Topic: The Smokey Trio - Sid, Scottie & Linerel

Lerida

Date: 2007-08-29 05:57 EST
There was no season, no setting and rising of a sun or a moon, no sandy planets in her dreams, no steeples and spires and spiders. There was just her on a chair, rocking back and forwards, in an empty room, of a turreted building, on a tall, tall hill. With loose spools of wool and needles sparkling by the windowsill she was alone and colourless but for her apricot mouth thoughtful and wordless. She mused on the Disappearing Act, these Magicians. She had seen them long ago when her own skin had been of smoke and mirrors. But that was long ago and she was frightful now at her recollections being anything more than a fine vapour over all she had really been through.

Tossing her head to the side she threw the skeins to the floor before her and rose, sighing heavily, though without drama, and walked in her thin night rail to the windowsill that glittered with small needles and she stared at the hillside below.

She had felt an impression of warmth and poetry and song and forgotten lore in the presence of the Three that had disappeared in recent days from her vision. It had left her speechless and in desire for days. They all beguiled her.

Like strangled in pearls of a wild wisdom she felt herself soar, wishing to sleep. Fantasies were best for the wild ones, and she was not that, any more.

"I'm not so wicked anymore Jack"

"As if wickedness can just be wiped away, like chalk from a chalkboard" Jack Scot replied.

And timidly she had raised her head and smiled, crookedly, sweetly.

"It's not gone, just hiding"

Otherworldliness she could appreciate. Being a plain, mortal thing. The colour of ash, and as distinct a lightness, to be blown away.

She returned to her seat and sat there for the rest of the age of that eclipse. It was a blood moon outside. And she knitted again, taking her thrown instruments from the floor, and she sewed Summer. Green, unnatural, thunderstorms. She smiled when done, content, and decided she would give it to Linerel. If just to see his reaction.

Lerida

Date: 2007-09-16 06:03 EST
Throughout the night, in this dream place, where she was different, thinner, meeker, feeling herself miniature, she became somehow quite lost in her sheets of dreaming. Cotton poured off the maTtress leaving her naked and festooned only in the candle light that sat on the bed side table. Although this was all dreaming, even her on that very mattress, her mind designed a pattern as with wool and a board and picking needles. She sowed some mad calligraphy between herself and another world and would awake forgetting it all.

Viki appeared in this number, act trillion of the many she had had since her return. This rendition of Viki was colourless, as she herself had been in a previous subconscious wandering, with handsome Linerel behind her, hand on the seer's shoulder and saying "she is alive. She IS alive!", and Lerida's miniature heart, a fragile tropical leaf, began to race. Her fingers unfurled from her palms where nails left dashes in her hands from clenching so hard, and she spun from the bed and to that window that overlooked a sad countryside, always a gray sky, and she smelt smoke. It was spicy smoke, like the kind she smoked in her real life, not this otherworld, the kind she had stowed away from Russia on return trips. But it was a fire, down below in the gully somewhere, of this spice. It was a mountain of flames and in side each lick was a riddling tongue, like strings of a violin, shuddering haunting notes along the horizon and into her humid, trembling heart.

"Oh Viki", she cried, out over all the music and fire below. She held onto the windowsill and the sparkling needles and sobbed and sobbed, searching for answers unbeknownest, here where whispers ran like children through the gloom to yell out at her the truth of this horror.

And then, she awoke. She was sitting before a group of musician's, and yet she could see herself, behind herself, crouched down in a floral dress and whispering into her own ear, and then off, off into the crowd, smelling of sweet things, of childhood dreams, and circus floss, and sandlewood, and Lerida pined to really wake up, to be herself, that elusive sylph self, not this dream wracked huntress as she was now, before tumpets and blazing clarinets.

She was not tortured, but tired. And then, she really awoke, in Valcroix's bed, hugging herself.

"Viki"

And there was no response.

Lerida

Date: 2007-10-01 02:51 EST
This time she was not in a bed. There were no angels. No skeins to chase after around the room, down the valley, to pin back into her cross stitch board.

She stood outside, thunder was playing, and lighting zig zagged occassionally. There was no rain.

She yelled out for the Smokey Trio, her own affectionate name for them, and held herself tight.

She did not like being tied up in bed anymore, she didn't like her husband, she didn't like to sing, she didn't like the swords, she didn't like the blues, she didn't like her clothes, she didn't like her voice.

But she listened. To nature, and hoped to hear their foot steps.

It had all come to this. Every single interaction.

A singular spell. Here, and now.