haunted. [annie, howl ST]

Annie Pierce
[General info about this SL:

These early scenes are mostly about introducing little pieces of a broader scenario, so everyone's scene is going to be a bit different and it may or may not initially seem as though there's any connection between them. I'm not sure yet how fast this thing will progress, but don't feel as though there's anything in particular you're expected to do. However this thing develops (or doesn't develop) organically is fine.

About this scene in particular:

Threat level is low to nonexistent.

The tone of this one is pretty sad.]

Annie PierceIt was the afternoon of June 29th, a day that most people in Denver would not think to mark as anything worthy of note. So many of the Awakened had come and gone over the years, a steady migration that inevitably left the land bereft of those who might remember its history. There was one who remembered though. One who had witnessed much of that history unfold with her own eyes. Annie was alone at the house today. She sat beside the node with her legs crossed, watching the shimmering reflection of the sun on the water. She wasn't meditating or channeling the node's rejuvenating energies. Today she was just... thinking. Remembering.

She'd been gardening earlier, and though she'd rinsed the dirt from her hands there was still a sheen of sweat covering her sun-kissed skin. Her hair, a bit wild (like her nature,) was left loose in drifting strands of strawberry-blond. A patch of red and a smattering of freckles marked a spot on her nose where she'd spent a bit too much time in direct sunlight. She had on jeans and hiking boots and an old white tank top marred with patches of damp sweat and a streak of grass-stain on the back. There was a knife strapped to her belt - both a ritual and a work tool.

Kiara WoolfeKiara had become a semi-regular visitor to the Chantry of recent days.

While she had neglected to stay overnight often with the return of Annie and her sisters (whether out of respect or other reasoning Kiara's own was anyone's guess) she frequented it to tend to flowers she'd pressed into the earth out near the node while the ground had still been hard and unyielding with winter's touch. She'd tended to the small smattering of color as much for her benefit as to offer vibrancy for the great spirit she'd made herself known to.

It wasn't anything she'd explained to the others; why there; why for Callisto. Perhaps they assumed it was best not to ask the intentions of one who dabbled with the spirit world. Perhaps none had paid them much mind. But - she came, the pagan, came when the summer solstice was high most recently and carried a box of summer fruit into the Chantry for Annie's Cabal. If any would understand the reasoning for the offering; it would; perhaps; be the woman who felt like the unbreakable, enduring strength of nature.

Last she'd stood in on their land, it had been to offer the ashes of the midsummer fire to it; to invoke and strengthen the ground beneath them. Today, she doesn't visit for any reason other than the weather had been warm enough to draw her out of the city limits.

The door to the patio slides open on her and Kiara's presence washes out to accompany her footsteps. That gentle beating energy, the stronger essence that seemed to harmonize with the Node itself. "Am I interrupting?" The brunette jingles, the bracelets on her wrists offering a dull, metallic score to her progress as she picks a path toward the spring; a pair of sandals dangling from her fingers.

Annie PierceShe hadn't expected visitors today, and there was an edge of that in the way Annie turned her head to regard Kiara, her expression a little more raw than she perhaps meant for it to be. Despite the stillness of her body, her resonance crackled around her - wild and untamed as the forest that stretched out past the house. She'd never been very good at hiding her emotions - if in fact she even cared to try. But whatever volatility the Verbena may have felt, it wasn't directed at Kiara. After a moment, she offered a small, tight smile of greeting. Getting to her feet, she brushed the grass from her jeans and turned around.

"No, you aren't interrupting. I was just taking a break. It's a good day for work, but I'm afraid I'm not getting much done." Annie wiped the back of her arm over her forehead. "I suppose I'm glad its you. It's fitting, actually. I think you and I are the only Verbenae left in Denver. Though... you never really know with us, do you? Might be some old crone hiding out in the mountains."

Annie glanced at the sky, squinting against the bright rays of the afternoon sun. The weather didn't seem to know that it was a day for storms and sorrow, though the sun could be unforgiving in its own right.

"I was about to head out. Is there anything I can do for you?"

Annie Pierce[Edit: How did I even do that? That should say "You and I and Leah."]

Kiara WoolfeThat crackling energy and the expression on her face draws the other female up short. She pauses, Kiara, the folds of the summer dress she's wearing settling around her legs. It's printed in bright blues and greens and yellows against white; a splash of almost violent color to contrast against all that dark hair of hers; those eyes that seemed to study and file away Annie's reaction; the open emotion like a tender bruise there, blossoming in her eyes, the smile she casts Kiara.

She hesitates; the edge of her mouth offering a hint of some amused thing, the bare suggestion of a smile in return, the lift of a slender shoulder upward in easy acknowledgement. "I'd personally be let down if there wasn't at least one of us out there, in some form or another." She leans down to set her sandals on the ground; toeing back into them and adding with deceptive lightness for the way she felt as if she'd imposed her presence on something entirely personal.

"I was just coming out to sit by the water, actually, but - " She flicks hair from her eyes with an absent; unhurried sweep of her fingers across her brow.

"Everything okay?"

Annie PierceSasha would claim that Annie was the world's least effective liar, an assertion that probably had some basis in accuracy. When Kiara asked if everything was okay, Annie's lips thinned. The wind gusted past, tossing wild strands of hair over her eyes. Annie barely seemed to notice, brushing them away absently as she contemplated an answer to Kiara's question.

"Today is a haunted day," she said finally. "I'm just... remembering." Annie glanced at Kiara's dress; at her bare feet in the grass. "There used to be more of us here. Before the war."

Annie started to move, striding out past Kiara, but a few paces in she paused, glancing over her shoulder. She seemed to consider something for a long moment. "I'm driving out to Roxborough State Park. If you want to come... I suppose that would be alright. I've probably got some better shoes I could lend you."

Kiara WoolfeToday is a haunted day.

To say that to some would have raised eyebrows, would have likely resulted in differing reactions, depending on belief, depending on the individual. The shape and surety of how they perceived the world and such things as ghosts, things less tangible and clearly mapped. To say it to Kiara Woolfe was to draw her attention wholly and with clear interest; the shift of her expression from something veiled in polite consideration for the owner of the land she was on to open curiosity.

Annie was an ineffectual liar, Kiara was not inclined to curb her interest, when drawn in.

The Verbena's eyes dip to her feet when she mentions the war; there's a faint line drawing her brows together; a schism between interest and settling respect; for the losses the memory invokes. For the awareness of what exactly it might have been Annie mourned in the afternoon sunshine. She looks after the other female when she pauses and there's the catch of the wind in Kiara's hair; dragging it across her throat, sweeping it away again as she turns.

She doesn't ask if she's being invited because perhaps Annie wants the company. Just lets a smile settle at the edge of her mouth and starts after her.

"Sure, I'd like that."

Annie Pierce"You may not like it so much when we get there," Annie warned quietly. "But I wouldn't mind the company."

There was no explanation given as to why Sasha and Leah were not present to make the trip with her. Perhaps this was the kind of journey that Annie did not wish to visit upon them. She nodded once, almost more to herself than to Kiara, before leading the two of them inside. In the kitchen she filled a couple of canteens full of water before disappearing upstairs. When she returned, she carried an old canvas backpack - faded and frayed in a few places, but still strong.

"I'll drive. We can take the SUV."

The car in question was in the garage: a black Ford Expedition hybrid with a few splatters of mud marring the pristine paint job. Annie tossed the bag into the back seat and unlocked the passenger door for Kiara. When they were ready, she pulled out into the driveway and started them down the road.

The journey to the park was fairly quiet. Annie was kind enough to flip on the radio, so the silence never got too awkward. Old bluegrass and folk music filtered in through the speakers as they drove. If there was any conversation, more than likely it was Kiara who initiated it. Annie was... mostly lost in her own head, staring out at the country roads as though she half-expected a ghost to appear. But none did.

It took about half an hour to make it out to the park. When they got there, Annie fished a pair of hiking shoes out of her pack and offered them to Kiara, should she need them. They were about the right size, and still fairly new. If Kiara didn't want (or need) them, they'd get tossed back into the car. Then Annie locked the doors and paused to gaze up into the sky. A few clouds had formed since their departure, but the sun was still bright and hot. Ahead of them, the landscape stretched out into beautiful rolling hills, rocky outcroppings and verdant forests. Looking at it from a distance, it was hard to imagine anything terrible ever could have happened here.

"We need to hike for about an hour. There's a trail for part of it. If you need anything, let me know. I've got the water, and some food."

Kiara WoolfeSomewhere between Annie's warning and their arrival at the park, Kiara's mood shifts to something if not quite somber; far more attuned toward it than whatever lighter variation it had seemed in at the Chantry. She stops only to secure keys, her phone and a jacket before following the other woman into the garage and sliding in across from her.

Annie was quiet on the drive and Kiara seemed to slip easily into the role of contemplative companion beside her; cutting the other woman only the occasional glance when they slowed for what little traffic was present so far out; for uncertain terrain as they journeyed out into the depths of nature. When they arrive, the pagan accepts the proffered hiking shoes and tosses her sandals into the SUV, twists the heavy fall of her hair into a knot at the base of her neck to keep it out of the way and, with a brief pause only to take stock of their surroundings; to breathe in the crisp air and admire the way the sunlight dappled over the rocks; the way the trees offered a shadowy canopy to the hillside; falls into an easy trek behind Annie.

She's not dressed for hiking, Kiara, but her footing is confident; she's a runner by inclination and her endurance is built such that she maintains pace with Annie without complication; save only for moments when she drags the hem of her dress away from snagged branches and obscure; hidden catches underfoot. "The place we're going," she asks after a few minutes; her tone quieter for the sense of solemnity she's sensing from her companion.

"Is it the reason why today's haunted?"

Annie PierceThe first length of the hike was easy-going and picturesque. Annie led them to a trail-head that wound out through the open grass along the side of a rock-strewn hill. The stones weren't as red as the ones in Red Rocks, but they still possessed an arid, rough-hewn beauty that contrasted against the bright green of grass and the tiny white wildflowers that grew along the edge of the trail. Around the bend, they crossed a flat section of ground and entered a forested area. Annie's footsteps were light and agile, barely making a sound as they traveled across strewn twigs and pine needles. She seemed to know where she was going. There was an instinctive quality to the way she moved. Like maybe she could have shut her eyes and led them through the park on sense memory alone.

Is it the reason why today's haunted?

Annie stopped moving for a moment, turning back to glance over her shoulder at Kiara. After a moment, she nodded and kept walking. "I used to come here, when I was a kid. My parents were Hermetics. They didn't like me hanging around with the heathens." In spite of her grim mood, there was a soft, defiant smile at that. "But I was never meant for the Order. I doubt they would have taken me, even if I'd wanted them to. So I ran away and came here and found... a different kind of family. They let me sit in on some of their rituals. It's how I met my first girlfriend."

It was the most Annie had spoken since they'd left. Certainly the most she'd ever spoken of her past around Kiara.

"How was it for you, when you joined?"

Kiara Woolfe"Difficult, at first."

She admits, perhaps a little uncertainly. "My Mentor was a nurse, the night I met her she was standing over the bed of a stranger I saw get hit by a car - " There's a beat, a fleeting shadow that settles over the brunette's eyes; an old hurt, briefly twinged. "She told me she'd been waiting for me. I was scared of it, of her, at first. I hated my family so any excuse to get away from them was welcome but - "

There's a flicker, an edging, suggestive little twist of her mouth. Kiara's eyes met Annie's when she glanced back at her.

" - Aisling, she was a Gardener of the Tree. To say she took a risk bringing me in would be a gross understatement." She skirted a small dip in the otherwise flat, grassy ground and for a moment grew quiet, as lost in her thoughts and memories perhaps as Annie had been for much of the afternoon. "The coven didn't like it, the loss of pure bloodlines, the heritage. Still, I learned a lot from them. Even if I didn't agree with half their methods most of the time.

Denver, being out here - " Kiara's eyes shift to some point in the distance. " - it's the first time I've been alone since I joined. There's always been someone with me but - she's gone now, too."

 Annie Pierce
She's gone now too.

Annie slowed her pace a bit, falling in next to Kiara. Her eyes were softer when she looked over, the cool blue of her irises limpid and clear. Not exactly gentle, but certainly understanding. They passed by a tree with an overhanging branch, and she reached up passively to run her fingers along the bark.

"Some of us need to learn the difference between preserving history and being bound to it."

A beat, and she glanced up at the sky. "We lose so many, don't we? Too many." Kiara hadn't said what happened, but she spoke of Aisling in the past-tense. A person could make assumptions from that.

"Here. This way." Annie nodded to a spot ahead where the trail forked, picking up her pace again. The two of them traveled down the smaller of the two trails, heading steadily deeper into the trees. The further they went, the more wild and tangled the landscape seemed to get. Until finally Annie stopped and looked around. "We're off the trail from here."

Annie led them through a gap in the trees, moving more carefully now that they had no path with which to guide themselves. She seemed to know where she was headed though, picking her way through the undergrowth as they headed West - toward the slowly sinking afternoon sun. At one point she stopped to watch as a doe picked her way through the trees a few yards away. The animal stopped when she saw them, lifting her head to stare at them through the scattered foliage. She flicked her ears twice, then trotted off in a different direction. She was the last animal, aside from a few insects, that they saw or heard from that point on. That alone had the effect of making the woods feel... wrong. There ought to have been birds. Squirrels. Mice. Perhaps more deer.

Instead there was silence.

Eventually the trees began to thin. More and more of them looked dead or dying. Up ahead, they could see a place where the forest opened up into a clearing. Annie kept her head down. She didn't look at it. Just kept walking.

Finally they arrived at their destination, and Annie looked up.

Perhaps this place used to be a Grove, but now there were dead and blackened stumps where the trees once were. The ground was dry and cracked, and everything about the place felt wrong. Dead. Static. The life and energy and resonance of the forest was gone. The largest of the mangled stumps was at the very center of the clearing. Once there had been a great tree here. Now... there was nothing left but broken, gnarled roots.

"We're here." Annie said softly.

Kiara WoolfeThe undergrowth makes Kiara's progress challenging. They slip off the trail eked out by years of regular use and into thicker, wilder tangles of forest. Branches hanging lower; dried debris crunching underfoot. Her clothing snagged and held up by old; decaying logs and curled, drying leaves. For all of it though; her bare legs scratched where the thin cotton of her dress offered scant protection against twigs and close hanging branches, she doesn't seem inclined to mind.

Sets her hands against trunks as they navigate through them, Kiara, sliding her palm over the rough bark in a passingly tender way, her senses attuning themselves to stirrings of something - different. All of nature had a pattern, a heartbeat, every tree and plant and animal its own energy signature. When she listened, Kiara could hear it; the pulse; the gentle susurrous of nature around her. The fundamental weaving of the elements that drew everything together, held it in place.

Both Annie and Kiara were children of nature, in their own ways. They felt and understood and tended to the earth in ways the other Traditions did not. Could not, perhaps. The pagan's attention is captured by the slow, ebbing sense of nothingness. The traces of life becoming fainter the longer they walked. The silence beginning to press in and suffocate the pagan.

Kiara could feel her skin prickling; tiny hairs lifting; her heart beating against her chest as if to protest the lack of any stirring of life around them. The verdant growth gone, the absence of birdsong, the singing of insects. Annie announced they were here and Kiara stops and stands; her hands uncurling at her sides; that sense of stifling stagnation like a vice around her throat; choking off her breathing.

It looked like a fire had ripped the heart out of the grove; the twisted, mangled stumps draw some tiny sound from the woman slightly behind Annie. She looks down as she takes a step forward; carefully lowers herself to her haunches to gather up the dry, cracked earth. Closes her fingers around it in her palm and lets out a slow, measured breath.

"What happened?," she asks very gently, still crouching, weighing the earth in the palm of her hand as if she could deduce some sliver of it from this alone. "Nature's been bled dry from this place."

 Annie Pierce
Sanitized. That's what the place felt like. Not merely destroyed, but erased. What must the spiritual reflection look like? Did the Grove's penumbral counterpart even still exist?

What happened?

Annie's expression was grim as she looked out over the land. Her body was alive with grief - a tension she held in her shoulders and her sternum and the pit of her stomach. Her eyes were crystal-bright and slightly bloodshot in the hot afternoon sun.

"The Technocracy happened."

Annie stepped out into the clearing - into the graveyard (for surely that's what it was.) Her gaze swept slowly over the scorched remains of the great tree and the bare, cracked earth. Perhaps she saw something there that Kiara could not see. (Perhaps for a moment she saw the place as she remembered it.)

"The war happened. Not that it ever really stopped. Not that anyone really remembers when it fucking started." There was disdain in her voice; barely contained disgust for the senseless violence and destruction that had been wrought here. "They came here with their soldiers and their machines and they slaughtered everyone and everything they found." She walked to the mangled stump at the center of the circle, crouching down beside it. For a moment there was silence as she reached out to touch the blackened remains. And here, finally, a tear fell across the slope of her cheek. "Including the Node. Of course they had to destroy it. It was too wild. Too alive. They could never use it."

Kiara Woolfe[Apparently Kiara hates herself and wants to see how bad it really is. Spirit 1, looking across the divide. I think that's a base of 4, -1 for practiced rote and -1 for taking her time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (6, 7, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Kiara Woolfe[And extending once. More WP because this isn't a fun thing to look at and the dice are fickle.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Annie PierceThe gauntlet here was thick and heavy. Much more than it ought to have been, out here in the wilderness. It took a great deal of Will for Kiara to see past it, and when she finally managed to break through the veil, what she saw was... emptiness. Just this bare, dead space where nothing - not even the spirits of the long-dead trees - could live.

And in the center of circle, where the node used to be, there was... it was difficult to describe, exactly. It had no real form, but it looked like some kind of black hole. Like a scar in the umbral reflection where the light could not reach.

Kiara WoolfeShe wants to see it. The full scope and shape and size of the cancer eaten into the earth beneath their feet. The total destruction wrought by the Union because they could not fathom something that could not be cut and dissected and re-worked into their configuration of the universe. Annie starts toward the warped and blackened stump in the middle of the clearing and Kiara - opens her palm around the handful of dirt in it - feels a shiver run down her spine and allows the granules to run between her fingers.

Perhaps Annie won't understand the necessity of it, the desire to look something that awful in the face for what it was but then again - maybe she could understand why and how Kiara, attuned as she was to the heatbeat of everything around them, would need to see. To understand the totality of Annie's grief. She doesn't have the skill to cast her senses back the crouching brunette, not yet, but she does reach them out; across; pushing and casting her will against the barrier between their worlds.

Opening her eyes and rising to her feet to look into - a void. This airless, lifeless stretch of space. She breathes in, a sharp little motion of anguish, her eyes bright. "God." She clenches her jaw; looks away for a beat. Her presence here feels like the strangest, most heartbreaking falsity. A washing, soothing balm that cannot do anything for the absolute absence of life around it.

"I've only felt - I only got a taste of it once." Kiara moves toward the twisted remains of the tree; what she sees; a jagged wound. The end result of War. The ultimate cost paid by not by them, or the others but - the world. "I never saw them but I could feel it. Not like this - this is -" She reaches out to set a hand against the surface of the tree.

Looks at Annie's tear stained face, finally. Grief narrowing the pagan's mouth into a line; her eyes brilliant with mingled empathy and rage. "They tore the heart out of the world here and I don't understand why. They're so - " She breathes out again, slides her hand away from the tree. " - I want to make them feel this hurt."

Kiara looks away, across the clearing.

"Some day, I want them to know how it feels."

Annie PierceThere weren't enough tears in all the world for the casualties of the Ascension War. (Of any war.)  This was an old wound for Annie, and the tears she shed now were not those of fresh, ragged pain but of an ache and emptiness that could never really be cured. She closed her eyes and bowed her head and let her tears fall silently to the dead earth. She didn't respond to Kiara's words for a long time.

Finally she picked her head up and looked at the sky. "I wonder... if they even can feel."

She pulled the knife free from her belt, twisting it slowly in her hand. "It was... seventeen years ago, today. I was fifteen. Hadn't even fully woken up yet. I wasn't here when it happened, but I made my father show me. The Coven was named the Daughters of the Crescent Moon. Some of them were old and powerful, but they weren't warriors. Even if they had been..." She shook her head, letting the sentence trail off.

"I remembered all their names. When I can, I come back here and I say them. Because someone needs to remember."

Annie took the knife and cut a shallow line down the center of her palm. Standing up, she reached out over the ruined stump and let her blood fall onto its surface. A sacrifice to the departed. Each time a drop hit the wood, she spoke a name. Twelve names in total - witches, old and young. Gone but not forgotten. There was a pause at the end, as Annie began to withdraw her hand - but stopped. Blood began to run down her arm. Finally she stretched it out again and let three more drops hit the wood.

"Sarah Pierce. Roland Pierce. Jack Pierce."

Then he stepped away and looked at Kiara. "They didn't die here, but I suppose I can honor them too.

"Anyway, I thought you should know what happened."

Kiara WoolfeKiara looks back when Annie speaks, when she withdraws her knife and slices the tip into her skin. She watches the blood well to the surface and start to run. Stands and bears witness to the remembrance of those that had died. It was an empty graveyard, this. Not even the spirits lingered here on the other side. The reflection a dull, empty echo. The sight of it as Annie gives her blood over to it; the eerie nothingness, draws Kiara's shoulders back.

Her spine straightens and she lifts her chin, her face upward, toward the late afternoon sunshine for a moment, as if somehow it had been absent and forgotten, in the stark reality of what they were looking at. She lets her senses shift, draws back from the other side and when Annie steps back finally - when she adds the last three names - Kiara's mouth suggests a tiny smile. Not quite pained but - sympathetic. But understanding.

She hesitates for a moment, the brunette and then makes a wordless gesture for Annie's knife, if she'll tender it to her. To slice a line down her own hand and flex her fingers against the sting of it; folding her fingers around the cut and holding it out to let a few drops hit the wizened, twisted trunk, to run and mix with the other Verbena's.

"Aisling Callahan."

A beat, Kiara rubs a thumb over the wound in her hand, looks up. "I'll remember them too, now."

Annie PierceWhen Kiara gestured for the knife, Annie hesitated a moment. As she passed it over, offering it to Kiara hilt-first, there was a sense of ritual about it. Sharing tools (and mixing blood) was not a thing done lightly. Annie watched as Kiara made her own small sacrifice; as she spoke the name of her mentor and remembered the life that had been lost.

When she said, I'll remember then too, Annie nodded once, very subtly, in acknowledgment. She took the knife back when Kiara was finished with it, wiping the blade clean on her shirt before sliding it back into its sheath.

"They took the Chantry in the city, too. I guess they thought they could wipe us out." She smirked bitterly. "And yet... here we are."

Annie reached across with her unwounded hand to touch Kiara's arm. Just this simple, human bit of contact (a gesture of connection and support.) Then she turned and began to walk back into the woods. "Come on, let's leave this place."