incognoscibilis | Time it took us to where the water was

Entry tags:

purge,
unmaker

Time it took us to where the water was

There was so much happening. Too much. Aurora Lynch was dead. Ink was melting from Adam's skin, leaving red welts behind.The ley line and Cabeswater both resonated with confusion, fear, and dread, feelings that reflected in Ronan's dream creatures.

Outside Cabeswater, there was a different chaos brewing. It was cruel and entirely human in a way that Adam knew intimately. He tried very hard not to think about what Robert Parrish would do on a night like this and not for the first time, Adam was glad that he'd stolen his father's gun when he left that double wide.

So Adam took himself to Cabeswater and went as far into its center as it would allow him. The ground felt ever more uneven and Adam wondered which had come first, the frayed sense of himself or the tenuousness of Cabeswater. He tried to imagine himself as steadfast and stable but nothing changed. Cabeswater did not reorder itself to Adam's imagination and he wasn't sure if that was because it saw through the disguise or because it couldn't.

The latter frightened him more.

On a flat stone, Adam sat and held a velvet pouch that contained a well-thumbed deck of tarot cards. There was nothing he could do to alter the course of human cruelty but maybe, maybe the cards could tell him what Cabeswater needed.

"I'm listening," he promised the forest, the ley line. "You just need to tell me."

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Amalthea had retreated into the forest when the chaos started, moving toward Cabeswater without a second thought, even if that had become a thing that frightened her. She had been avoiding it lately, uncertain of what it was that she heard whispering to her, looking for her.

Adam was here. She knew it the moment she crossed the border, because the forest knew him and responded to him. She let herself become a unicorn, even if she could hear it louder like that, even if she was more aware of the things happening to the forest.

She ran through it, tangling in branches and having to jump over roots that had never tried to grab at her before but seemed to now.

When she found him, she was trembling, bright in the forest. But as she moved closer she stumbled, she fell, and as she did she lost her shape. Her hair allowed for some modesty, but she was still a naked girl when she looked at Adam.

"What's happening?" she breathed.

Edited 2017-11-06 00:05 (UTC)

The forest shuddered and Adam tried to put down roots in his own soul, as if he could lead by example and Cabeswater would follow. All it did was seem to emphasize the forest's distress, its own inability to stabilize. Adam shuffled the cards once more and the earth shook before he could deal them out.

The earth shook and the forest coughed out a naked slip of a girl, pale as moonlight. At first, Adam gaped and had the brief, intense hope that it was Persephone. Then reality settled back in and he realized several things at once. First, that it was Amalthea. Second, that he should look away. Third, that he ought to give her his jacket. He did both of these things, temporarily distracted by the embarrassment and the fear that she'd caught him staring for half a second.

"I don't know," he said, patting himself down as if he might produce another layer of clothing to help Amalthea bundle up further. "Everything feels wrong."

She accepted his coat and wrapped up in it. After a moment, she pushed her arms through the sleeves and closed the front of the coat so it wouldn't fall open. It was long enough to provide modesty, at least.

"Everything feels wrong," she agreed softly, clutching the jacket around her. "Sick. A thing calling darkly."

Amalthea had not been this deep in the forest in over a month - she had been avoiding it because of how it made her feel, because of what she heard. "Dying."

Adam swallowed tightly at the last word but even so, he knew that was the word. Cabeswater was not just sick, it was rotting, dying and decaying at the same time. He tried not to think about the dream creatures, the house that Ronan had built, Aurora herself.

As he turned, he forgot that with his jacket off, Amalthea would see the angry red lines that had been his tattoo.

"Tonight's only making it worse," he agreed.

She moved closer, pale fingers brushing the angry mark where Adam's tattoo had been. A dream thing, maybe. For a moment she leaned into him, head tucked against his shoulder, he eyes closed.

She breathed slowly and peeked her eyes open again, looking at the forest around them.

"Is it talking to you?"

At first, as he always did with those not in his immediate circle of friends, Adam tensed but Amalthea's touch was gentle. There wasn't much she could do for the wound but her touch, sincere and uncomplicated, helped a little. She was not one of Cabeswater's creatures but she was deeply attuned to the forest as well and she could feel all of them hurting.

"It's trying," he said. "But it's weak."

"I wish that I could help," she murmured. She had magic as a unicorn, but the forest had trouble holding her in the shape. And, if she was perfectly honest, she was more aware of the wrongness of the energy when she was a unicorn, and she didn't like it.

She pressed close against Adam, half-hiding against him but also offering something. Her energy, what magic she had even trapped as a human girl. There was something still in her, something that had power. She didn't know if it would help.

"I wish anyone could help." By now, he'd been around Blue enough to sort of guess at the sensation he felt. Amalthea was trying to offer up power or energy, anything but the forest was refusing to even let her be a unicorn. He was grateful but they were still nearly powerless.

"I'm supposed to be Cabeswater's hands and eyes but..." But everything was crumbling down to its very bones.

"But it has been cut, and it cannot reach, and it does not see," she said quietly. "Perhaps better... perhaps if it cannot see you, it cannot get you."

She shivered at the thought of whatever the dark thing was grabbing hold of Adam. She gently tightened her own grip, as if she might protect the young magician. Softer and kinder and gentler than the one she had once known.

"It doesn't need eyes to do that." Again, Adam thought of the welts across his back. Whatever was affecting Cabeswater and all the other dream things were affecting Adam too. Whether because he had a dream thing on his skin or because he was so intimate a part of Cabeswater hardly seemed to matter anymore. Whatever this force was. It knew he was there.

Amalthea held him fast as if that could keep the darkness out. He let himself imagine it would because he had the protection of a unicorn.

"No," she agreed. "I suppose it doesn't."

Amalthea rested her head against his shoulder, the odd, faint mark on her forehead pressed against him. "What can I do?" she asked, because in that moment she did not know. She wanted to keep him safe - she wanted to keep this place safe, the way she would have defended her own forest if need be. But this was not her forest.

"I wish I knew." It was as much about himself as Amalthea's offer. Adam was the Magician, wasn't he? Shouldn't he know Cabeswater well enough by now to do something, to have a solution? Except that asking, trying to understand, felt like wading into snakes. Words and concepts slithered around him and never settled.

"I wish someone knew."

She's on her way to meet Ellie at Harley and Effy's place, outside the city, fleeing the chaos she's already been party to with Magnus. It's dark in the way late fall is, the kind of dark that clings and feels like midnight long before it is. The buildings in the city are more shuttered than usual, the dark broken by fireworks and gunshots, tenuous silences broken by the earth itself, by demons and humans alike.

When she goes, she goes, incautious and knuckles pale on the stick shift.

Getting outside of everything takes her past Cabeswater, though, and she can't help but think of Adam and Ronan. The wreckage of literal dreams, Aurora's death, the farm. The way her fabric scraps had come away like rotting leaves in her hand when she'd reached for them. And she thinks of Magnus, too, the way she'd been no help at all even when she felt she could summon the energy that seems so inconstant with her lately.

She stops, there, and walks into the forest.
It doesn't feel any easier, the trees murmuring, the path unfamiliar and thorny, everything looming dark and unfamiliar. What are we supposed to do, she thinks, but then she hears Adam's voice, or some Cabeswater echo of it, and turns, following.

He's sitting in a clearing with cards, only lit by the moon and the light on her cell phone. In some ways, she thinks, Adam has become the son that Fox Way never had. Regardless of their relationship. Family feels right, anyway.

But she's seen things go wrong tonight.

"At least you're not scrying without me," she says aloud, brashness over a knot in her chest.

"Never," Adam said. It was a strange thing, the way their magic fit together so seamlessly, more perfectly than they themselves had when they played at being in love. They knew better now and Adam was still searching for a way to undo so much of his own darkness, but he was better.

"I haven't had to use these in ages." Persephone's deck was the one that gave him the clearest sense of the forest. Blue's gift was a deck for earthly, human divinations, but this deck was like its owner, real but also slightly not of this world. "But Cabeswater won't talk to me–can't talk to me the way it normally does." Every sense and image it passed to him felt...phlegmy, as if it took tremendous effort from a sickened body.

"Tonight's only making it worse." The violence, the earthquake, the shifting powers, all of it.

She smiles at that, despite everything. There's an easiness to their friendship -- a familiarity, with all that implies -- now that she wouldn't necessarily have predicted when they both stepped out of Henrietta; in the midst of turmoil, it feels solid.

She comes and sits down on her knees, touches Persephone's deck gently, as if it's a thing to be revered and not the last thing left of a missed friend and family member. Maybe it is. There's a certain amount to seeing, but especially the kind of power Persephone was capable of channeling and Adam is tapped into, that demands fear as well as respect.

"I don't know if I should offer to help," she says, which is of course an offer. "I..." Blue presses her lips together. "I was at Magnus's and -- his magic is backfiring. I just made it a lot stronger a backfire, I think." She glances at Adam. "Whatever it is that I do, sometimes it's working too well, and sometimes it's not there at all."

She glances up at the sickened tangles of Cabeswater. "But we have to find something out."

When Blue sat, Adam shifted so that his posture mirrored hers, the cards framed by the diamond of their knees. It wasn't a magical number, the two of them, but it was enough. It was a grounding. He touched the cards, fingers laying over Blue's.

"The earthquake," he guessed. It had shuddered through Darrow and into Cabeswater itself, though Adam had initially dismissed it as a tremor of the forest. Given how strange the ley line felt and how many powers it fed, maybe he shouldn't have been surprised. Certainly, he was now only more worried.

"It's trying to talk to me. But it's weak."

She nods, a sharp incline of her head. "And --" It seems too private to talk about how a healing spell had almost killed Alec. She still can't tell if it was her fault or Magnus's. She knows that Magnus blames himself; she still feels as though maybe if she hadn't been there it wouldn't have gone the way it did. "Alec got hurt," she settles on. "It's -- it was just a mess. I don't really think I'm a good luck charm, here."

"But I can try to do what I do." She turns a hand over towards his. "If it'll tell you anything."

Adam took Blue's hand and thought it might be just as much to reassure her as himself. He needed power, yes, there wasn't one part of the forest that didn't, but that wasn't why he took her hand. This moment was human, grounded in the basic solidity of skin on skin, blood pulsing through them, charged by the same rapid heartbeats.

Cabeswater hadn't always been a fixed point in their lives but by now it had been a fixed point long enough. Adam felt lost without its confusing, sometimes ineffable guidance. Blue, he thought, must feel the same.

"I'm glad you're here." Not her power. Blue.

Despite sitting out here in this plague of a forest, on what should have been Halloween night, Adam is still a little warmer than she is. She gives his hand a little bit of a squeeze. The touch is comforting even if she feels like she might be dangerous to be around, and she takes a breath.

Blue manages a small smile. "I'm glad I stopped," she admits. "I'm glad you're here too. Even if I wish it wasn't like this." That they were sitting here, palm to palm, being some sort of comfort to each other. But then if it wasn't, maybe she wouldn't. "Do you think it's -- us? All -- this?" She looks around at the forest helplessly. Even if it weren't Cabeswater and so usually full of voices and power and bizarre steadiness, it would be trees visibly sickening and the feeling of it is sick and twisted in Blue's stomach.

Edited 2017-11-17 22:44 (UTC)

He liked to at least imagine that he felt a little spark of power from Blue's touch, that it would help. It was maybe a dangerous wish in a place that once bent itself so neatly to their imaginations but if Cabeswater noticed, its acknowledgment was feeble. Nothing changed around them, for better or worse. Adam felt as if there were damp leaves in his lungs.

"I don't know. It wants to tell me. Or it did. But it couldn't." And now it was too late and the forest could tell them nothing at all.

"I wish Persephone was here..."

Blue tries to imagine the trees whole and hale and healthy, green leaves or even yellow with fall whispering to each other. In the past if she'd reached out to it, she might have gotten something back. She doubts she will now. Or if she does, she might bury them all in leaves; given what happened with Magnus, who knows.

"I do too," she says, and when she sighs it feels like it's from the whole middle of her, some tree all hollowed out. "I always do. But now especially."

She looks at the cards. She knows what they all mean, but that's where it ends for Blue. "I wish I was more like her."

"That's not what I..." Adam sighed because Blue probably knew and understood what he meant. He wouldn't trade Blue for Persephone, her amplification for her wisdom, but he wished she was there with them. Three was, after all, the best number for magic. Between the two of them, they could create something but they needed someone else, someone who grounded them. Someone who knew.

"I'm in over my head," he admitted, voice soft.

"I know," Blue says back, quiet and sensible. "I didn't think you did." She knows Adam doesn't want Persephone instead of her; she'd simply be more useful in this situation, than either of them probably. She'd know what to say.

Any of them. Hell, she'd take Orla.

"Me too. And I've been doing weird longer than you have," she says. Adam might be Cabeswater's hands and eyes, but Blue's been the daughter of psychics all her life. "I...really miss my mom right now," she admits, quietly and a little ashamed, and glances up at him helplessly.

Then she takes a long breath, squaring her shoulders, and turns over a card. They have nothing to lose, right now.

Adam let a slow breath out, relieved that Blue understood. Everything else felt so fragile that the thought of ruining something with Blue would have been the last straw. It would snap something inside of him and Cabeswater too.

"I miss all of them," he said. Collectively, 300 Fox Way had done a lot more to mother him than the woman who gave birth to them. Mostly, it had been Persephone but he still remembered the day he'd arrived here and looked Calla in the eye alongside Blue. He'd trusted them. He would again.

The card Blue turned over was not encouraging. Not even the graceful, swirling art of Persephone's deck could hide the looming image of the Devil.

"Shit."

Blue nods. No one has been raised by Fox Way as she has, but Adam's the closest to being their family, she thinks. Not in small part because of Persephone. Maybe Noah too, who is a little less than earthly in a way they all understand. "Me too."

She blinks at it. "It's... a metaphorical Devil, usually," she says, but then, it's a metaphorical Death, usually, and that wasn't true of when Gansey pulled the card. "Addictions, the internal things that make us feel hopeless." She looks around at Cabeswater. Is that supposed to mean this is all Ronan's doing, somehow? That Aurora, the farm, Cabeswater has all been affected so terribly by something in his mind? Or all of theirs? Are they somehow supposed to face their fears more than any of the other things here have made them?

She can't believe that. "I already got the hopeless part, thanks," she frowns at the deck.

"Doesn't feel very metaphorical right now," Adam said. Between what was happening here in the forest and out there in the streets, driven on by something monstrous in its own banality. Human nature, Adam knew, was a cruel thing and sometimes that was devil enough on its own.

Already disheartened by the first card, Adam shuffled them again and looked to Blue. "Top or bottom?" he asked, squeezing the deck together as if he could force the right card up or down.

She arches an eyebrow in agreement. In truth, some of the monsters they've faced here have seemed much less demonic than the people raging out there -- the men who'd thrown knives at Alec just for fun and the people looting businesses. She's glad she has the cats still inside. Then again, Adam's father's behavior on a regular basis wasn't that far from that.

She looks at the deck as though a card is going to hop out of it, defying her choice, and purses her lips. "Bottom," she says.

Blue Sargent could convey a lot of things in one minor facial movement and Adam thought he could read, at best, maybe half of them. There was so much in that look, so many things she didn't say and which Adam was glad no to hear. When the sirens went off, he'd retreated to Cabeswater, his crumbling sanctuary.

He couldn't imagine what Blue had seen.

At her suggestion, Adam drew a card from the bottom and flipped it over. Breath gusted out of him as he observed the burning Tower.

"Hell," he said, because all the more obscene words suddenly didn't seem curse enough.

Blue stares at the Tower. In the dark, the glimmering edges of the flames depicted on the card look so much worse, or maybe just appropriately worse than usual. She looks around at the collapsing, eerie forest. If she listened hard enough, she thinks, she could probably hear explosions, but inside Cabeswater it's almost silent.

"Possibly literally," she says dryly. "Except all the devils are here." It's a misquote of something she's undoubtedly heard Gansey say, but she's trying to keep her stomach from roiling. What the hell are they supposed to do about it?

Any advice, Cabeswater? she thinks frustratedly. "Well, let's take the one from the top and see where we're going. It can't get much worse." Her tone is a little surer than she feels, right now, and when she glances up at Adam she's sure her gaze, trying so hard to be practical, gives it away.

Adam shrugged because he sort of thought it could get worse. The Tower was easily the darkest card of the deck but it wasn't the only one he could think of that spoke bad tidings. Blue sounded firm enough in her decision, even if her eyes didn't quite match, that he decided to follow her instructions.

Pulling out a card, Adam didn't flip it over. He held it out for Blue instead.

Blue takes a deep breath, thinking about that question: where do we go?

She's not the one who reads the cards, not usually, but with Persephone not here, with Cabeswater not talking to Adam, perhaps it didn't matter. Maybe she was the one to look at it.

She reaches for it, and as she closes her hand on it, as her fingers touch the edge of it there's a chill, a dizziness like what she'd felt holding Magnus' hand, and a flutter of wind over them sends the next card tumbling toward her from out of the stack in Adam's hand.

"Sorry," Blue says, recovering, "I -- things have been acting weird around me." She looks at the card that's leapt the deck. Five of Swords. She sets it down. A pyrrhic victory; over-ambition, conflict. It doesn't feel good and she doesn't really like the idea of it having distracted her.

She turns over the card in her hand.

The Hanged Man.

"They've been weird for all of us," Adam said but his voice didn't sound like his own, everything dropping into icy-numb fear as the cards only got worse and worse. Swords and hanged men were never a good combination, especially not with the Devil and Tower.

Clumsily, he picked up the chosen cards and forced them back into the deck. "We should leave," he said. "Get back to Hywel or Magnus' or anywhere."

His mother's blood still stained his hands. Ronan didn't even need to close his eyes to see it and whether that was due to Ronan's vivid imagination or the demon tearing apart Cabeswater or both, he didn't know. It curdled on his skin, soaked in.

The animals were dead. All of them except Chainsaw, who could hardly even fly.

And still Ronan could barely stand to leave Cabeswater. His heart was in this place and it too seemed to be bleeding from the inside, splintering as the trees wilted and the creek flowed with tar, shattering as the home he and Adam had built became more and more empty.

"I'm not sure it can even hear us anymore," he confessed as he knelt beside Adam, the grass little more than mush beneath his knees. "Maybe we should get Blue."

Ronan looked wild and haunted, as ravaged as the forest itself. He knelt and Adam immediately put arms around him. To share power, to comfort Ronan, to comfort himself. He wasn't sure except that he knew they both needed it. Ronan smelled of blood and Adam wished he could wipe it all away, the pain, the memory of what they'd seen, but mostly this...demon that was consuming Cabeswater, devouring it, undoing it.

Unmaking it.

"Blue's having a hard time too," he said, glad for her moral support but uncertain if her presence would accomplish anything.

Adam leaned into him, wrapped around him, and as hollow as Ronan felt, the weight of those arms was still a comfort. He breathed for a moment, soaking it in, before nodding.

"Figured," he said, because it made sense given what this thing was doing. It all made sense. He couldn't shake the idea that they should all be here anyway, all working to destroy this thing together given it was likely them that brought it here. Somehow.

He stared down at the few cards Adam had laid out already, the forest floor deathly still beneath. "Getting anything?"

It was, at best, psychosomatic but Adam chose to believe that Ronan's nearness also eased the aching in his skin where the tattoo had melted away and left pain behind. Adam had avoided looking at it in a mirror, afraid of what he'd see and too disappointed by the loss of that little piece of Ronan on his skin.

"Barely," he said. It was trying to take the pulse of a dying person. Agitated, fluttering, weak.

"How do we fix this?"

The answer was as far from comforting as it was unsurprising and Ronan pulled in a breath, his shoulder still pressed to Adam's as though he might gain some stability from just that point of contact.

Adam's question was one they both knew the answer to. Gansey had told them. He'd lived this and died through it.

But that answer was no answer at all as far as Ronan was concerned.

"Advertise for a willing sacrifice," he suggested, his tone just on the edge of nearly being serious. "Obviously."

Adam closed his eyes and hunted for a punchline that didn't come. The trouble was that Ronan had a point. Gansey had told them what had stopped the destruction before, who had stopped it. They couldn't ask that of him, not again.

This was Darrow. There were so many kinds of magic here. Someone else had to have a solution.

"Don't suppose it could be Kavinsky," he said, dredging up the only bad joke he could come up with.

Despite the heaviness of the situation, the weight that bore down on their shoulders as the cards remained a puzzle at their feet, Ronan snorted. It was a humorless laugh, more a release of air than anything else, but something that could almost be a smile tugged at the corner of his lips.

"No way we'd be that fucking lucky," he said, his attention still on the cards. He had no idea what any of them meant, but he knew Adam did. If only Cabeswater would talk.

Adam smiled, the corner of his mouth hooking upward in something that was more an imitation of a real smile than a genuine one. There was precious little to be happy about right now to the point that any real laughter felt like an insult. Sighing, Adam pulled himself closer to Ronan.

"I don't want it to be Gansey." Because he thought Gansey very well might if they gave any indication.

"It won't be," Ronan replied with the sort of conviction that could only come from desperation.

He had no idea who it could be, though he thought it might be him. The memory of his mother's bloodied, eviscerated body was still etched into his mind, a memory that would remain until his own dying breath and with each piece of himself that he watched rot and melt away, the quicker he wanted that breath to come.

It was the weight at his side that kept him from speaking up, the stubborn refusal to willingly leave Adam alone in this place. Even if he wouldn't really be alone with Blue and Noah at his side, and even if he could fare just fine on his own. Had done so many times in the past.

Reaching forward, he picked up one of the cars, frowning down at it as he worried the curved edge with his thumb. "Fucked as this place is, there has to be someone. We just have to find them."

Adam's grip around Ronan tightened a little more, as if he could keep them from splintering if only he held on long enough, had enough force of will. The card that Ronan turned over only created more fracture lines within him. Demons swirled gleefully around a crumbling, burning tower, a grim face in the clouds presiding over the destruction. He didn't think he'd have to explain the card's meaning to Ronan, not when they were surrounded by a crumbling tower all their own.

"Do we leave?" he asked. It wasn't as if the world outside Cabeswater was doing all that much better.

He didn't need to ask what Adam meant to understand. There was no leaving Darrow, after all. Not willingly.

Ronan stared at the card in his hand, thumbnail digging into the hard cardstock, but not quite bending it as a heavy weight settled in his stomach. Or maybe not settled -- made itself known.

"Isn't much left," he pointed out, thinking of the crumbling walls of the farm, the empty hen house and decrepit yard. "I don't know what else we can do here but let it kill us too."

It was a hard truth but Ronan was right. Adam cast a glance (a final one?) at the skeletal farmhouse. The foundations were still there, the things they'd bought and built, but everything that had made it fantastical and impossible, all of Ronan's dreams, were drained away now. He missed the animals already, for all he'd teased the chickens and goats.

"We should get back to the others." Even if Noah, Gansey, and Blue didn't have a solution, it was still better to be with them than without.

Frowning down at the card, Ronan flicked it into the rotting moss. Part of him almost expected the ground below to melt or fade into a yawning void, to swallow the card whole just as it had swallowed Hercules and Cinnamon and all the others.

But it remained on the moss, untouched for now.

"Yeah." He pushed up to his feet and held out his hand. There wasn't much Gansey or Noah or Blue could do, he knew. No more than Adam or Ronan. But being together right now was more of a comfort than anything. It couldn't take them all at once, after all. "Maybe they've found our sacrifice by now."

Adam squeezed Ronan's hand but didn't rise just yet. First, he leaned over and plucked up the card. Even though it had nothing good to say and perhaps he'd have a happier deck without the Tower, but this was Persephone's deck. It was all the tether he had and he didn't want to lose any piece of it.

"I just hope they're safe."

The statement felt more ominous than it might have at any other time. In Darrow, there was always a chance of something bad happening, Ronan had become well aware of that in the past couple years. But his time, there was a heavier weight than usual.

This time, things felt more permanent.

He gave Adam's hand a light squeeze before tugging lightly, trying to get Adam to his feet. "C'mon. They're probably thinking the same thing about us."

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Time it took us to where the water was

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