The Road Less Traveled [Possible M?]

[DragonSong]

She had barely set up her tent, she was still stringing the layers of sheer black and shimmering silver fabrics that hung between her "reading room" and where she slept, when that by now all-too-familiar chill ran down her spine. The hair at the back of her neck stood up and she tensed, her shoulders creeping up toward her ears.

Then she shook her head briskly and set about continuing her her task, jaw set and brow furrowed. If he wants to show up and be all mysterious, let him. I have work to do, she told herself with no small amount of bluster.

It had been nearly a year since she'd dealt with this particular entity. She'd started to hope, foolishly it seemed, that he may have given up on her.

Still, nothing she could do about it now. The Ringmaster might stop by later and that could be an issue, but barring outside intervention she didn't exactly have a great track record conversing with this particular spirit...or whatever the hells he was.

As she finished the last minute touches to her tent-- they'd be in this camp two weeks at least, so she got add some decorations, light some incense, little liberties-- Mira swept back into the personal end of the tent and set a teapot to boiling with a flick of her fingers, fastidiously recovering two intricately molded clay cups from a box of personal belongings and setting them on the small table beside her cot before crossing back to the now steaming water and adding a mix of her favorite jasmine and chamomile tea leaves.

She glanced around as she worked. Still couldn't see him, but that didn't mean he wasn't there. He seemed to have a harder time hiding from her than most mortals, but that didn't mean her sight was foolproof.

When the teapot began to whistle, she lifted it from the small bed of coals and poured the fragrant liquid into the two cups, then set the kettle in the middle of the table as she sat on one end and retrieved her cup, sipping at it delicately.

Her eyes flickered around again. Still nothing, but she knew her sense weren't lying to her. "Honey, I'm home..." she murmured, a little singsong. And she waited.

[Kadakism]

The mortal woman was such a pain to deal with. She took herself far too seriously as far as Tvaldis was concerned. And, like most mortals, she was ridiculously short sighted. These two components together had forced him to have to repeatedly bother her about keeping up the rituals that kept him tethered to the material world. Otherwise he'd go right back into his box and he did not want that.

At least her fellow circus folk were somewhat entertaining most of the time.

Thus was the typical tangle of thoughts Tvaldis found himself with whenever Mira went off to do whatever inane mortal task was required of her and he decided that napping in her tent was a far better use of his time. His eyes flicked down from the cloth ceiling where he laid, his back against the fabric and his hands rested behind his head. She was back and she was talking to him. How quaint. She hadn't noticed him yet and so he decided to make himself known.

He appeared, sitting on the tent floor cross legged, his elbow resting unceremoniously on the table she had set the tea on. He wore his trademark squint and grin, looking as much like a fox as he did a man. "Honey? Are you implying that I'm sweet? Is that why you made this delicious looking cup of tea for me? Because I'm flattered, really. I mean it."

Picking up the tea cup and seemingly ignoring the heat of it, Tvaldis lounged in such a way that his body floated into the air the same way one might drape themselves across a couch. "So what captivating business have you been up to today? Anything actually worthwhile, or just more of the same?"

[DragonSong]

"None of your damned business is what," Mira replied with a sugary smile and a bright, cheerful tone. Her gold eye flashed, a permanent mark of the bond she held with the creature before her. "You know, most people knock or something before they come barging into a person's living space," she added as she took a sip of her own tea, trying to act as though this was a perfectly normal, everyday occurrence.

She was quiet for a moment, then placed her cup back onto the table and scowled at the man. Floating. Does he have to be floating? Gods be damned show-off. "What are you doing here?" she demanded in something near exasperation. "If I have to resort to putting up wards again, I will."

It was a bluff, and she thought they both knew it. Though her connection to Tvaldis gave her augmented magical abilities, as well as a connection to the dead and the Veil that she'd never really had before, she doubted any of the warding spells she knew would be enough to keep him out if he was determined to get in. His very presence here now was proof enough of that.

[Kadakism]

Tvaldis' grin widened slightly as he drank his tea. Was it his tea? Well, it was now, in any case. "Gods I missed tea," he mused as he flipped to be sitting upright, his legs crossed with a cushion of air underneath him.

She was as brusque as ever, her attitude towards him had not improved at all in the year they had known each other. Wait, had it been a year? What even was a year? His smile diminished slightly, the closest he would get to a frown, as he mused about her empty threats. "I don't have any pressing tasks at the moment and I knew you'd be making tea.Do I need any other reason?"

It was a lie, of course. He had no way of knowing that she was going to make tea. But he said it with the same laid back certainty that he said everything else, so hopefully she wouldn't question it too much. "I'm hurt, dear Mira. That you would consider leaving me out in the cold. Am I not a more pleasant tent-mate than the people you swindle?"

[DragonSong]

Mira's eyes narrowed, the gold flashing, though she kept her biting smile firmly in place. "I don't swindle. I offer perfectly legitimate services providing comfort and answers to those who seek them," she retorted sharply. One eyebrow arching up, she added, "If anyone's doing the swindling here, it's you. People come to me asking to speak with dead loved ones, to hear their final message. You could actually give them that, but instead you just float over my shoulder and annoy me."

Putting her tea down, she stood and moved to check on her privacy curtain, peeking out quickly to make sure that no one was coming to speak with her. Sighing, she snapped the curtain closed again and turned to glower at him, arms folded over her chest. "Don't play the innocent with me. You're not here to be out of the cold, so what do you want?"

She tossed her hair and huffed as she added, "If you're trying to get me to come back to that weird little cult of yours, forget it."

[Kadakism]

"I'm not a messenger, dear Mira. I'm an escort. A guide. And we've been over this. It isn't my place to console the living. Besides, they'll only hurt for what, however long they themselves have left to live? And that's the absolute maximum."

Tvaldis gave a casual shrug and finished off his tea before setting the cup back down on the small table. That much effort for something so trivial. She might as well have been asking a king to shine every shoe in his kingdom. His tea finished, the Psychopomp fished a flask he had filched out of his coat pocket. One of the other circus acts. They surely wouldn't miss it, he had gathered with his immense wisdom.

Taking a sip of the strong, biting liquid inside he shrugged again. "I promised I wouldn't ask again, and so I won't. Though I have to ask, do you think you could say the word cult with any more venom? I'd almost be afraid the word itself could kill me. If I could, you know, die."

[DragonSong]

"Cult," Mira hissed, just to be spiteful. Eyeing him over the rim of her cup, one eyebrow suddenly shot toward her hairline. She plunked the teacup onto the table and demanded, "Is that Kubrik's flask?"

Scoffing, she got to her feet and tossed her hair, moving to the incense burner by the curtains. "Typical. You're just a pickpocket. Stealing booze, stealing souls, doesn't make a difference to you, does it?" she spat at him, keeping her tone as biting as possible.

She knew she was being unfair, but she couldn't find it in her to care. This guy irritated her. And scared her, if she was being perfectly honest, though she'd be damned if she actually let him see that.

[Kadakism]

"Ooh, there's the venom. You're cute when you're angry. Like a house cat who thinks it's a panther."

"I do not steal souls. I make sure they go to their proper place when they die. Keep
the Necromancers from royally fucking everything up." Damnable necromancers. Why couldn't they just not? Was it really that hard to leave souls and corpses where they were meant to be? Like kicking a hole in a wall because it was there.

"And I don't know who Kubrik is. I found it on a crate. If it is his, he has awful taste in liquor." Despite his apparent distaste for the stuff, he continued to drink it.

[DragonSong]

"You could always stop drinking it," Mira pointed out sweetly, turning back to face him. Her expression quickly dropped back into bored distaste and she added, "And you've been saying that shit for almost seven years now-- I am a necromancer, y'know. Not all of us use our gifts for reanimation. And not all reanimation requires a soul!"

She huffed and stomped toward her little cot, fluffing the pillow and straightening the blankets repetitively. Honestly, it was just so she had something to do to look busy-- maybe if she seemed absorbed enough he'd leave her alone.

She doubted it, but what the hells. Worth a shot.

[Kadakism]

"I could," he mused as he took one final swig of the bitter burning liquid before screwing the cap back on. "But I went through all that trouble to get it. Would be a waste, don't you think?"

He floated closer to her, absolutely unperturbed by her apparent decision to suddenly ignore him and fluff pillows instead. After seven years together, she was far too easy to read. "Mira, dear. You are absolutely right. Not every necromancer is a dangerous monster. But consider," he continued as he faded from sight, reappearing on her other side. His hand slipped onto her shoulder, much the way a tutor might encourage a student. It was a gesture that felt natural to him, though he could never really gather why.

"It only takes one careless fool with a torch to burn down a forest, yes? Why would magic, especially magic dealing with life, death, and the very soul, be any less dangerous?"

[DragonSong]

She stiffened under his touch, but didn't pull away. Not yet.

"I'm not saying necromancy isn't dangerous, but it's not outright evil either," Mira grumbled. "And stop calling me dear! I'm not actually your wife, you know." She twisted her head to give his hand on her shoulder a pointed look.

With a soft sigh, she stopped pretending to fluff pillows and straightened up, fixing him with a firm glare. "What do you want, Tvaldis?"

As it did every time she spoke his name, a soft shiver ran down her spine. She fancied for a moment that she saw the smoke from her incense flicker, as though in a wind intangible to her mortal form.

[Kadakism]

"It really isn't about what I want, Mira. It's about what I need to do. I, unlike so many of you mortals, know precisely my purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. Souls die, I nudge them in the right direction. Souls are born, I make sure they aren't tampered with while they are alive. Souls get lost or trapped, I untangle them and send them on their way."

Simple. Elegant. A purpose with true, unambiguous meaning. Keep the cycle going, like a water wheel. Smooth and constant. Tvaldis watched Mira as she practically shuddered saying his name. He wondered why that was. Did she genuinely fear him? The idea that someone might find him of all beings frightening was deeply amusing to the psychopomp.

"And an act need not be evil to disrupt the natural order. Using the same metaphor, lighting a torch isn't evil. Dropping it when you trip over a root isn't evil. But the resulting blaze still harms the way of things all the same."

He vanished again, reappearing in front Mira and propping his head, tilted slightly, on his hand. As if deep in thought. His eyes slowly opened fully, looking into hers with their eerie, milky white hue. "You always ask me what I want. But you never tell me what you want. You summoned me after all. What end did you even have when you did it? I can't read your mind. Or can I? I can't. Or can I?"

He couldn't.

[DragonSong]

Mira stumbled back a step, surprised almost despite herself by his sudden closeness.

"I-- I don't want anything." Gritting her teeth against the sudden tremor in her voice, she took a breath and repeated, "I don't want anything. I was dragged into that ritual not knowing what it was and drunk off my ass. If I did summon you, I certainly didn't do it on purpose."

Why did he keep pestering her like this? Tvaldis had made it clear on more than one occasion that he was an immensely powerful being; what use was one priestess more or less to someone-- something-- like him?

"Besides, I have a show to do in an hour." She tried to be flippant, putting her back to him and moving toward the table again to begin cleaning up the tea set. "I can't very well make you leave, so I suppose you're welcome to stick around and watch."

[Kadakism]

"Ah the one-two punch. Young and drunk. I understand." Tvaldis floated around behind Mira, practically lying on his side with his head still propped up in his hand. He looked at peace, and his voice held a kind of sureness that made it seem like he did understand, even though that made no sense. He was a god, far removed from mortal concerns or concepts like morality or time.

"But fine," he relented, taking one final swig from the flask and tossing it gently behind one of the pillows. "I'll just sit back and watch you work. Blink twice if you want me to play Poltergeist with the audience. That could be fun right?"

Tvaldis faded slowly from view, vanishing as a mirage might as one gets closer to it in the desert. Despite his physical form being gone, Mira might still feel his presence hovering over her and hear his voice whisper in her ear, "Knock 'em dead. But not really. I don't want to have to work today."

[DragonSong]

Biting back a curse as he faded from sight, Mira stiffened her shoulders and quickly brushed back through the privacy curtains that separated her personal quarters from the front of her tent, which was appropriately arranged for her “performances”.

No customers yet, but she’d rather expected that. It was still early. She’d mostly said it in an effort to get the death god off her ass for a few minutes—probably a futile attempt. Just because she couldn’t see him didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

“Insufferable creature,” she muttered to herself as she set about arranging her reading table, balancing the crystal ball—entirely for show, she was utterly useless at divination—on its stand and moving the incense from the center of the room back toward the dividing curtains.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” she asked the empty air after a few minutes, fairly sure that her “husband” was still floating about somewhere.

[Kadakism]

There was an uncomfortably long silence when Mira antagonized the empty air, long enough that she might have thought he had actually decided to leave her be for a while. But eventually, his voice came in a whisper on her ear; the tickle of a cicada resting on a tree near your head, accompanied by a faint scent like cut apples and Autmun flowers.

"Not really, no. No one's dying, no one's lost, and the view outside is much more dour and uninteresting than watching you."

The smoke from the incense moved as if someone brushed their hand through it. Tvaldis' face appeared to her as a transparent illusion in her crystal ball, visible and audible to only Mira.

"I am kind of bored though. Tell you what. If you can think of something good to offer, I'll help you with the next client who wants to talk to a loved one. I'll even throw in some real immortal wisdom for free."

[DragonSong]

Mira's blood ran cold at the phrase "something good to offer". While the deity that followed her around Le'ranna had never before struck her as particularly malevolent, it was impossible for her to ignore the series of events that had gotten her into her current predicament.

And it was impossible not to wonder what had happened to however many Brides in Black had come before her.

"Oh no." She glowered at his face in the decorative crystal, uncaring how silly she might look should someone happen to wander into her tent. "I wasn't born yesterday, koishii," she told him caustically, using a Thanati endearment with as much venom as she could muster. Yeah, that's right, asshole. I did my homework. Your little cult followed Thanatos's traditions for the most part, hm? She still had no real idea of what the hell that cult even was, but she was hoping she could get under his skin, just a little.

"No deals with spirits I don't understand," she finished firmly, and swept her hand sharply against the crystal ball to knock it back out of its stand and roll it off the table, then across the floor.

And right into someone's foot.

"Oh!"

The young woman who had just ducked into the front of the tent paused, looking from the crystal to Mira and back. She wasn't one of the Fantasma's troupe, so that meant she was a patron.

Great.

"Er...I'm sorry. Did I interrupt...?"

"Oh, do excuse me!" Mira beamed at her, pitching her voice low and a little throbbing, easily slipping into her "professional" persona. She bent to collect the crystal, flicking the surface subtly out of sight in an effort to piss off Tvaldis if he was still there. "Spirits can be...tricksome, you know. May I help you, miss?"

[Kadakism]

Being tossed around in the crystal ball didn't really do anything to Tvaldis, but he played it up as if it did, rattling himself around in the reflection almost cartoonishly. He shook his head and held the sides of it as if he was worried about his brain falling out, flashing a knowing grin at Mira as she flicked the glass.

"Looks like you have a customer, Higanbana," letting the Thanatii name of a beautiful but ominous flower flower roll off of his tongue before his face vanished from the crystal ball. Yet his voice lingered in Mira's ear for a moment longer before she felt his presence leave her for once. Simultaneously like the tingle of your foot falling asleep and the rush of warmth when sensation returns.

"My offer still stands."

The patron, who had witnessed or heard none of this, stood in the tent's threshold for a moment longer, mouth slightly agape before shuffling tentatively further inside. "Well as long as I'm not interrupting. You are a fortune teller, yes? I was hoping..."

Whatever else the lady had to say, Tvaldis was no longer interested. He floated up and through the tent roof, just outside in the open air and watched the circus camp go about their business. He could see all their little souls, dancing around in their bodies like torch light. Some stronger than others, some dented and scuffed in one way or the other. A sad thing, really. But it wasn't his job to go buffing out the rough edges. So long as a soul was intact enough to function and in a proper body, he wasn't meant to bother it. Still invisible, he took off his glasses and polished them with the sleeve of his shirt, one ear keened for if Mira called him back for any reason.

[DragonSong]

"Of course, of course, deat girl," Mira assured her new patron as she ushered her into a seat at the little round table, casting one last quick glare at the crystal before she set it back on its stand. Useless, she knew--Tvaldis wasn't there anymore, if he ever really had been.

She could still feel the ghost of his breath on her ear. How was that even possible? Did he even have breath.

Though he'd said numerous times that he couldn't read her mind, she thought anyway, quite loudly, I do not need or want your help, lichlord.

No idea if the insult held any weight to it, but even just thinking it brought her a certain vindictive pleasure.



That first customer was a relatively easy one. A young village girl, she simply wanted her palm read, wished to know what choices she might make that could bring her health, love, happiness--the usual.

Though Mira was truly awful at divination, she was quite good at reading people. And her connection with the Veil that the unwanted bond with Tvaldis brought her allowed her to speak with the girls recently deceased great-aunt, who was hovering near the young woman's shoulder through most of the interaction, whispering bits of advice that she wished she could have given in life.

All in all, Mira was actually feeling pretty good about the encounter as she bid her patron--whose name she'd learned was Tallias--farewell and escorted her back through the entrance of the tent.

She paused for a moment to take a breath as she watched her walk away, steps lighter and a small smile on her face.

"See?" she told the empty air, softly but rather smugly. "I didn't need your help."

[Kadakism]

There was no response from Tvaldis for several minutes after the patron left Mira's tent. He must've been off and about doing something else.

He appeared lying on the table, the crystal ball protruding through his intangible chest in an odd way. He had an apple in his hand, turning it over between his fingers before taking a bite. "I knew you wouldn't. Yet you are always the one who asks me to go fetch the dearly departed when someone comes in asking about those who have already crossed over."

"Lovely woman by the way. The Aunt, I mean. She passed on peacefully once you'd helped her say what she needed to," he admitted. It had been quick work, which he'd been thankful for. The girl had also seemed happier, he supposed. Strange that the words of the dead held so much sway over the living.

"But how are you feeling? Got the warm fuzzies in your chest from doing a good deed? Do you want a reward? A pat on the back, maybe? A kiss from your darling husband?" Tvaldis grinned cheekily and took another bite of the apple. It was tart and almost over ripened.

"I know, I know. We're not actually married. I'm sorry." His tone was genuinely apologetic, or as genuine as his natural sarcastic lilt could manage; realizing he might have taken the joke too far.