[Samhain] Getting In Touch

Something about a Monday? The Beast knew it was not Wednesday. That was one of the King's things. Odin's Day. Mercredi. Mercury's Day. The God of Messages. The day for receiving messages. The pattern made a roundabout sort of sense.

From how Scorpio was framing the situation, Gavin was learning there were other patterns to each of the days. Apparently Mondays had to go through a filter of feelings. Something to be looked at on another day.

He had just asked for a King's time and had his attention right now. All that darkness and the weight of embodiment of what was Autumnal Authority was waiting to hear about his 'worries.' Scorpio caught a bit of side eye at giving him twelve wonderous seconds of warning.

"Yes sire," the Beast nervously shuffled trying to find a position where he might feel slightly more comfortable talking to the depths bearing Fear's crown.

"I will give you some context and magnitude for my worries first, if you will." He had found no better position and a knot started to form in his throat while trying to formulate putting his report into the form of worries and anxiety. The King was definitely helping in that regard.

"I foresaw the failure of one of the Emerald Court's rites of renewal, briefly before it happened. It ended up being I had a hand in how it came to fail. While I'm not the authority behind the decisions that led to it, I feel, to a degree, responsible for the outcome. That has weighed on me. The tipping of the one domino has led to another and I fear more to come. I have since spent much of my time since trying to right the outcome or stop the harm from spreading further."

"Following that fear, tonight I indebted myself to the Dollmaker to look behind the curtain. With the guidance of three Spring Courtiers I set out to interpret their magics through witnessing precisely how they failed and to which debts or obligations their failure could be attributed." He scanned the space beneath the spark of the Crown and at the toothy mask looking for any sign of reaction. Presumable the King was waiting for the context to stop and the request for guidance to start before moving on it. 

Gavin dropped all effort to contain how the terrible insight was making him feel. "I have seen so much. The link between the failure of Spring's healing, the ritual, and that court's contribution to the Wards that protects us all, how it has weakened, and so much in between that I don't yet understand."

"I think I have seen what you might use to fix the failure. I somehow feel through the rustling leaves and their whispered secrets that only yourself or the Winter Monarch are capable of," he paused to feel out the correctness of the next word. It felt unbelievably strange and yet ominously right. "Writing ... on the fabric of the world in the necessary way." If he stopped there, it would have simply been a report with his feelings interlaced throughout. Today was Monday, not Wednesday.

Stumbling for a moment he finished with a request that fit Scorpio's guidance, "It feels like I have answers to questions I don't know how to ask. That to speak of them is to be disbelieved. I worry that I will forget what I have learned before I can interpret it and pass it along. I am oathbound to help another today and at some risk. How do I contain this fear knowing what I've learned might be lost before it can help the Freehold? It overwhelms."   

Right now, the fear of the Leaden Mirror's chosen avatar was starting to creep above his worry about forgetting how to help everyone. 

Gavin didn't think they wanted something for nothing precisely, that was simply how Samedi was seeing their actions. He estimated the price that was asked was high and any decent person would balk at the asking of it. It was more that there wasn't any lead up or common understanding why the price was that high or why the price was what it was. The people asked to pay it had no say in the negotiation, the terms were the terms and offered no explanation. Autumn's price was nothing to scoff at either. There was plenty of blood on Gavin's hands for his part in its blessings. The selection of Autumn's sacrifices on the face of it were far more palatable though than Spring's gaggle of innocents offered up to the block. 

He waited a respectful amount of time for the gravity of the King's impassioned narrative to land, thoughtfully considering how to approach this obvious sore spot. 

"How many Emerald courtiers joined in the Ashen Hunt despite their monarch's prior proclamation?" The Beast asked rhetorically. An attempt to soften the hard edges of the binary metaphor was in the works.  

He needed to get the King to see there was an opportunity to bridge the differences of the old and new to some degree. It might be a battle for inches or miles, but he was going to try.

"If they were all so unwilling to pay any price whatsoever for a thing, I would not have expected them to have done so in such numbers."

"To me it seems there is a perceived difference in the prices being paid between the myriad seasonal rituals. In this case one example is acceptable and the other is not, to the same participants." Even if Saturday was locked onto the 'Heroes and Villains' narrative, he couldn't ignore the logic could he? Not all deals were created equally. 

"Were it not for the Emerald secrets shared and the whispers of the falling leaves, I would have doubted all understanding that I have now of the magics spun together as they are. From the tiny glimpse of the broader fabric I was able to glean that you might be able to author what the price is for their part in it. Though I do not presume that task to be simple or free of cost itself, the possibility carries some hope." The tired King, Gavin imagined, would at the very least hope to not be tired any longer.

"Would it also not be expected that a price selected by the current cadre of Spring nobility would be more willingly be paid than that set by a past group they feel disconnected from or did not fully understand?" Fear often flourished when things were not communicated and misunderstandings grew in place. That kind of fear was destructive and needed to be managed.

"Three of them already are seeking answers from one such as me. One of them from among the middle nobility. I think there may be more willingness than implied by what you've voiced tonight." He was treading ever so carefully to not speak definitively about what was or was not going on inside the King's mind. He had seen what presumption had wrought previously with the younger Autumn courtiers and did not need any progress to be destroyed by such a misstep.

"Spring clearly doesn't want any more beets. Perhaps they would happily grow potatoes, or carrots, or cabbages if given the choice." He glanced over at Scorpio hoping she looked like she got what he was trying to accomplish here. Gavin's anxiety from being the focus of Papa Saturday's attention had risen substantially as the Beast increasingly reluctantly pressed his agenda. His mania had made him as verbose as ever and was opening a vulnerability to turn into nervous repetitive chatter.

"Perhaps there is something I could do to move things in a mutually favourable direction." He had to offer something for something, or it would be clear he hadn't heard the importance of what was said.

It wasn't semantics to the people asked to carry it out or those that had to give the order to make it happen. It was a repugnant choice to have to make.

Gavin agreed with the Spring monarch on that front, to a degree, but also felt satisfied with the work of the Ashen Hunt as well. Hunting monsters and threats to the Freehold was vastly more appealing than fostering hope and potential into a small garden of people and then snipping off those lives solely for our own benefit. 

The emotional resonance in the Ogre's words had given the Beast insight into the monarch and his burdens. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed the role was wearing him than the other way around; or at least, it was how Samedi was acting. He sees himself as a villain: the price paid for the grand benefit of the Wards and the lives the other Lost get to enjoy, ignorant of the grim truth. 


It seemed he expected others to behave true to themselves, ignorant to the roiling depths beyond, and then simultaneously begrudges them for living that way when they have no reason to think other than that way. Grand object lessons put to all comers who might look beneath the surface continually discouraging many who would try. Why would there be much understanding for the monarch in this bed he made for himself and so many others?

From the sounds of things, there was a troubling trajectory in the implications behind the King's words: the Wards were going to fail or be brought down by ignorant action such as how Gavin had contributed by stopping the Spring sacrifices. What else could have been meant by living as they have before? The only 'before' relevant to this conversation was 'before the Wards.'

"You have done plenty in your adopted roles. I expect duty is quite satisfied." Duty wasn't everything though.

"There is more to someone than the hats they choose to wear, isn't there? They do much to define, and each has their own weight, but they never fully contain the whole." He wasn't going to be able to break the narrative, but he could wrestle to create more room for something else to fit.

"Even in a story, there is room between the written lines and in the margins for notes and amendments." The King had started with the parallel of archetypes in a story, the young courtier worked within the confines of the broader metaphor.

"Would you be satisfied with many lifetimes' work and sacrifice coming undone through ignorance and untrained exploration? Then since the Wards have caused many to become complacent and ill prepared for what it is like outside the walls, what would the legacy be?" The Ogre may not care what others' think of him, but Gavin knew there was one voice it was difficult to ignore, one's own. The voice unconstrained by the crown. The voice when not the villain. The Beast's tone was rhetorical so as to not invite a response before he could deliver his point.

"My suggestion, though I am unsure of the weight of the offer in the whole cosmic balance, would be to add a clause if possible. Leave them the choice they already had, and let them choose to give up a mortal lifetime's work as an alternative. Built an empire of connections and wealth from nothing? Gone. Start fresh under a new identity. It would be like shedding a life in a different manner: catering to their need for renewal and moving on from the past and building anew. Not only that, it allows them to place the price on themselves, if they choose it, and it helps to systemically break complacency as they need to find their footing over again, or do the other hard thing." There was a spirit behind the Ogre's principle that Gavin was trying to tie into here. They don't know the price, or how it came to be, but the weight of the scales could be placed on them in a way they could understand and choose for themselves. "It's poetic too, I think."

"But I am not nobility of the Emerald Court, and do not speak for them with any authority. This is the intuition of what I am speaking through the lens of limited but growing understanding, yeah." It would be fraught with obscene hubris to push for this as the solution without having done any consultation to find what they'd be up for. This was simply the suggestion that might get Papa Saturday to care and see a way forward.