the light.

-ascendance-

Into the darkness she dives, until that darkness grows, until it encompasses the horizon, the sky, the earth, her mind. There is -- if she was afraid of such a thing -- no dreadful pull, no horrific stretching, no freakshow spaghettification. There is simply the unbelievably fast growth of absolute nothingness from a point

to a golfball

to a tennisball, a basketball, a beachball, a globe, a world, a universe.

--

She is no longer herself, then.

She has no weight, no identity, no boundaries.

She is darkness, and the darkness is her.

--

And then, gradually, she realizes she is not in darkness at all. She is not in darkness but in light, bathed in it. Absolute, blinding light, white light from every direction. At the heart of a fallen star gravity bends light, bends space, bends time. Caught in this trap, this cosmic time-out, all the world passes outside, too quickly to be seen as anything but brilliance. She is alone in a vast white silence, suspended, in suspension,

until

she realizes: she is not alone after all. She is curled like a fetus, curled like an egg, and there is a rabbit beside her, curled like a fetus, curled like an egg. Eyes closed, ears laid along the back of its head.

Black Sheep

She is curled like a fetus, curled like an egg, curled like a seedling, possibility, promise, consumed and consuming and she can hear her heart beating, Charlotte, against the roof of her mouth. They are moving so very fast now but all she feels is the weight outside herself. The dis/connection between that without and the strange slow-time parabolic descent into (she takes another breath) the burst light at the heart (and another) of the fallen star.

Perhaps this is what slumber feels like, to the spirits, or the ancestors. This buoyed compression, this sense of animate suspension, and removal. Charlotte does not think, precisely, in phrases like perhaps or maybe - she is a theurge, and her mind is both more and less bendy than that - but she does think that this is what beforetime and notime and everywhen are like. Sleep, too, perhaps.

Is she a wolf or a girl? She is a wolf and a girl, see, two yolks in the same egg scrambled together and her self here hardly matters.

And there is a rabbit. A bright moon-bound rabbit whose brilliance is lost in the brilliant inward collapse of the fallen start and the girl reaches for it, egg to egg, pulls it close, strokes its ears, strokes its ears, strokes its ears, as she starts to - well, howl and sing, a greeting to what once-was and is-now collapsed.

The simplest of rites to honor helios, greeting the sun in the fallen-star. Some memory of sunrise as the world without passes beyond. Exuberant though the rite is meant to be, this one has a minor note, a keening sound. This is what you lost, little sun, when you fell.

Then she tucks the rabbit against her body, holds it close - stretches. Is movement possible? Is sound? Where does the greeting go?

(Wits + Rituals: minor rite: Greet the Sun)

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1

-ascendance-

Here's the thing. The dreadful secret about falling, about collapsing so far into oneself that one is removed from the universe, about being lost:

it's not so bad.

She could stay here forever. There is no hunger, no pain, no suffering left. Nothing but white light; all the light of the universe, all the light devoured by the darkness. It's still here, see. It didn't die. It just went somewhere else. And it would be so easy to curl up. Like a fetus. Like an egg. Like the promise of something else, unfulfilled. It would be so easy to just give up.

Wouldn't it?

--

The little rabbit: bright against her heart. Soft fur, cool fur. A real rabbit would be warm, frenetically hot-burning, but this one is not. This one is soft as moonbeams, cool as silver. It moves only a little, a tiny little dream-twitch, and does not open its eyes.

Charlotte begins to howl. She begins to sing. She honors the sun-that-was; not the fallen-star-that is. She honors what it was, and what was without. There is no music here: her voice is mute, her body impossibly heavy, almost impossible to move. But she sings nonetheless, and the song is everywhere and nowhere at once, and all around,

all around a quiver, a shimmying shiver like a quake. An ache and a sigh; remembrance. The blank white ripples and stills.

Black Sheep

The greeting is a kind of remembrance, a sort of half-formed contrition. Here is the inverse of that-which-was. Everything consumed back into itself. All that light swallowed, the gravity impossible, time slowed to the shape of a dream-twitching moon-rabbit held quite safely in her arms.

She feels the stir, the sigh, the shifting in the bound and heavy light all around her. Honors whatever is in this thing that would stir and shift and sigh for what was and what was lost, and she does that even as the song changes: another sound, twined with the first - because it was meant foremost to be performed at dawn, as the sun rises and offers its new-light to the world - and here it is always dawn, a dark and endless dawn, without a horizon around which to bend itself except the event horizon.

So: the stir, the sigh.

The song.

Holding on to the moon-rabbit in her right hand, Charlotte (Alice) reaches for her little pack and pulls from it a small vial of clear water from the highest of streams. There are no spirits bound within, just that water that she pours into this endlessly collapsed static as she starts to move and her howl of honor and greeting changes to something else: a challenge, a snarl, a rite meant to cleanse and banish the Wyrm.

Black Sheep

Rite!

Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

-ascendance-

That shiver all around again. That ripple, heavier this time, a shudder. A straining, keening note on the edge of hearing. In her arms the moon-rabbit opens its eyes, gives its head a quick shake. It kicks, spasmodically, as small animals and small gafflings do when caught.

And overhead, in that blank whiteness: the tiniest, most transient of partings. A rift, an opening, a crack through which Charlotte can see a glimpse of the world-that-was.

Large enough for a moon-rabbit.

Large enough for her, perhaps. If she squeezes.

And yet all around her: that intangible sense of loss, of suffering, of ghosts on the very edge of remembrance.

-ascendance-

[i am gonna let you, if you want to, reroll cleansing at the same diff. if you get 3 succ in one roll, or ... let's say 7 cumulative! SOMETHING REALLY GOOD WILL HAPPEN. but if she fails or botches a roll, the opening will close again, and Cleansing will not reopen it. she'll have to find another way out.

in interest of fairness: she will not lose renown at all if she chooses to escape right now.]

Black Sheep

The beast the creature the priestess is still keening/snarling that challenge, that rite, scattering clean water from the highest of alpine lakes, where the water knows the sun and knows the stars and knows the moon, and remembers all, reflects their light, gleams pure as anything left on earth in its basin. She lifts up the spasmodic little moon-rabbit with her other hand, to that thinning, that opening, that place-where-things part and pushes the little sisterbrother through but does not follow him.

Does not follow him and does not stop her song, her call, her remembers.

There is a challenge inherent in the rite but there is also somehow twined with it now the earlier rite - a paean to greatness, the memory of the sun - see, wake, wake.

Once you rose.

Now you - merely - fall.

(Continuing the rite!)

Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

Black Sheep

And again.

Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (2, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

Black Sheep

ONE MORE TIME.

Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

-ascendance-

Her voice like a beat in a heart, unseen and unheard but felt, felt. Like a hammer against stone, against ceramic, against glass: again, again, again. The shuddering of the world all around her. The splitting of the featureless white sky. The cracks and the rivulets running together, a spiderweb of fractures, spreading and growing and fusing until --

until --

This is what it must be like to stand at the heart of creation. This is what it must have been like to be gaia at the moment she came into being. This sudden, wild out-flinging, this ecstatic shattering, this bursting-forth, this atomization.

Charlotte flies apart. The world flies apart. The white heart of the black star flies apart, flails in every direction, flings to every corner of the universe. There is pain, because of course there is; birth does not happen any other way. Things crack and rupture and split and tear and there is a scream in her mind, it may be her own, she is blind, she is rapturous, all the universe screams with her and then

silences.

--

Darkness, then.

True darkness. The sensation of coolness. Liquid. A river washing past her feet. Grass beneath her cheek. Fur against her arm, pushing, nudging, insistent.

Her dazzled eyes open. The night sky above, restored. An infinity of stars. Perhaps there is one more there that was not before. Who can remember? Who can know for certain? Who can count the stars. Who is like god?

A moon-rabbit huddled beside her, nose twitching, wide-set eyes fixed on her.

And a moon-bridge descending from on high, arcing so slow, so graceful, so silent down toward her.

Black Sheep

The pain is so physical that it feels distant somehow. She is intact in the midst of being pulled apart. She is shattered, but that sundering is fractured and physical, it is not bound and framed and formed in her madness, but in her being. Somehow that makes it both right, and righteous.

Somehow - for an endlessly passing moment - her broken mind feels,

well,

whole.

--

And then: night. She is a girl-again, and she is on her hands and knees in the umbral reflection of the city's own expression of madness. She has become more comfortable here, she might even make it through LA without clapping her hands over her ears and decompensating, but it is the river, still wild, that makes any of that calcified city center tolerable. And beneath it: she is spent, so utterly and wholly spent that she just wants to curl up, perhaps with her moonrabbit, and sleep. The wolf-girl does open her arms, exhausted, and pull the moon-rabbit closer, and pet its silver-cool ears, and marvel at the arcing brilliance of the approaching moon-bridge, which seems as if it is half-contained in a dream.