For context:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=27534



Once upon ago, she had made her sleep beside other misfits that had too found their kindred home in the West End, or at the edge, at the Penny Moon. At times, Madison deeply missed what had been simple days in between chaos and iron. The last strains of that time had played out, and even though they were always to be looked back on with some regret, and a formidable guilt (and one that had transformed her on a fundamental level) she missed them. For what they could have been, and for what made them so special - their brevity. She had thought, for that period, that she may have re-captured what she had shared on the road with other men and women. Though their directions and reasons varied, they were still of a similar ilk, and bred through heritage or experience or tragedy, for that way. The road had been their friend, and when all was done, and farewell was tipped in a hat, what had been was always. Some things don't break.

But then the Hexx had done what they did, and Elison Blue had re-appeared, a living dead man, or a man who had never really lived (..in the terms she had believed him to) and again, her life had been plunged in another direction. There was more regret, more shame. The failure of a marriage, and with it a dream of home and children, still haunted her. It was a thought she little engaged and mostly put to bed. The only inkling of it was the curious tinge, when staring at the night's fire in the field, throwing wood on to burn, as thoughts would yield from their hidden doors, and she might imagine what Elison was doing or thinking and if he felt guilt and shame for what had been lost. She had wondered whether it had had to have been lost at all? But what could they do. Both had changed. The only thought left for Elison, was an unending thanks that he had seen her special to save. That he had not let a hungry past eat her whole. That he had given up all he knew, to ensure she did not. Love did not wear the way we sometimes think it should. Besides her lessons on trust and time and their fickle natures, and those who give it to you, she had learned that love was often in disguise. At its most true and honourable, it rarely arrived packaged as you expect. And sometimes, it is doing for you favours that seemed so natural, that you thought you had done them for yourself.

Say, the time Glenn Douglas had slapped her ego across the room. In all that rust and guilt, regret and whiskey, chaos and iron, Madison had been clinging onto her pride like a triumph. But it, like Elison's blue old life, was a phantom, and in the right light, a lie.

Some things are all in the way you look at them. The angle of the world. How much darkness is in the way.


For the better part of a year, her and Douglas had been roaming. In and out of prairie, their violent storms, towns that had no name, or names that had fallen off their signs, and making sleep beside one another with restless dreams. The journey had knotted back in on itself. The time before that year, was when they joined their force to see to the past that had been chasing them both. After the fall, there was no great release, or redemption. What had been left was wide, yawning emptiness that pieced them both to the edges of their souls. They felt changed, but not certain of the way in which their efforts had made them changed people. Much like love, Madison figured, watching the flames stroke like red fingers against the shadows in their barrel, there was no certainty for how to find that release. Maybe it would come to them to finally sleep sound, or stop looking at the stars and the skies like maps. To one day ignore the insistence of the wind tugging at their hair and shirts saying run. But it seemed that the change was more quiet than this. It too, like those old forgotten towns disappearing into the weeds and hill, no longer wore a name or held identity. It was to be a passing notion of completion. They both longed for the next adventure, it was the inscription upon their very natures. They were starved without it, for they had been both different people before they set foot into the dark. In the right light, they were the same as before. But in the shadows, they were lost. Thick cloud cover came crawled across the sky, deepening the night. Madison sat forward, stared good and hard at the flames, then pushed to her feet and walked around to Glenn, squeezing his arm, rousing him from sleep. He'd fallen asleep an hour ago. His hat covered his face, and his boots were half-fallen from his feet. "Time to go in", whispered to his jaw, as she scratched at the side of his head. "You'll get a kink in your neck if you keep fallin' asleep like that."

She headed for the house. Left him to douse the fire. She liked the tingling warmth of it reaching through her blouse to scald her back as she walked away. Fingers chased through the taller grasses as she moved. When she undressed, her skin was red, and she would slip into the sheets nude and toasted. Eyes stared at the ceiling. Wondering what was next.

Madison smiled in her drowsy state, curled there. A ghost of a hand trailed across her resting face, toyed with the lengths of dark hair fanned across the pillow beside her. She mumbled Glenn's name. Her eyes opened, but he was not there. Her gaze turned across the room to the open window. White curtains blew. For an instant, it seemed the vague outline of a man stood outside - hat, cane, and a smile. But like smoke, evaporated quickly. Breached the darkness and broke. Gone. She pulled the loose sheet around her naked form and moved across to retrieve jeans and her blouse. Working the buttons hastily, she dropped the sheet and took the hall. There was a spark in the air. An electricity. The feeling of something being off. She'd smelled it enough to know what it was. It was elusive, but it was there all the same.

"Glenn?!" She paused by the bathroom to reach into the bottom drawer and remove the pistol laid there. She moved into the lounge. Then straight for the door. Again, a sense of eyes. She looked behind her, passed her attentions across the kitchen, and out to the yard. She passed through the door and alongside the house. The air had stilled, and the taint was lessening. The sign on the front by the mailbox creaked. "Glenn?" she asked the night forcefully. Passing further, she could see the last billows from the fire's smoke curling up, with fireflies of cinder fluttering by the prone form of her lover on his back, hands in the air.


Boots paused nearby. Her head tilting, enquiringly. "What in sod's name are you doing, Douglas?"

The man was eccentric, and for some of his behaviour that was putting it politely, but this was altogether different. She stepped over and crouched down and reached out. A hand to his forehead, caressing hair from his face. "What kind of fortune is in your hand, babe? Something good tonight?"

That's when, in the dim expression of country light, she noticed. Dark brows rose, and she squinted. She neared a hand to his but did not touch. His palm was calibrating with a heat not unlike getting too close to a fire. Disbelief shaded her features. "Glenn?!" Most of the back of his hand was illustrated. As if by the most meticulous artist.

Snakeskin.

Blue eyes cast to his face. She could not recall a time she had seen that look on his face. Spooked. His pale, hard face a stricken mixture of marvel and frank horror.

"You going to explain what the hell that is?" Her body was vibrating. Even in the humid air, she felt the chill.



---------------------------------

"Times come to play. We know it."

Ol' Pierce rocked up onto the balls of his feet and laughed a perverted laugh. A noise of a thousand moth-wings, of bones snapping like twigs. He was a laughing stranger on the night road. Just a man gone for a walk.

"Roll up, roll up...", and then he turned and continued walking down the long, dry road that led away from Redemption. A wagon went by, he tipped his hat and smiled a charming smile. He continued on his way. A merry whistle. It didn't carry on the air.

Just some stranger on the road, walking, whistling, into the dark, until he was not anymore.



and he knows your name
I hear him call your name
and you will learn his name
when you learn how to want
oh, how you will want

and I can tell by the signs along the path now that he's walking
and I can tell by the weave of his words while he's talking
he'll fill you up full of night
until the light in your eyes is a dim dusk
he'll tear the stars from the skies and count
the scars on your horizon
he'll tear the stars from the skies and count
the scars on your horizon

Bewilderment flashed along the curves and angles of her face, and made her mouth lax, stunned, open. She remained crouched on the ground, only turning her head to follow his movements as he pulled away, as he walked around her and to the house. Her hands flattened against the soil, pulled at bits of grass. She shook her head and stood. From the darkness, she watched his silhouette move back and forth around the house. Packing. He was packing. Where would he go? Why so sudden?

She felt like a dreamer.


Was she dreaming?


It wouldn?t be the first time that a man had had to leave for unknown reasons. Everything about this, all the wrong in the air, felt as it had when Elijah had woken in a fit one morning and gone about packing half of their life into a bag, loading a saddle and telling her he?d be back soon. Leaving her with little to go on. It had hurt, though she?d hid it back then. Believing his words, despite the sense in her gut that things were not okay.


Pushing those images away, before she stepped right back in time, Madison moved briskly for the house, in through the door and swept by the counter. She gripped its edge. He kept moving. Eyes tracked him. It was a raven's expression on her face, the crook of her neck - curiosity, and a canniness, trying to draw the blood from the marrow, the truth from the silence. Blue eyes watched him fill the water. Watch patchwork move through the sullied, snakeskin, stranger?s hands. Her brow arched. She stepped over to block the door. Stall his path. ?What the hell kind of malarkey is this? I dared never think you might prescribe to the thinking of our fathers. Being marked and what not. Really, Glenn? That?s it? Not going to share with me what in the goddamn got transpiring while I was dozing in bed not twenty minutes ago?? She couldn't see herself letting him go without a fight. But he wasn?t himself. She could see the man outside the man. Those bells tolled like they were want to do. Requiem across the desolate city, telegraphing through the world and straight to her head.

They shared breaths and sneers until the feeling passed that she could look past her pride and into his eyes to see the other man in the room had won. Stepped on in and taken the floor. His words were cruel, and they carried the anger that had been pioneering him when he broke window and stole from Charlie's, nigh on two summers ago. Her eyes in turn were hooded with pity. Really? This was good bye?

So be it.

With a twist of her hand, the door swung back wide and her with it. Admitted a gale straight off the road blowing with grit. She rocked back and forth on her heel, before her other foot planted firmly on the boards to steady. Her jaw was set. Her own anger was fresh - puckered and sore. Her eyes wet. It wasn't so much the words that cut, as it was the lack of understanding. She nodded to his hands. ".. Here I thought only snakes were under these floors. Had one in the bed, too. Shame."

Her eyes shimmered wetly. She lowered her face and looked up it at him. The door rattled behind her as the breeze travelled along it. Her hair was everywhere in the wind. Madison levelled her eyes on him with deep thought. Watching him there. Funny how if you take the time to look at someone long enough, you can see them anew. A bad old feeling waltzed through the tunnels of her heart.


"Shame indeed."

Her chin lifted and she looked out past her hair at the dark road. The night. "Have at it, Douglas. You'll have your mystery, and you can keep it. But I'll tell you this: don't you d-a-r-e stick a gun in my face ever, ever again."


"Don't get too comfortable with the thought that I'm not going to come after. You're too damn c*cky to deal with anything as what you talk of on your own. I'll find you out there. Unless the wind sings back your death. Then I'll mourn your sorry, simple a$$. But I've debt to you."

"Go."

The collapsing sky and scenery and distance ate Glenn Douglas up and out of sight. The extraordinary sense of emptiness in his wake was searing, and gave the earth further gravity, and her knees seemed to want to melt into the boards beneath her. This outskirt was a great tumbling expanse for the wind to scream across, and the rains to own. Her house, somehow, withstood the burden. Braced by a slight incline in the land, the full pressure of the weather never quite shook the house from its nails though in this careless storm the walls, and their stories, did rattle like some great howling beast roamed its insides. Staring, she nearly grinned out of irony - feeling much like the land around her - vast, bare-boned, stripped, desolate. Madison had once stood on a white-paint peeling porch and watched a man ride away. She had not been upset for there had been the sentiment of his return. He never did. Because he went off to stage his death and save her soul. But Glenn? She had never expected him to stay, yet she had never expected this desertion.

She watched the bleak world crash and sizzle for a long time after he left. She had no nose for the direction he had gone, and could only think of snakeskin and the gun tucked under her chin. If anything, confusion outweighed the sense of loss. Loss was something she was accustomed to, again and again, like a penance. With a turn on her heel, she struck the doorframe with a fist bluntly, and ran her hand down the smooth wood. "Goddamnit".


When she went back to sleep, she did not sleep. She still thought of snakeskin. Of cold metal beneath her chin. Of a cold smile and a cold mind. What strangeness this did seem. When she awoke, restless and sweaty, the dull pain in her heart had abated, and left in its grave something else. When she crawled from tangled sheets, it was for the telephone on the wall she went. She picked up the dial and walked her fingers along a number to a voice that she had nearly forgot the cadence of.

"Madi? That you?"

"Seaside Sam's - six?"

".. Well, yeah. How the hell are ya?"

She smiled, if stiffly, and looked towards the door. Patches of morning were streaking beneath it like golden paint spills. She could, even in her blind haze, appreciate that. Underneath the rawness, was a determination. Seething and curling in her gut.

"Good enough. See you then, Heil."


There was a lull, a sound of movement down the line. A scrape of furniture.

"Where ya been, Mads?"

"Wrong question. I'll buy you a drink."

Click.


Post-storm winds still lashed around outside, like the impetuous invisible fists of a giant pounding the land like dough. She stole a steely breath and rested her forehead to the wall.


Here we go, Madi-girl.

The below composed solely by the player of Sam Reed: Terminal rat, fire-starter and he who is attracted to power as the moth is to the flame..


The folder on Heil's desk was massive, and almost nothing in it was useful. Jesnevich had been digging through archives and reports for a solid two weeks to get enough information together to find anything even remotely resembling a trail of where Samuel motherf*cking Reed had been. It was more trouble than it was worth given the vague search parameters, and worse yet, there was no real way to determine whether or not there was any actual connection to Reed's whereabouts until he could get the material to Madison to have her verify if any of this sh*t was Reed's handiwork.

The information was entirely unrelated.

A girl nailing the spot of Prima Ballerina after the previous one retired, despite a favorite for a lock-in and a number of others considered to have, before the try-outs, been much more likely choices.

A man taking a gamble and quitting his job to start a farm, to get back to his roots he'd said, accidentally cross-bred a dozen new strains of fruits and vegetables resistant to all kinds of disease.

A blind man that had been getting routinely mugged suddenly found himself in the position of media darling, leading to the capture of his tormentors and skyrocketing him into becoming the face of the disabled movement in Rhy'din.

A drug dealer decided to turn her life around, and worked undercover for the Watch in what wound up being one of the most devastating blows to the Spice trade the City had seen in recent years. The dealer, whose identity was revealed in the file, received a cushy posting and a nice fat pension plan.

These were the biggest, the gaudiest, and the most obvious of the articles and archival files in the folder. It came, as well, with a map of the city, gridded out nice and neat. There were three colors of marker dotting locations in the city, and a little legend scrawled up at the right hand corner.

Green: Where marks had lived before their unreal changes of luck.
Blue: Their general lifestyles and routines were guessed at and matched with employment info, enrolment info, and things like receipts and phone signals and sign-ins, to trace out the routes they were most likely to take on any given day.
Red: Where the marks lived after their collective luck had changed.

The green and red marks had no real sense of coherence. They were everywhere, and they went through the city and outside of it with nary a trace. Likewise, a number of the blue lines were incongruous and didn't match up anywhere.

Luckily, however, a number of the blue lines did run through a few common areas: The high-cost, high-powered and high-fashion market districts of the East End, and the venerable Old Temple district.

Jesnevich had busted his a*s on this folder, working these different angles. Heil owed him so goddamned seriously for this.

Teas & Tomes. Tuesday, 19:22 PM.

Thanks to Morgan Wright for the fantastic collaborative effort


The tea shop was a strange place to find a man such as he. A man who spoke little and gave even less with his actions. A man who, during hours of conversation, might only grunt and say a single word. His gruff nature led others to believe he was a brutish man, uneducated and dim witted. But the many hours he spent out and about in this city were cut up by visits to the shop, where he enjoyed hot drinks and many, many tomes. How else was he to learn so much about the insane situation fate had thrust him into. He was on a couch near a fire that crackled merrily, even in the summer. He drank coffee and red a large, old book that spoke of myths and the power behind belief. He wore his faded jeans and wrinkled shirt, his eyes half lidded as though he were on the very verge of falling asleep. But an observant onlooker would note the way they darted from one side of the page to the next. He was very much awake.

The bells on the door cheered. Madison was there, hat in one hand, and a glowing sensation the other. She spotted the man quickly, and moseyed over. "Morgan", she dropped down on the next, small seat beside, and stuck her boots out. The hat was placed to the chair arm, and she gave a quick rake through the restless night of her hair. Eyes settled on the cover of what he read, and flicked up to his angular face. "Wouldn't have taken you for a man to read up on mythology. But then, I wouldn't have taken you as a man been chained to a cell, either." She smiled.

"There's more truths in myths than people like t'believe, Rye," he closed the book with a snap and set it aside, turning to level his half-lidded, but somehow still quite stern gaze on her. He clicked his tongue. "Much you can learn from a book like this, if you got a mind for it," he reached for his coffee and had a taste, swallowing a mouthful.

Morgan was watched for a lengthy time. "Do you get a kick out of all this stuff? Do you prescribe to this idea, that these men are more than.... what we both know them to be." She caught the eye of the woman behind the counter, lifting a finger to indicate one coffee, and returned her pale gaze to him. Wondered if it was jail, or the life of law, that loaned him his disposition. Nevertheless, he put her at ease, in the way the Sheriff of Lofton had, and Billerton, her Father. It was a presence, and a command. Something few men she knew still had. Like it had been weeded out of every subsequent generation. Though, to Morgan, she would not speak it.

"Sam Reed." She sat forward. "Know him?

"Name's one I've heard on a wind once or twice in the past," his eyes searched the ceiling and rafters for more information. But like all great mysteries, it was harder than that. "'Fraid I don' know much 'bout 'im other'n he had a bit t'do with some business you had in town a ways back. Why? Lookin' for him?"

"He's Leo's, and Leo is his. They were working some hitches together. My partner, and his colleague, have been flushing out the dirt. We haven't turned up much, but Leo is what led me to you - by connection. And eventually Sam, who I know...? flick back to a long, lonely dirt road, a road to hell. But she doesn?t impose the man with memories of her death sentence. ?...from the old days." She grit her teeth, did he see that? She looked up as the mug was held out by the server, and slid some notes in return. The woman scurried away. Madison sat forward and held the mug close. Even though it was warm outside, and the air was hung heavy, she looked to enjoy the fragrant steam rising across her face.

"Sam's one degree away from you. It?s a name I suggest you file somewhere." She said it low, and not as a threat. Just that it was a name that echoed, and its resonance would be felt later.

Morgan had a file for Sam Reed. He wasn't wholly honest about everything. He also noticed how she grit her teeth. Once upon his time noticing things like that had been his job. "In league with Leo, huh?" Morgan grunted. "Then I'll kill 'im."

He won a smirk. Just like he had the night before, when he invited her to take a twirl with the Devil.

"What's your angle, Rye? Why bring 'im up?"

"He wants you dead too." It was an embellishment, but like Morgan, she needed her leverage too. Simple. Flat. She raised the mug, rubbed her lips together, then took a sip. See how it flew. Go little birdy, go.

"Shit," he laughed. "Him, Leo, the whole f***in' Hexxen. "Tell 'im t'grab a ticket."

Her nose thinned with an inhale. Her eyes grew serious.

Ain't a man who can be put down so easy, Rye."

"I wouldn't think so, Morgan... I'm not intimating so. But I think, if he needed to, he'd switch the game." ?He wants what you possess." Her hand grew hotter, even at her mere words. "Death could be on the plate."

She paused, to strike it home. ?Down the line."

"We all gotta die sometime."

She paused at that, and tilted her head. Blue eyes roamed his face.

"Hey," change of subject. Just like that. "Question for ya."
Madison nodded for him to go on.

"Glenn Douglas. What's he to you?" He knew what she was to him, but not the other way around.

"A debt I have to repay", kind of bland about it. She wasn't about to radiate a series of compliments about the man. Though her eyes did crinkle a touch. "We were involved. But we haven't been, in the sense we were, for months. Fair to say, we were trail buddies. Then he cut out, and I .... I don't know what I could be to him now. Only that, at day's end, he's a debt."

"I thought I explained that all last night." Brow arched. She took another sip. "Does it matter?"

Morgan agreed. "You said that last night. But that's just you rationalizin'. It's bullshit."

Laughter. A shake of the head. "Not entirely." She took her eyes from him.

"An' it matters a helluva lot, Rye. Need t'know where your head is," he sipped at his coffee. "I know what happened with you two. I know a lot. An' I know, Glenn ain't the kinda man people become indebted to. Don' matter the cause. Folk don' go outta their way t'help him no matter what he's done for 'em," because Glenn Douglas was a storm, destruction incarnate. No one wanted to chase that. "M'sure you feel like you're doin' this just 'cause you owe him, but deep down inside, Rye, you know."

"It's not that way. Softly, she added. "I do care."

He nodded, that seemed to satisfy him. "I saw him again."

That got a prickling of the interests! "And how did that go? Hand you another cog?" Wry.

"Nope. Still just the one. He didn' say much. Truth be told, I think he's usin' me t'keep tabs on you."

There came an eye roll at all he might infer. "That makes utter sense? ironically.? No, he wouldn't. If he wants me dead, he'll make it so. He wouldn't be a-linger, to ensure I'm not tracking.? "He's using you, that would be certain. And writing my name on a bullet.""Unless... he's afraid. When he left, I tell you, he was."

She went on.

"His face...." She placed the mug down. It thunked mutedly across the table. "But it wouldn't be about me. If he's as dead-set as you, and he, go on with. My death wouldn't last two minutes in his thoughts."

"I've accepted that, Morgan."

"Glenn's gone his whole life bein' afraid," Morgan replied with a grunt. He finished his coffee and stood. "You lost faith in him, Rye. But maybe he ain't lost just yet."

Her features begged enquiry of Wright. She stood too.

"Ain't got anythin' else for you."

"I'm not about to engage you in what or what I did not do. But I did not resent him. ..." He spoke, and she heaved with a breath. "Leo. What do you want to do - chase him out, or go in?"

Taking up her hat, she pulled it on - low. It shadowed eyes.

"Burn his whole world down."

She looked to her hand.

"Be careful you won't burn a few others along with it." A pointed remark, she thanked him under a breath and moved for the exit.

Silence lurched. It hung, swayed like a dead man at the noose.

He eventually grunted a farewell to Madison.

"Eyes high."

As the door closed on her shadow, she nodded. "Eyes high."


He clicked his tongue at the shadow. And then he stepped out the door. It chimed merrily, a contrast to his sombre demeanour.