what's your story. [nick, in progress]

Nick

After they had all convened at the chantry, Nicholas made arrangements with Kiara to meet her at a later date, and soon.  The Chakravanti has this air about him just then: distracted, preoccupied, his thoughts thousands of miles away and years ago.

But he will meet her later, and rather than meeting at her apartment he had instead asked whether she knew of anywhere outdoors to go around Denver.  He's new in town, he'd explained, and he's been meaning to get out and hike more now that the weather isn't bitterly cold; he often finds it necessary to go out to remote areas to do his Work.  So: he is willing to go wherever she suggests.

When he appears at whatever place she has suggested, Nick arrives early, and he waits.  He is lingering by a small dark gray compact car, and he is very monochrome today: a light ribbed black jacket, dark grey pants and a pair of boots, his hair a wild dark halo.

Here his resonance, the hallowed hush of him, is more evident than it had been amongst the pack of other magi at the chantry; it's something that is easy to lose in the background.  Nicholas is burnt circle mounds and highland barrows, and even the presence of the car doesn't quite detract from this fey look he has to him, this feeling of elsewhere-ness.  He is leaned against the hood of the car and staring off into space; waiting.

 

Kiara

 

She gives him directions that take him 10 miles west of Denver, out into Jefferson County and what signage as his car kicks up dust and turns into a visitor's parking area informs him is Red Rocks Park, an impressive range of sandstone rock formations that jut out into the skyline from a distance. It's the home of an amphitheater of the same name, too, rock concerts and other performances taking advantage of the superior acoustics to be had surrounded by the stars and stone; great levels of seating rising up and up and offering an irreplaceable view of the wilderness on every side.

At dusk when the horizon is painted into swirling reds and golds, there are precious few other places in Colorado that give over the impression of how magnificent the natural world could be (and how very tiny in comparison they really were.)

Out here too, one imagined, reaching across the divide between worlds would be a simpler feat than in the towering apartment complex the Verbena called home. Not impossible there, among the steel and glass, but a task burdened with a need for agility and perseverance - to push past the Gauntlet; to transpose oneself (and the senses) into the realm of the spiritual.

It's mid-afternoon by the time the pagan arrives in her tiny red hatchback; the sides of it coated in a fine layer of dust; old mud clinging to the lower half of the doors and wheel flaps (a sign perhaps of the female's inclinations toward frequent visits outside of the city limits).

-

Nicholas, lingering by his car is the picture of hushed, quiet tones. Not so the brunette that crosses toward him, her boots easily devouring the soft gravel underfoot. Kiara wears jeans and a bright, flowing shirt in forest greens and ocean blues, inter-cut with swirls of cream. Her ears gleam with silver hoops and around her neck a simple chain displays a quartz pendant. There's some combination, the thick, wild waves of dark hair that fall around her shoulders, the vibrant red mouth and dramatic eye make up perhaps, that casts her the vision of what she seems (what she conjures with that resonance of pulsing, rejuvenating energy) --

a witch by any other name

-- "Hey," she greets easily enough, her stride slowing a little as she passes by him and inclines her face, her mouth curving into a brief smile. "This way, there's a spot that I like to come to."

And off she goes, in a haze of earth and spice and some laced undertone of sweet perfume. Well, then. 

 

Nick

 

The vast expanse of chaparral and red stone is what makes Nicholas realize he has come back home.  The types of places we grow up remain inextricably tied to our youth: so too for him.  He didn't miss Arizona, necessarily, during his years in New England, but these are very different places, and here he might as well be a lone life form on another planet.  At least, until Kiara arrives.

It has occurred to him that there are no rivers here.

When she reaches him he is standing with his head slightly tilted back, the fingers of one hand lightly gripped in another.  When Kiara's hatchback pulls up nearby, he lets his hands fall to his sides.  "Hello," he says, and he starts after her without hesitation.  His footfalls are quiet, as though he were walking through a church: in those places even the softest footsteps ring and reverberate and disturb.

There is a brief time while he walks after her where he is silent, his wandering gaze lighting on whatever they happen across on the road to where they're going.  It's not uncomfortable to him.  They could easily spend this entire exchange not talking and Nick would be fine with that.  Still: he's aware that in fact this is not something other people usually like.

And in this situation, Nicholas Hyde will always default to asking questions.  "How long have you lived in Colorado?"

 

Kiara

 

The track she leads him on is scrubby at first, wild grasses erupting from the gravel track and skirting the edges; their footsteps leaving shallow imprints that the afternoon breeze would soon enough obliterate and conceal their ever having set foot in this wild land where they were sorely outnumbered by the cottontails and clever foxes; by the trees and low lying prairie fields. It widens out as they crest a hill and then narrows into a silver of etched out, worn down earth; eroded by the passage of many human feet over time.

Before them the sun winged across the tips of the rock formations and cast intricate triangles of shadow; the fields rolling back a ways before a smattering of tall pines bracketed any clearer vision beyond.

The air here smelled fresh; cleaner and lacking the congestion of city pollutants and the sky above them would be a sight when the tiny pricks of starlight began to reveal themselves after the sun's rays dimmed. The pagan too, felt (and appeared) more at home here, the further they moved into nature; stretching her fingertips out as they passed long, swaying wild grasses. The blades tickled Kiara's palms and for a moment she seems entirely possessed and elsewhere by the sensation, stirring only when Nicholas' voice penetrates the distant calls of a circling eagle; the rattling hiss of the leaves; shaken by the breeze.

"Hm? Oh, not long. A year, I think." There's a pause, Kiara's eyes narrow into the distance. "No - maybe two, now," she corrects with a neat little shrug; this curl of laughter in her voice as she glances over her shoulder at him. "Long enough that evidently I forget the date. I came here from New York, that's my home town." She starts down a gentler incline; her trajectory seemingly directing them toward a smaller protrusion of rock upon a nearby hill; tufts of grass dotting it, too. The Verbena's dark hair is shaken back by the breeze; it sails out over her shoulders.

"And what about you? What's your story? If we're going to be working together, I guess we should know some basics. We can skip trading starsigns though, if you want." A cut of her dark eyes, framed by long lashes and a crooked expression of mirth on those red lips. 

 

Nick

 

 

What's your story?

 

Kiara's eyes cut to him and Nick, too, smiles at her quip about starsigns.  There had been a short nonverbal sound of acknowledgement when she told him she was from New York; people around their age and slightly younger have been moving east to west in droves within the past few years.

"Pen and I just moved here back in December from the east coast, near Boston," he says.  "It was her idea, but I was ready for a change of scenery."  There is a way Nick hesitates when he speaks, not out of any particular sense of distrust but perhaps out of a selectiveness for his words and the information he does offer.  "I'm Chakravanti, which I think you caught."  This is not a story, precisely, and certainly not his, but it encompasses the things that are currently the main aspects of the life of Nicholas Hyde, at least as well as anything can.

In spite of not being too physically impressive, Nick keeps pace with her easily enough: more likely due to practice and comfort out in these wild areas than any sort of physical prowess.  The air here lacks the congestion of city pollutants and he has been breathing deep but quiet breaths, his gaze not on Kiara slightly ahead of him but reserved for the horizon line and the shadows cast across the plains.

"Grace had mentioned your name and that you Work within the spirit world.  I don't think I run into other magi with extensive experience in that very often."

 

Kiara

 

I'm Chakravanti.

Kiara's eyes do move over him at that as they walk, her expression not wholly closed off at the mention of his affiliation but perhaps - thoughtful, more so, than before. She might have caught that, what he was. "I did," she affirms softly, with this slight little smile before her attention re-directs back toward the rocky outcropping ahead.

Grace had mentioned her name and Kiara makes an affirmative noise at that, as if to acknowledge that what the Virtual Adept had mentioned was true (though it seems unlikely Nick would be out here were that the case). "I'm a healer by trade and by - calling, I suppose you could say. I consider myself a student of Life more than anything but my mentor believed in my learning the harmony in things. The balance. Once I began to understand more about everything out there," she gestures, Kiara, with a rattle of bracelets, toward the horizon, where the shadows were already beginning to lengthen.

Turns a bright eye back over a shoulder toward her companion. Her smile sudden and full and quite entirely captivating. "There was no going back."

-

The spot she guides him to sat on the lip of a cliff; cutting off abruptly at the edge and dropping in a sheer descent down into a small canyon. Everything here was coated in a fine layer of red dust; the granules of it clinging as they arrived at the Verbena's chosen destination. She set her bag down and perched herself tentatively on a small boulder; rubbing her palm along the side of it. "It's a lot easier to look across out here. Quieter, too. Don't get me wrong I love the city but - " she breathes out and tips her face back, eyes closing. "I can't go too long without coming out where it's wilder. Where the air isn't so artificial." One of the pagan's eyes opened, then both.

"Did Grace happen to tell you what I am," a curl of her mouth. "I'll give you two guesses."

 

Nick

 

There was no going back.  Nicholas meets her smile with one of his own, though there is something altogether more reserved about his, something thoughtful and slow.  "I suppose I'd also consider myself a healer, sort of," he says.  Perhaps a thing that one would find it unusual for someone of his Tradition to say, but then so few see them as anything other than passionless death dealers, bloodyfingered as they spin and sort the webs of Fate. And in fairness, this is the sort of Chakravanti many people come across.

They crest the top of the cliff, and the red dust has settled over their boots and their clothes and their skin, so that when they scour it away later it'll stain the water like rust.  Nick finds a nearby boulder and hops up onto it, where he sits back on his haunches and sets his bag next to him on the rock.

And he surveys the canyon, perhaps with a thought or two of how long it has been and will be.  Some canyons go deep enough to expose rock that saw the world's birth; likely not this one, but it doesn't hurt to show reverence.

As Kiara teases him about her own Tradition, he shakes his head, glancing at her across the small divide between the rocks they've chosen to perch on.  "I'm guessing you're either Verbena or Dreamspeaker," he says, "unless I'm way off the mark."  He says this with the certainty of someone who rarely is, where other people are concerned.

Kiara