| [the name of the author is the first to go] |
[17 Nov 2020|12:33pm] |
Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very
flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency.( Read more... )
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[11 Mar 2012|06:08pm] |
[She's spending quite a bit of time keeping busy, because at Haven there is always something which needs doing, and busywork keeps Emily from reflecting on the remembered taste of her own creeping madness. But no amount of distraction is quite enough, not really. Not swapping out the rooms of now-departed residents to accommodate new faces, not triple-checking everyone has what they need, not even the occasional scrap of afternoon eked out sitting in the sun. Emily is all nervous-jittery energy; she's strung taut as her own bow, is quietly preoccupied with Haven as a nightmare factory. With bodies in the ground. Nives now never quite the same, and Ophelia still herself... but Em has finally met Nina up close, so the unstated embarrassment is inability to pretend it's okay. Very few of them are, in fact, okay. Em catches herself stopped mid-stride now and again, and wonders -- almost idly, really, a strangely indolent ribbon of thought -- at what point 'okay' starts seeming like a feasible option. If it ever will, for that matter.]
Was the whole city turned amnesiac on high alert, or were there actually new journals parceled out? Is there a contingency plan for that sort of thing? A corner of the Library devoted to mixing up a stockpile of spells like roofies, or just a whole warehouse full of waiting journals?
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[16 Jan 2012|01:13am] |
[It's the lingering sense of disconnect, emotional footing iced over and slippery. Emily has taken step to one side, has tucked hands in figurative pockets and now watches Haven with a questioning of purpose, of place. She'd had a slip of the pen a few months back, said 'everything is eventual'; lo and behold: so it is.]
[Havenites]
Be nice to the cat. Enough said.
[Open Entry]
Seeking enlightenment. You wanted to be what when you grew up?
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[27 Nov 2011|06:38am] |
Haven's lit up late-night with Emily tucked into her corner of converted church, hidden away in her bedroom with the door half-closed whilst she drowns out all the rest of the world via low and ongoing violin monologue. It's portrait of a muzzy-minded artist: Notes taut as her nerve-strings (waiting for the other shoe to drop, cynic at 23 like any good young creature), then bleeding off into lazy loose-limbed relaxation before tick-tick-winding their way back around the corner and up the anxious hill again. Early mornings are for running, slap of rubber soles against the pavement, hair scraped back from her face and bedraggled down her neck, the steady drumbeat of Em's own pulse resonating through her ears. Evenings, though, are back to old familiar; the music has come home during these past couple months, progressed from tentative fumbling in the dark -- lively lovers too long separated, embarrassed by what time's gone past -- to confidence mostly restored, ability to chart out rollercoaster emotion and all the things gone unspoken with fingers curled around bow and strings.
Still, there's that sensation of Andley mockery wending its way through the entirety -- as much toward herself (refreshingly) as anything. Em doesn't actually speak on the matter, but rather fills half a page of her Library journal with incomplete Tchaikovsky-Bartók-Prokofiev phrases and incomprehensibly indecipherable notes-to-self in too many tongues to count, a mishmash of Schrödinger languages fitted together in ways which ought to be like forcing the wrong puzzle pieces, but somehow manage visual tapestry, eyecandy mosaic. On the journals, at least, she finishes it off with underlined flourish.
Countdown to Christmas music: go. Are there spells to drown it out, do you think?
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[28 Sep 2011|07:03pm] |
Faust, King Lear, or Dr. Seuss?
(I could comment on the weather and how it sounds like the trees will come crashing in the windows at any given moment, but this is called a diversion so let us please run away with it.)
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[15 Aug 2011|07:50am] |
It’s less revelation than realization. It’s opening a door she’d barred shut when more desperately emotional. Now Emily is a little bit older, a little bit less naive if not necessarily wiser, and equally susceptible to her own magic wrapping its tight hold around her heart and mind and limbs (just in wholly new ways). Rather than thinking about what happened in the training room -- unvoiced acknowledgment, too-tense recognition of their respective pieces and places on the game board -- she avoids Haven for the day, loses herself in the calm blankness which is people-watching; anything to not think. Except -- and this is Em fighting to the surface, twisting and twirling around Natural-born magic to be Emily Andley rather than magic-sodden linguist -- she does think. Not about the ebb and flow of Gryff lost to kata, or the want/need stare-down which happened after, but of the scar over his heart and the sight of him sitting on his office floor. And Haven -- Haven which wanted and needed far more than she did, Haven which if given what was required would perhaps in turn give the man who helmed it some much-needed peace. Haven which needed its people to come home.
The Occultists haven’t panned out. That leaves a single solitary option behind, one which she knows would never be approved of -- has, in fact, already been shot down. It doesn’t matter. They need the help, and she needs to know that Gryff’s own responsibilities won’t eat him alive. It’s a phone call, then; the journals are right out as part of better-safe-than-sorry, so Em sits out in the cool where she is surrounded by people and pointedly does not dwell on anything other than retrieving her phone, dialing Dom’s number, and dancing around a series of pleasantries, questions and answers until the end result is what she’s been looking for: a name. And then it’s the journals. Only after there’s the concrete reality of a name -- ‘Who do you actually work for, Dom? Who’s responsible for heading the Market?’ -- does Emily put pen to page. Even that is a formality; she’ll bang down the Merchant’s door, if she has to.
[Locked to Nic Santoro]
Em Andley’s slanted hand gone neat, straightforward, bold either from genetics or circumstance; do the details matter? What's the going price for an audience to discuss business arrangements?
[Open]
Right. Evening out, please and thank you. Cass, you are hereby designated escort. Who’s on board?
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[26 Jul 2011|01:06pm] |
Word's been put out; everything else then comes down to the waiting. Perhaps it's the potential for threat which keeps Emily close to home (closer than she's been for awhile, far more frequent); she's back, now, and bustling through the corridors -- still uncharacteristically quiet, though at least there rather than elsewhere. Skilled magicians are a hot commodity, but the ones who live at Haven -- the ones who cannot control magic which pulls at them like tides, too powerful and too demanding and too oil-on-water contrary -- exist in ongoing state of threat, for unskilled magicians are rough-shaped tools to the right hand (except it's usually the left hand, and its intentions are rarely well-meaning). No wonder Gryff decides to place them all in safe-houses until Haven's own protection is restored, though it's unsurprisingly strange and discomfiting when Em approaches them, and one-by-one explains 'it's just for a little while -- we'll make sure everything is taken care of before you come home'.
Liam shows on the scene, as he tends to with that weird sixth sense of knowing when he may be wanted (or needed, the two sometimes twisted about each other until there's no telling them apart). He's the conductor to their train, the cheerfully grinning sheepdog to their shattered little flock. Em tags along to ensure safe delivery, watching each and every one of them with dark eyes which see just a bit too much and faint smile which says not quite enough. Ultimately, Ophelia and Vaughn are deposited at Gray's (not the best possible pairing, but Vaughn's protests are ignored), and Liam volunteers to put Nives up at his own flat, that brick-walled place which he so rarely occupies. Em's initial attempt at starting conversation with Dom is cut short; he has his own alternatives, can look elsewhere until the church becomes Haven-proper again. As for Emily-her-own-self, well. She could go, too -- there are her parents, after all, but home is home and Em's mind is her own, so after every rusting and fractured magician has been gently set down in alternate arrangement, she circles back to wander unprotected halls as though nothing's changed.
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[04 Jun 2011|09:57pm] |
Birthdays come and gone, hers then Gryff's one after the other as though intentionally timed. Em -- spoilt child and spoilt young woman now -- ran string-calloused fingers across offerings left for Her Special Day, all appreciation and vague contemplative half-smile, winding semi-serpentine thing. Another year older, another year wiser (or something like that), another year of carving her own funny little path in a miniature world which she had some sort of control over. Gryff's birthday ('How old are you?' asked what felt like a hundred years prior, and of course he'd only offered a blank stare in return.) was downplayed and all comparative low-key, just another day of tea and work and perhaps a late evening adagio, the one coaxed out from violin and violinist when Haven's engine was at the forethought of things. (And perhaps a book on travel, a book charting all the interesting places he'd never allow himself to visit and all the places Emily thought he ought to visit anyway, and if that was a bit of half-chiding, half-sighing whimsy tucked between the practicality of new shirts -- Would he ask how she sussed out measurements? Of course he wouldn't. That was half the reason she did it. -- then what of it?)
So the birthdays are gone for another year, and that leaves them with a summer full of broken magicians trying to put their cracked glass selves back together. Em's comfortably sprawling hand fills Library page in that easy way which goes hand in hand with woman-lounging-in-bed, all bare feet and languidness and chewing on the end of her pen.
I forget. Are these journals for profound words of wisdom, trading incantations, or grocery lists?
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