sterngaze | kenos

Liem. Good afternoon.

[... Small talk is not a specialty of hers. She thinks perhaps she should try, but. She has a question to ask, and it feels strange not just to ask it. After an uneasy pause in which she attempts to ask anything else first-]

Have you seen hide or tail recently of the war god, Set?

[She knew they were at least vaguely acquainted, but... most of the people she knows for sure have deeper bonds with the man (god) she despises, and she will not speak to them, even in a time such as this.]

Good afternoon.

[Though Liem’s mindspace has returned largely to its usual austere quality since his return to Meridian, the cracks smoothed over and the tremors calmed, it is not quite the same cool and quiet place as before. There are lit candles on the freshly-washed altars. Inside the endless maze of cathedral-like rooms in which he may be found, for once he dwells within one with… windows. A touch of light warms the pale stone within.]

Set?

[He had wanted to speak with the god, to tell him of his return to Meridian, but…]

Actually, it has been some time since he came to beat down my door. That is unlike him.

[Hayame's hoofbeats echo in the stone halls. She lingers at the edge of the light.]

Yes, Set.

["Beating down doors" is... Like him. That's not surprising.]

I take it that your last contact with him was more than a few days ago, then?

It was... before. I haven't spoken with him since before you found me in Alenroux.

[He had been avoiding those he knew, a little bit, as he'd sunk deeper into his discord bender in Highstorm. In a way, he hadn't thought that it would matter. Set had never needed his permission to seek him out before, but... he hadn't come to him. It has been a week now, and he still hasn't come.]

Has something happened to him?

[He does not know quite what the nature is of the bond that she and Set share, but he is aware that they have an agreement, and that when Set speaks of her, it is not unlike the way the god speaks of... him. Intimately; something he has claimed.]

[Hayame hesitates, because she has not ever been someone who easily admitted to being bound to anyone. Even her own brother, she had never allowed him to call her "sister" where anyone else could hear. But Liem was...]

There is a part of him that has lived in me, ever since the dryad's games.

[Ever since the bond had been forced on them, and then she had accepted it, along with the choice of a warrior swearing to dedicate herself to the god of war for as long as they occupied the same world where such things were possible.

Has something happened to him? She cannot know the specifics, but what she does know is...]

And now it does not live.

[With only a few words from Hayame, a chill sinks into him. Now it does not live, she says. He knows better than to think that Set may have simply relinquished his claim on her, so there are only two things that might mean.]

You cannot reach him at all?

[A cold wind rattles the windowpanes, and makes the candle flames gutter.]

Have you sought him in person?

[For half a moment, she had considered it. Set was fickle, and unfaithful by the standards of honor and loyalty she had been raised with. Countless times they have berated and warred work one another morals and ideals, over how to execute the goal of returning to their worlds, and countless times they have shouted and insulted and clashed, rage and passion and damage clawing to overtake the other, but when they weren’t… when they weren’t…

He had sworn he would always listen to her. He had called her his friend. He had said that only she could sever the bond between them, and no matter how frustrating and vexing… She hasn’t let go.

Which left…]

No.

[The fluttering candles make a hint of shadow dance over her face, the dark patch that covered most of the left side.]

I have looked in Springstar. I have looked in Alenroux.

[She knows he roams beyond there. But never had going to Kowloon or the Beyond swept the desert from the corner of her hearts.]

[There is silence for a moment as Liem considers this. He is not experienced enough with such things to know the difference between attempting communion with a shard-bearer who has been dissipated, and one who has vanished from Kenos altogether. He only knows that, if Set is not present to give replies to such queries, they must use other methods to find out where he has gone.]

Does he have a home that he regularly returns to?

[He must, right? Stripped as he is of his divinity, the desert god must have some place in Springstar that he retreats to when he has need of solitude.]

I can check Kowloon and Highstorm, and see if anything is amiss at his shrine. Though... I cannot think how he would have come to grief.

[Even when faced with the dangers of Ryad or the Beyond, Set seems too canny and too dangerous to be felled with nary a whisper to anyone else.]

"Regularly" is not a word I would use.

[Not for Set.]

But I spoke already to Akua, who shares her house with him. She has not seen him of late.

[It is precisely because of who he was that Hayame did not easily imagine his death. He was a god. A god of war, with power and intellect in that field, even if she found him frustratingly obtuse in others. Which means, if he is dead...

That they should be afraid of what had managed to kill him.]

... Show me where his shrine is.

[She had always done her worship in person.]

Ah, I see.

[He hadn’t known that Set had a housemate, but that does make some things simpler. At the very least, they can be certain that he hasn’t returned to his residence — assuming Akua is forthcoming about his comings and goings, which he has no reason not to expect at present.]

You haven’t seen it?

[Abruptly, Liem wonders if he has said something that he shouldn’t have. Set has seemed, to him, rather private about the shrine he’s claimed in Highstorm’s wilderness. He has never known the god to speak publicly about it, and although he’d assumed that Hayame would have been apprised of it as one of Set’s followers, he wonders just how many people besides him actually know of its existence.

But if Set didn’t want him to tell her about his shrine, he shouldn’t have disappeared without so much as a word of warning.]

It’s in Highstorm, out in the Beyond. We can visit it together; if something has actually happened to him there, it would be wiser to go with company regardless.

What reason do I have to go there when the god himself appears when I call?

[Honestly, she hadn't even properly known he'd had one... But what does she expect at this point? It felt like for everything Set told her, he withheld ten. No, a hundred. ... Two hundred.]

Then I will accompany you to the Beyond. I have never been- for what should I prepare?

[Liem has no answer to that, but he has always associated worship with physical structures. After all, prayers to Abadar are always to be done under the shelter of a roof.]

It is much like Alenroux's forests at night, so you may prepare in the same way you do when you venture there. However, we shouldn't need to travel far to reach it. Set has placed a cornerstone nearby.

[If Set did truly come to grief at his shrine, it's possible that the cornerstone was destroyed as well. But they will need to take a cornerstone to get to Highstorm regardless, so at this juncture it makes the most sense to him to try to head directly there.]

Where are you? I'll meet you at whichever cornerstone is most convenient.

[Sure, you normally worship at shrines or temples... But when the god shows up in person, it felt way less important to her to pray there when he could be physically there and listening.]

Very well.

[That is how she will prepare, then.]

I am in Alenroux. At the...

[She pauses, trying to make herself say the words that are so... alien. Ones she'd never thought she'd say, nor deserved to say, and it's just-]

At the house.

Edited 2023-07-06 02:34 (UTC)

[Ah… that makes things easy. Since Liem had placed a cornerstone nearby to make construction go more smoothly, meeting her there would be simplicity itself.]

I will find you, then.

[He has some preparations of his own to do, if they are to go into the Beyond — particularly if there is even the slightest chance that someone or something capable of killing a god could be hanging around. But, as swiftly as is reasonably possible, Liem arrives at the cornerstone that he had placed weeks earlier, imagining that it might one day be the centre of a thriving little village of its own. He is armed and dressed for ranging about the wilderness, although he was being truthful when he said they shouldn’t need to do much trekking at all. It doesn’t hurt to be prepared.]

I will be relying on your guidance.

[A statement, but in her culture it functions as both thanks and gratitude. Just as swiftly, she prepares her bow and naginata, supplies and the light leather armor she had invested in, and when Liem arrives... She is there at the cornerstone to greet him. It is still too strange, the idea of... waiting at the house? Answering a door? Perhaps it will eventually become... believable.

But first, they go to the Beyond. They go to a shrine to a foreign war god.

... One that will prove to have no trace of him.]

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