Tag: Helal x 9

The bite of the cider faded only slowly on Khaeris’s tongue. She’d maybe spiked it a little too much. … Maybe. Ha, oh well! No one to know but herself and Pollux. She smirked and took another full drink, holding it in her mouth and picking out flavors as she looked over the quiet Bazaar. People were at home celebrating and sharing food, occasionally people would walk past. She knew them some, Pollux’s neighbors, and they would wave and wish her a happy holiday. Contentment tried to cocoon her. She tried not to fight it.

It was a good day. It had been a small meal, just the two of them, but she was happy for that, too. Pollux had been able to be home more the last month or so. But she didn’t plan on him being there. Even...

The facility in the center of Nazmir was massive. Khaeris eyed it. There would be no denying the thrill of it. And she'd heard it was mostly cleared out now. Mostly.

She rolled her lips and watched as one of those horrible blood ticks crawled out from under a half-burned hut. Clearly it was holing up there, now that the blood trolls were eradicated in the area. Or maybe it had lived there before? She wrinkled her nose. What did they even feed on to get that big? It turned her stomach just to think about it. One of the huge brutosaurs maybe?

Her raptor clicked his tongue in agitation and Khaeris agreed. Her hand rested on his powerful neck, caressing to soothe. They turned away from Uldir and kept to the road heading east. To Torga....

It had felt a bit like a rebirth, coming back to this time. She had been gone for over six months. Vanished. Poof. As good as dead. It hadn't been hell, but her time away certainly hadn't been heaven. She had not been sure it was going to be a purgatory, even with the insistence everyone had tried to reassure her with in the months prior to her correction. But here she was, given the second chance to live in her second chance time.

Habitually, lost in thought, Khaeris ran a fingertip at a small imperfection on her upper arm. There was no scar--just a small injection and then it was done. But there was a slight rise in the subcutaneous tissues. The small tracker was there. Pollux had, apparently, been carrying it with him constantly, in...

(( From a prompt on Tumblr ))

Khaeris slid onto the bench under her fold-down table. Her tea sat nearby, steam dancing and swaying as it tempted, trying to pull her focus from the envelope in her fingers. As much as she loved her tea, the envelope held her rapt.

This was the 135th envelope.

On her first day back in this timeline she had opened a flurry of them. She had been crying and her heart had swelled with emotions she could hardly name at the time. She opened one most mornings, savoring them now. Her heart continued to swell every time she opened one. Even now, months later. Even after reunions and hugs and more tears.

Khaeris let herself remember how displaced she’d felt that day, crossing the Bazaar toward her wagon....

It had felt like a kind of static shock. Startling. Not quite painful. But a surprise, none the less. She had jumped and so had her heart. No one looking at the scene would have understood the woman's jolt. It was quiet in the room Khaeris had been granted. Her alchemy tools were neat on the dresser top. Perhaps not the best work bench, but it was doing the job in a pinch. Mr. Hale had not minded. His generosity was evident in the superbly crafted set of tools in front of her now.

Her mind whirled with the possibilities. Her gaze fell unseeing onto her research journal. She leaned on the dresser while she thought.

No. It hadn't been true static, of course. She didn't know exactly what, but something had happened. Something she was...

Khaeris lay in a bed that wasn't her own. The sheets were rich. The rug she put her feet down on each morning was thick and soft. The curtains over the window were finely made. The window itself looked over the Court of the Sun, not the Bazaar.

Pollux hadn't come home that week. Other Pollux, not her Pollux.

Gone on a business trip. Zandalar? Had he said that? He supplied the military, he'd said, but was that what this trip was?  Maybe somewhere else. She realized should probably be ashamed she hadn't listened closely, but she wasn't ashamed. Despondency came and went in waves.

Though alone every evening, Khaeris could not be disappointed in this. He was too strange. It was both too familiar and too jarring to see his shape. His...

The blue glow of the usually steady runes strobed in her vision, through no fault of their own.

Ah. It was one of the flickering episodes. The tiny breakfast nook bench she sat on was beneath her, then not, then there, then not--and so on. For the span of about five seconds Khaeris flickered in and out of that reality. Too fast to even have her teacup tumble from where she had lifted it, but not fast enough to pretend it wasn't happening. And happening inside her vardo, where Helal had so painstakingly runed nearly every inch of walls. The episodes were getting stronger.

She reflected on the last few months. The attacks had been ramping up in both frequency and intensity. From a fraction of a second gone, beginning months ago, to...

Her wagon was not particularly accessible.

While getting into the wagon was never a problem; once inside and trying to relax it got more difficult. The prosthetics didn't come off as quickly as they did in his own home, he didn't bother taking them off at all, sometimes. Here, the steps were awkward to the loft, the water closet was too small and there wasn't much to hold onto (never mind you had to climb down the steps again). The floor bounced slightly with your steps and the furnishings were nearly an obstacle course.

The tiny space was hers, but it wasn't welcoming to him.

He hadn't complained; it wasn't like Pollux to complain. He might have been used to figuring things out, but she noticed how much more time, effort, and thought...

She didn’t know what they were called, but Khaeris ran a finger over the spiraling, sharp line of a long, thin machine screw. She pressed the pad of her finger against it for a few seconds, just  enough to be painful, before she carefully set it back down in the funny little magpie pile she’d made on the floor of his room. A few of the very precise screws, a piece of cork (what was that for?), and one of his sketches he’d made for Pyraelia’s prosthetic designs. She’d been sitting there awhile now, in the early hours of the morning, not bothering to look for the restless sleep she’d abandoned an hour ago.

They made her think of him. The strong lines of his ink sketch were his confidence in his work. The hard metal screws...