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renferretMouse, armed with many, many ominous dreams, goes to share her suspicions with Jacinta.
While the edges of the bawn remain untouched, and the brambles even encouraged in their growth, some of the paths are beginning to be a bit more refined, and travel between the caern and some of the more important locations is no longer quite the chore it had become.
Jacinta works at the edge of what remains of the Story Tree clearing, continuing to bury the closest of the vines.
A howl goes up, not too far away, and recognizable as First-Strike's. ~I am looking for Tempest's Wake!~ The howl itself seems to carry a note of urgency and worry.
The moment it takes for the Warder to shift is all the time before her answer. ~By the tree! The path is easiest from the caern!~
While she didn't sound /too/ distant, as far as wolf howls go, it does take First-Strike a very long time to reach the Story Tree, likely because she took Jacinta's advice and had to circle around a bit. Eventually--a long eventually--her peculiar lupus form can be seen trotting through the path that has been made, pushing here and there when it gets a little too thick. Her body language matches the sound of her howl--urgent, and worried, and, inexplicably, with a note of unspecific mourning, as if she were just generally feeling terribly sad about something. More noticeable, as she draws close, is a strange, fresh scar with a jagged outline, visible through her chest fur.
Jacinta has already returned to homid by the time the metis arrives. She tips her head to the side, rearding the scar, but then lets it pass and lifts her gaze. "Waqaa," she says with a slight dip of her head. Her own posture is filled with the tension of the moon, but seems to lack the urgency heard and seen in the other.
First-Strike appears to hesitate, and then abruptly, with a somewhat jerky motion that holds for a moment longer than necessary at her birth form, she slides to homid. One hand briefly, unconsciously touches where the scar must be in this form. "I think," and she sounds breathless. "There's something...I can't call it wrong. Calling it wrong feels.../off/, but I. It's Chimera. I think it might be Chimera."
Jacinta folds her arms over her chest and fixes the Glass Walker with an intense stare. "Ca? Explain what you mean?"
Mouse rubs roughly at her eyes. They seem a little red, all told. "Okay, yeah, that made no sense. Let me...from the start. Dreams. I've been having /all kinds/ of dreams, this entire past week, every single night. Do you know the story of Noah's ark?"
Jacinta's brows rise and fall at the question, though the intense look about her doesn't change. That sense of urgency in the theurge seems to be contagious, finding its way into the Wendigo's posture, as well.
"The first dream," Mouse says, letting her arm drop, "Was kind've like that in a way. There was a woman in a silvery dress who smiled and handed me a hammer and nails. Then she pointed at a huge stack of wooden planks, and then to the sky, where the plans for a massive ship appeared. Then I was standing /on/ the ship, it was built, and I think I'd built it, and I was looking out, and I saw this massive green tide rolling towards me. But in front of it were all these animals, all sorts of animals, coming towards me, but some of them stopped and turned back, and some of them were looking over their shoulders, and some of them had to be tugged along by their companions. And I knew it was time to lower the gangplank." This all comes out in a rush of air, so the Theurge has to pause to actually breathe again. "Then the dream changed again, and I was steering the ship through a storm, and off in the distance there was this light from a silver fountain, and I steered the ship toward it." She chews briefly at the inside of her cheek. "Every Glass Walker I've talked to has had this dream. Lefty and Slug also had it, and Jacob. I asked Tim to see if he could find anyone who lived out here who'd had it, but I haven't heard back."
Jacinta listens with the same intensity, and her lip curls in distaste. "Qang'a. None I know have dreamt. We have sought them, asked Chimera, Eila, Grandmother Tree, has accessed the caern for us, and still, we have dreamt of nothing."
Mouse frowns at what Jacinta says, looking, if possible, even more troubled. "My next dream wasn't so much a dream as it was...impressions, but I've had it every night since. I think I'm dreaming about being different animals, but it's so vague I'm not sure. I have wings, or I have too many legs, or I'm searching or wandering, or looking for a place for my children. It kind've...sticks in my head when I'm awake, it's distracting. I don't know anyone else who has had that one." There's the sense about her that she's about to go on, that she has /more/, but she does pause.
The Wendigo's eyes narrow as she takes in this next piece, and after a moment, she lowers herself to crouch and her fingers dig into the soil. "Insects," she says. Pulling up a small handful of dirt, she rises again and holds it out, as if in demonstration. "Since solstice, I have noticed the decline. Fewer insects. In summer it was a blessing, to have fewer mosquitos with which to contend. And as fall became winter, more are dormant, typically. But it is more than that. As yet, their numbers are not worryingly low, but it is clear that there are fewer than there should be, and the decline increases as the strength of the Wyld grows."
Mouse's eyes narrow. "Tim said...well, he had a dream too, but first, he said he and his spirit friend were looking around the Bawn, and the small prey animal spirits were very very hard to find. His spirit friend is a snake, so that might've been part of it, but it struck me as worrying. With this kind of cover, small prey animals should be more /numerous/, not less. But he also said that the scarred forest is seeing a surge in spirits /and/ animals. Insects especially, and the bees are swarming."
Jacinta tips her gaze skyward, a frown of concentration forming. "I have not noticed such a lack. The larger animals stay away, the brambles slow their travel as they do ours. But I have not noticed the smaller animals having difficulty."
Mouse nods once. "Tim's dream. He saw a very pregnant woman, close to term, wearing orange and black, walking through a big, empty desert. He said she'd been part of a big group of people, but they were all dead and dying behind her, like they couldn't make the long journey, or maybe they'd died to make sure she and her kid made it. But she was heading to this big feast, laid out on a table, and he said that there was everything you could want or need there." She pauses. "You said insects, and then I mentioned insects, and now I'm thinking of insects with this dream too. Orange and black like the wasps, maybe? I don't know."
Pulling her gaze back to Mouse, Jacinta's eyes narrow again. "Wasps at the Winter Winds. Bees across the scar, in the forest. Perhaps. But what is the feast? What is the progeny?"
Mouse purses her lips. "I don't know, but I'm noticing themes. This one and the ark dream, a long hard journey to shelter, with a number of...people? Spirits? Left behind. That vague not-dream did have a repeating instance of looking for a place for my...for whatever animal I was thinking I was, her children." There's a slight pause, and she looks up again. "I've got three more. One's third-hand. Emma told it to me, but Owen had it."
Jacinta gestures to an area by the tree, still clear enough to sit, and then moves to the trunk, herself. "Tell me," she says, simply.
Mouse moves toward the area, and even starts to sit down, but that frenetic energy about her seems unwilling to subside enough for her to actually stay there, and she ends up pacing a little in place. "Emma told me that Owen said he'd had a dream. There were paths leading to the four winds. A blizzard, a green hill, a swamp, and a flowered plain, one in each direction. He chose to go to the hill, because he felt it was the most like Hidden Walk. There was a mouse there, and she said it talked to him. Started talking about the turning of the seasons, but then it got 'cryptic and weird'. Owen didn't really explain anything else in specific as to what it said, but /she/ thought that maybe it was the Walk, that we walk the seasons, and it'd changed before, and now it was getting ready to change again, and we were being warned about it." Something about this seems to make her more agitated, but it has the result of stopping her pacing entirely. "It felt...it felt like it /fit/, to me, when she said that, but /now/ I think she might've been really, really right. But, I'm sorry, I've got two more dreams to get through, both mine. I'm not sure I'll be able to tell you the second one, I wasn't able to tell Ishmael."
Jacinta watches the pacing, but she herself settle into a crouch once more. "Long ago, I dreamt of a crossroads, but it did not matter which way I went, they only led to death. Tell me the other dreams."
Mouse inhales, and this time, she half closes her eyes as she recites. "Two nights ago, I had a dream beyond those vague animal impressions. It was set in the city, and there was a man. I couldn't see his face, but the dream centered all around him. There were colors and patterns swirling around him, and spirits, dancing in and out of the dream. Every now and then, one of them would.../give/ something of themselves to the man. Not power, but...pieces of themselves, their nature. Like coyote liking tricks, and sphinx liking riddles, and raven liking secrets. I woke up feeling drained but not..." She pauses. "It wasn't a bad feeling. Just a tired feeling. And then, last night--" She stops, and there's a faint echo in her expression of the mourning that was visible in her wolf form, and one hand touches the place where her scar was visible, now covered by her shirt.
Jacinta watches the movement of the theurge's hand, and her eyes narrow briefly. As her gaze returns to Mouse's face, there is an expression of concern, but it disappears quickly, and nothing is spoken.
"I had to come and see you right away," Mouse says, eventually, though her words are slow and seem to have to be pulled out from a deep place inside of her. "Because of this dream. But every time I try to talk about what was in it, now and with Ishmael earlier, it's like I can't...find the words. I remember it perfectly, but I can't seem to /describe/ it." Her fingers curl against her shirt, and then drop. "I woke up with this scar. I think what Emma said about the seasons is right. The seasons turning, the Caern /turning/, changing. I...think. I think something's going to happen to Chimera. I think it's not something we can stop, and maybe it's something that we /shouldn't/ stop, that it's...that it's another season. And it's going to change very soon, maybe with the actual seasons. But I think she's...I think we're losing her." And /now/ that mourning, while still only faintly expressed in her face, is quite clear in her voice.
"Losing her," Jacinta says, and though there may be a prompt in those words to speak more, they lack the intonation of a question.
Mouse seems to struggle even more with the words now. "I think...she was speaking. I think it was her in the dream. There were things that...that." Her voice trails off. "I'm sorry, I'm trying, I can see it in my head, I just can't--" She swipes her arm roughly across her face, eyes narrowing. "I think Chimera was telling me that she was, that her time, her /season/, was ending." That sentence alone seems to have exhausted her. The tips of her fingers are shaking slightly. "But this might all be sleep-deprived crazy-theory. I /hope/ so. I just feel like it...isn't."
"Qang'a," Jacinta says as she rises. "It fits with my dream from long ago. Each way from the crossroads was a different season, but at each season lay only death." She frowns, and juts her chin toward the metis. "Let me see your scar."
Mouse straightens, and then bulks up into crinos. This shift is much smoother than the one from before, though her agitation and worry are more pronounced than ever. The scar is there, just over her heart, raised and with a jagged outline, and roughly the size of a palm (in this form, probably a crinos Garou's palm).
Jacinta moves closer, to look, to touch, to prod at the edges with a finger. "In the dream, did you see what injured you?"
First-Strike doesn't seem to have any objection to Jacinta's investigation, and her question receives an immediate, ~Yes.~
"What was it?" The Wendigo's question is flat, and her gaze remains on the scar, as her point of study.
First-Strike closes her eyes and breathes deeply. Again her answer seems to take a long, long time to come, and the two words that do come seem to drain her entirely. ~Mirror glass.~
Jacinta takes a step back, looking from the scar to the much taller crinos's face. "How did it come to injure you?" With the moon and the topic both weighing on her, the sound of her voice takes on the overtones of strain. Still, her outward appearance remains, if not calm, at least collected.
First-Strike tries, several times, to answer that question, but she seems to have reached the edge of her ability to do so. She makes a fist, clenching and unclenching her fingers several times, as if she were pantomiming something only she knows. Frustrated, the Walker abruptly shifts down again, digs into one pocket, and produces the small compact mirror she uses for Umbral travel. She opens it, then turns it toward Jacinta, so that the Wendigo can see her own reflection in the tiny handheld mirror.
Jacinta looks once to the metis, and then to the mirror, and though her hand moves to her sealskin bag, she makes no objection. Finding her reflection in the other's mirror, she slips through the gauntlet with little difficulty.
Mouse follows through very shortly, though she's looking a little sheepish. "Not quite what I meant. I'm sorry, this is so ridiculous. It's like I just. Can't. But. /This/." She holds up the mirror again, and this time she looks into it, though she doesn't cross over again. "I'm trying to answer."
Jacinta tips her head to the side in a very wolf-like gesture of confusion. "Crossing? In crossing, the mirror injured you?"
Mouse shakes her head. "No, I. No. Not in crossing. There was no crossing." She holds the compact out from her body now. "But if I dropped this. Or maybe if I threw it, really hard."
Again, or perhaps still, the Wendigo appears confused. "The mirror broke, and injured you?"
Mouse wets her lips. "If I were to throw this very very hard, glass would go everywhere. It might cut someone."
"In your dream, shards of glass were flying. You were alone?" Jacinta studies the metis, as though looking for some other sign of injury, something other than the new scar she bears.
Mouse seems untouched, apart from the scar (which is, once more, covered by her shirt). She gives Jacinta an apologetic look, but doesn't seem able to bring up any more answers, or non-answers. She closes the compact with a quiet snap.
Jacinta walks a circle around Mouse, gesturing for her to still. With each step, she studies the Glass Walker, until at last she comes around to her front, again. "What holds your tongue?"
"I don't know," Mouse says, sounding equal parts frustrated and exhausted. "Trying to talk about it directly is impossible. Trying to talk about it IN-directly is nearly impossible. Even describing what I think it means is...very tiring. None of the other dreams have given me this problem."
Jacinta frowns. "If you were not angalkuq, I would tell you to seek one." Finally, she turns her gaze from the metis to look around them at the wyld growth.
Mouse's lips twitch upward for half a moment. Brief, sheepish, apologetic. "That first dream, with the ark? I thought it might mean the spirits. Back when that drug mess was going on in the city, and the Harbor Park glade was being woven over by wasp banes, there was talk of moving what spirits we could from there to the bawn. I thought it might mean the reverse, because only city Garou have had the dream, that I know of, and because the silver fountain made me think of the Glade. But now I'm...I don't know if it was spirits. Or /just/ about spirits. With all of the rest of this, it might mean us too. The Garou out here."
"What message does it send?" Jacinta asks. "That we should harbor the spirits elsewhere, and leave the bawn? Or that we should fight to defend them, here?"
Mouse's eyes narrow, her expression turning thoughtful. "I think we're being told that something is coming. Something large, something inevitable. The city Garou should be ready, be prepared, to provide shelter from...from whatever it turns out to be. And for whoever it turns out needs shelter. The spirits. Or Garou. If we do this, then we'll ride out the storm...or in Tim's dream, maybe we'll cross the vast desert, and at the end of whatever this troubled time is going to be, then there will be something bright. Something different from what we have now, maybe, but something that we need, and will be looking for." She runs a hand over her face. "I think the seasons are turning, and we can't stop it. But we can prepare for it."
Some more of luna's gift seems visible in the ahroun, and her jaws snap shut. "Then we must learn more. For what do we prepare? In the turning of the seasons, preparing for winter is different from preparing for summer, and doing the one will lead only to disaster if it is the other that comes."
Mouse nods slightly, in silent agreement. For the moment, she seems to have run out of words entirely, and her tiredness is all the more pronounced.
Jacinta again watches Mouse for a long while before she speaks. "I wish to speak with Chimera," she says, rather suddenly, and then watches the Glass Walker for her reactions.
Mouse nods again. She's still radiating exhaustion, but there's a flicker of something in her eyes at this announcement. "It's definitely worth a try."
While the edges of the bawn remain untouched, and the brambles even encouraged in their growth, some of the paths are beginning to be a bit more refined, and travel between the caern and some of the more important locations is no longer quite the chore it had become.
Jacinta works at the edge of what remains of the Story Tree clearing, continuing to bury the closest of the vines.
A howl goes up, not too far away, and recognizable as First-Strike's. ~I am looking for Tempest's Wake!~ The howl itself seems to carry a note of urgency and worry.
The moment it takes for the Warder to shift is all the time before her answer. ~By the tree! The path is easiest from the caern!~
While she didn't sound /too/ distant, as far as wolf howls go, it does take First-Strike a very long time to reach the Story Tree, likely because she took Jacinta's advice and had to circle around a bit. Eventually--a long eventually--her peculiar lupus form can be seen trotting through the path that has been made, pushing here and there when it gets a little too thick. Her body language matches the sound of her howl--urgent, and worried, and, inexplicably, with a note of unspecific mourning, as if she were just generally feeling terribly sad about something. More noticeable, as she draws close, is a strange, fresh scar with a jagged outline, visible through her chest fur.
Jacinta has already returned to homid by the time the metis arrives. She tips her head to the side, rearding the scar, but then lets it pass and lifts her gaze. "Waqaa," she says with a slight dip of her head. Her own posture is filled with the tension of the moon, but seems to lack the urgency heard and seen in the other.
First-Strike appears to hesitate, and then abruptly, with a somewhat jerky motion that holds for a moment longer than necessary at her birth form, she slides to homid. One hand briefly, unconsciously touches where the scar must be in this form. "I think," and she sounds breathless. "There's something...I can't call it wrong. Calling it wrong feels.../off/, but I. It's Chimera. I think it might be Chimera."
Jacinta folds her arms over her chest and fixes the Glass Walker with an intense stare. "Ca? Explain what you mean?"
Mouse rubs roughly at her eyes. They seem a little red, all told. "Okay, yeah, that made no sense. Let me...from the start. Dreams. I've been having /all kinds/ of dreams, this entire past week, every single night. Do you know the story of Noah's ark?"
Jacinta's brows rise and fall at the question, though the intense look about her doesn't change. That sense of urgency in the theurge seems to be contagious, finding its way into the Wendigo's posture, as well.
"The first dream," Mouse says, letting her arm drop, "Was kind've like that in a way. There was a woman in a silvery dress who smiled and handed me a hammer and nails. Then she pointed at a huge stack of wooden planks, and then to the sky, where the plans for a massive ship appeared. Then I was standing /on/ the ship, it was built, and I think I'd built it, and I was looking out, and I saw this massive green tide rolling towards me. But in front of it were all these animals, all sorts of animals, coming towards me, but some of them stopped and turned back, and some of them were looking over their shoulders, and some of them had to be tugged along by their companions. And I knew it was time to lower the gangplank." This all comes out in a rush of air, so the Theurge has to pause to actually breathe again. "Then the dream changed again, and I was steering the ship through a storm, and off in the distance there was this light from a silver fountain, and I steered the ship toward it." She chews briefly at the inside of her cheek. "Every Glass Walker I've talked to has had this dream. Lefty and Slug also had it, and Jacob. I asked Tim to see if he could find anyone who lived out here who'd had it, but I haven't heard back."
Jacinta listens with the same intensity, and her lip curls in distaste. "Qang'a. None I know have dreamt. We have sought them, asked Chimera, Eila, Grandmother Tree, has accessed the caern for us, and still, we have dreamt of nothing."
Mouse frowns at what Jacinta says, looking, if possible, even more troubled. "My next dream wasn't so much a dream as it was...impressions, but I've had it every night since. I think I'm dreaming about being different animals, but it's so vague I'm not sure. I have wings, or I have too many legs, or I'm searching or wandering, or looking for a place for my children. It kind've...sticks in my head when I'm awake, it's distracting. I don't know anyone else who has had that one." There's the sense about her that she's about to go on, that she has /more/, but she does pause.
The Wendigo's eyes narrow as she takes in this next piece, and after a moment, she lowers herself to crouch and her fingers dig into the soil. "Insects," she says. Pulling up a small handful of dirt, she rises again and holds it out, as if in demonstration. "Since solstice, I have noticed the decline. Fewer insects. In summer it was a blessing, to have fewer mosquitos with which to contend. And as fall became winter, more are dormant, typically. But it is more than that. As yet, their numbers are not worryingly low, but it is clear that there are fewer than there should be, and the decline increases as the strength of the Wyld grows."
Mouse's eyes narrow. "Tim said...well, he had a dream too, but first, he said he and his spirit friend were looking around the Bawn, and the small prey animal spirits were very very hard to find. His spirit friend is a snake, so that might've been part of it, but it struck me as worrying. With this kind of cover, small prey animals should be more /numerous/, not less. But he also said that the scarred forest is seeing a surge in spirits /and/ animals. Insects especially, and the bees are swarming."
Jacinta tips her gaze skyward, a frown of concentration forming. "I have not noticed such a lack. The larger animals stay away, the brambles slow their travel as they do ours. But I have not noticed the smaller animals having difficulty."
Mouse nods once. "Tim's dream. He saw a very pregnant woman, close to term, wearing orange and black, walking through a big, empty desert. He said she'd been part of a big group of people, but they were all dead and dying behind her, like they couldn't make the long journey, or maybe they'd died to make sure she and her kid made it. But she was heading to this big feast, laid out on a table, and he said that there was everything you could want or need there." She pauses. "You said insects, and then I mentioned insects, and now I'm thinking of insects with this dream too. Orange and black like the wasps, maybe? I don't know."
Pulling her gaze back to Mouse, Jacinta's eyes narrow again. "Wasps at the Winter Winds. Bees across the scar, in the forest. Perhaps. But what is the feast? What is the progeny?"
Mouse purses her lips. "I don't know, but I'm noticing themes. This one and the ark dream, a long hard journey to shelter, with a number of...people? Spirits? Left behind. That vague not-dream did have a repeating instance of looking for a place for my...for whatever animal I was thinking I was, her children." There's a slight pause, and she looks up again. "I've got three more. One's third-hand. Emma told it to me, but Owen had it."
Jacinta gestures to an area by the tree, still clear enough to sit, and then moves to the trunk, herself. "Tell me," she says, simply.
Mouse moves toward the area, and even starts to sit down, but that frenetic energy about her seems unwilling to subside enough for her to actually stay there, and she ends up pacing a little in place. "Emma told me that Owen said he'd had a dream. There were paths leading to the four winds. A blizzard, a green hill, a swamp, and a flowered plain, one in each direction. He chose to go to the hill, because he felt it was the most like Hidden Walk. There was a mouse there, and she said it talked to him. Started talking about the turning of the seasons, but then it got 'cryptic and weird'. Owen didn't really explain anything else in specific as to what it said, but /she/ thought that maybe it was the Walk, that we walk the seasons, and it'd changed before, and now it was getting ready to change again, and we were being warned about it." Something about this seems to make her more agitated, but it has the result of stopping her pacing entirely. "It felt...it felt like it /fit/, to me, when she said that, but /now/ I think she might've been really, really right. But, I'm sorry, I've got two more dreams to get through, both mine. I'm not sure I'll be able to tell you the second one, I wasn't able to tell Ishmael."
Jacinta watches the pacing, but she herself settle into a crouch once more. "Long ago, I dreamt of a crossroads, but it did not matter which way I went, they only led to death. Tell me the other dreams."
Mouse inhales, and this time, she half closes her eyes as she recites. "Two nights ago, I had a dream beyond those vague animal impressions. It was set in the city, and there was a man. I couldn't see his face, but the dream centered all around him. There were colors and patterns swirling around him, and spirits, dancing in and out of the dream. Every now and then, one of them would.../give/ something of themselves to the man. Not power, but...pieces of themselves, their nature. Like coyote liking tricks, and sphinx liking riddles, and raven liking secrets. I woke up feeling drained but not..." She pauses. "It wasn't a bad feeling. Just a tired feeling. And then, last night--" She stops, and there's a faint echo in her expression of the mourning that was visible in her wolf form, and one hand touches the place where her scar was visible, now covered by her shirt.
Jacinta watches the movement of the theurge's hand, and her eyes narrow briefly. As her gaze returns to Mouse's face, there is an expression of concern, but it disappears quickly, and nothing is spoken.
"I had to come and see you right away," Mouse says, eventually, though her words are slow and seem to have to be pulled out from a deep place inside of her. "Because of this dream. But every time I try to talk about what was in it, now and with Ishmael earlier, it's like I can't...find the words. I remember it perfectly, but I can't seem to /describe/ it." Her fingers curl against her shirt, and then drop. "I woke up with this scar. I think what Emma said about the seasons is right. The seasons turning, the Caern /turning/, changing. I...think. I think something's going to happen to Chimera. I think it's not something we can stop, and maybe it's something that we /shouldn't/ stop, that it's...that it's another season. And it's going to change very soon, maybe with the actual seasons. But I think she's...I think we're losing her." And /now/ that mourning, while still only faintly expressed in her face, is quite clear in her voice.
"Losing her," Jacinta says, and though there may be a prompt in those words to speak more, they lack the intonation of a question.
Mouse seems to struggle even more with the words now. "I think...she was speaking. I think it was her in the dream. There were things that...that." Her voice trails off. "I'm sorry, I'm trying, I can see it in my head, I just can't--" She swipes her arm roughly across her face, eyes narrowing. "I think Chimera was telling me that she was, that her time, her /season/, was ending." That sentence alone seems to have exhausted her. The tips of her fingers are shaking slightly. "But this might all be sleep-deprived crazy-theory. I /hope/ so. I just feel like it...isn't."
"Qang'a," Jacinta says as she rises. "It fits with my dream from long ago. Each way from the crossroads was a different season, but at each season lay only death." She frowns, and juts her chin toward the metis. "Let me see your scar."
Mouse straightens, and then bulks up into crinos. This shift is much smoother than the one from before, though her agitation and worry are more pronounced than ever. The scar is there, just over her heart, raised and with a jagged outline, and roughly the size of a palm (in this form, probably a crinos Garou's palm).
Jacinta moves closer, to look, to touch, to prod at the edges with a finger. "In the dream, did you see what injured you?"
First-Strike doesn't seem to have any objection to Jacinta's investigation, and her question receives an immediate, ~Yes.~
"What was it?" The Wendigo's question is flat, and her gaze remains on the scar, as her point of study.
First-Strike closes her eyes and breathes deeply. Again her answer seems to take a long, long time to come, and the two words that do come seem to drain her entirely. ~Mirror glass.~
Jacinta takes a step back, looking from the scar to the much taller crinos's face. "How did it come to injure you?" With the moon and the topic both weighing on her, the sound of her voice takes on the overtones of strain. Still, her outward appearance remains, if not calm, at least collected.
First-Strike tries, several times, to answer that question, but she seems to have reached the edge of her ability to do so. She makes a fist, clenching and unclenching her fingers several times, as if she were pantomiming something only she knows. Frustrated, the Walker abruptly shifts down again, digs into one pocket, and produces the small compact mirror she uses for Umbral travel. She opens it, then turns it toward Jacinta, so that the Wendigo can see her own reflection in the tiny handheld mirror.
Jacinta looks once to the metis, and then to the mirror, and though her hand moves to her sealskin bag, she makes no objection. Finding her reflection in the other's mirror, she slips through the gauntlet with little difficulty.
Mouse follows through very shortly, though she's looking a little sheepish. "Not quite what I meant. I'm sorry, this is so ridiculous. It's like I just. Can't. But. /This/." She holds up the mirror again, and this time she looks into it, though she doesn't cross over again. "I'm trying to answer."
Jacinta tips her head to the side in a very wolf-like gesture of confusion. "Crossing? In crossing, the mirror injured you?"
Mouse shakes her head. "No, I. No. Not in crossing. There was no crossing." She holds the compact out from her body now. "But if I dropped this. Or maybe if I threw it, really hard."
Again, or perhaps still, the Wendigo appears confused. "The mirror broke, and injured you?"
Mouse wets her lips. "If I were to throw this very very hard, glass would go everywhere. It might cut someone."
"In your dream, shards of glass were flying. You were alone?" Jacinta studies the metis, as though looking for some other sign of injury, something other than the new scar she bears.
Mouse seems untouched, apart from the scar (which is, once more, covered by her shirt). She gives Jacinta an apologetic look, but doesn't seem able to bring up any more answers, or non-answers. She closes the compact with a quiet snap.
Jacinta walks a circle around Mouse, gesturing for her to still. With each step, she studies the Glass Walker, until at last she comes around to her front, again. "What holds your tongue?"
"I don't know," Mouse says, sounding equal parts frustrated and exhausted. "Trying to talk about it directly is impossible. Trying to talk about it IN-directly is nearly impossible. Even describing what I think it means is...very tiring. None of the other dreams have given me this problem."
Jacinta frowns. "If you were not angalkuq, I would tell you to seek one." Finally, she turns her gaze from the metis to look around them at the wyld growth.
Mouse's lips twitch upward for half a moment. Brief, sheepish, apologetic. "That first dream, with the ark? I thought it might mean the spirits. Back when that drug mess was going on in the city, and the Harbor Park glade was being woven over by wasp banes, there was talk of moving what spirits we could from there to the bawn. I thought it might mean the reverse, because only city Garou have had the dream, that I know of, and because the silver fountain made me think of the Glade. But now I'm...I don't know if it was spirits. Or /just/ about spirits. With all of the rest of this, it might mean us too. The Garou out here."
"What message does it send?" Jacinta asks. "That we should harbor the spirits elsewhere, and leave the bawn? Or that we should fight to defend them, here?"
Mouse's eyes narrow, her expression turning thoughtful. "I think we're being told that something is coming. Something large, something inevitable. The city Garou should be ready, be prepared, to provide shelter from...from whatever it turns out to be. And for whoever it turns out needs shelter. The spirits. Or Garou. If we do this, then we'll ride out the storm...or in Tim's dream, maybe we'll cross the vast desert, and at the end of whatever this troubled time is going to be, then there will be something bright. Something different from what we have now, maybe, but something that we need, and will be looking for." She runs a hand over her face. "I think the seasons are turning, and we can't stop it. But we can prepare for it."
Some more of luna's gift seems visible in the ahroun, and her jaws snap shut. "Then we must learn more. For what do we prepare? In the turning of the seasons, preparing for winter is different from preparing for summer, and doing the one will lead only to disaster if it is the other that comes."
Mouse nods slightly, in silent agreement. For the moment, she seems to have run out of words entirely, and her tiredness is all the more pronounced.
Jacinta again watches Mouse for a long while before she speaks. "I wish to speak with Chimera," she says, rather suddenly, and then watches the Glass Walker for her reactions.
Mouse nods again. She's still radiating exhaustion, but there's a flicker of something in her eyes at this announcement. "It's definitely worth a try."
