deep, sick circles beneath them. Next, she put her hand on the locket at her chest, popping it open. In one half, a picture of her wife, Magenta, in her best Alice regalia. In the other, a photo of her daughter, Susie, taken moments after her birth. She closed the locket and took her coffin nail between her index and middle fingers, making room for a smoke-dressed sigh as she looked up to the altar before her. Flanking either side was Artsblood, her corkscrew wound just-far-enough into her own eye socket, with the stumps of her limbs sealed in burnt flesh. In the other, her glassy-eyed reflection, Mira, hung upside down with the skin flayed from her arm, fixed to the wall with razor wire and knitting needles. The room's floor was black and white zig-zags, and the walls were indistinguishable from the red curtains hung around willy-nilly. In a leather armchair, a tiny, well-dressed man entirely clad in red rocked with silent laughter. Over his shoulder, what looked like it should have been Magenta appeared in a Little Bo Peep, her eyes a pupilless gray and her lips pulled into a black-lipped rictus, holding a leash to a woman with traffic cone orange hair in a torn costume dress and lamb mask, fixed to her face with staples. The Man From Another Place spoke, his words coming in as if they arrived at the wrong angles, to be cobbled together later in the mind into something comprehensible. "This! is My FAVorite Show! Now Let's Set the TaBle for SupPeR." Without the aid of the mad Malkavians, without Saffron's moral support, and in the wake of Magenta's death at the hands of Velvet, Audrey would have had to take desperate measures and walk a lightless path to protect her daughter.
Cuyler Quinn wandered up to the inn on her birthday, decked out in her pretty floral dress and combat boots, with the song "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly" by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty on her lips. She went in, flirted with what patrons were around, downed more than a few bottles of hooch, and passed out in a room upstairs. She slept with whomever would take her up on her catcalls, occasionally coming up for air from her dives into bottle after bottle, if only to make her next plunge mean something. She had found a functional kind of stasis, keeping herself back from the dissolution of her local 'family,' though each strike to them would justify her withdrawal from the world more and more. She would shut down on the days when Hank would care for Emarie, spending her alone time wreathed in blue smoke and sweating booze. The days when she would clean herself off from her work got sparser and sparser on those days, and her home would, for at least half the month, smell not dissimilar to the inside of the crypts she cracked for the goods inside.
Saffron pushed the hourglass back and away from herself. The rosiness to her cheeks had gone pale and green as she stumbled across the inn from her booth and into the washroom, lurching into a stall to relieve her stomach of its contents. She shook as she spat out the remnants in her mouth, and curled up with her arms across her midsection, shuddering as her whole body fell into sobs. Tears and mucus added themselves to the wretched brew inside the bowl before her, though her wails she could still manage to keep quiet. She splashed some water into her mouth and onto her face at the sink before weakly trudging out on bare feet, quietly thankful for one of the many dramatic distractions pulling attention away from her search for a bottle of water behind the bar. She sipped down the lifegiving fluid on her way back to the booth and tugged on her boots with nerve-weak, yet serene purpose. By the time she looked up, the hourglass had already gone, and the nausea had been replaced by a glowing, sweet giddiness to return to her home in the Glen with her graverobber gal, to hang around as one of those troublemaking gals with Audrey, to get on with those little, seemingly meaningless activities that end up saving someone's corner of the world, whether intentional or not.
