kenoscomm | communion | stargazer-focused but ota

[The gentle expression on Liem’s face says that Matt’s understanding is right on the money. He is worried, even if he’s trying not to make a fuss about it. Although he has the feeling Matt wouldn’t appreciate too much concern, maybe finding it patronizing, it seems negligent to simply avoid the subject altogether.]

I am. I don’t want to see you suffer the way the other version of you did.

[Their circuit of the Community Centre concludes, and he pushes open the door so they can emerge back into the brilliant sunshine. Even draped in shadow and cloaked beneath hat and fabric, after a year of living here, Liem still can’t help but find the double suns excessive.]

So… If you need help with something, I hope you won’t hesitate to seek it. If not from me, then from someone.

[He glances at Matt.]

But of course, you can seek it from me.

[ The word suffer slides into Matt's ear and right down to the pit of his stomach. Has he ever suffered? Apart from the way in which everyone does, the way a certain amount of pain seems to be the inheritance of an embodied, limited life? Bad things have happened to him, for sure. And the prospect of being his world's maybe-sole survivor in the face of apocalypse feels ripe for misery, even if his sharpest anguish hasn't landed yet.

Matt's clearest feeling after hearing all this, honestly, is sadness for Liem. It sounds like whatever happened to other-him, it was hard for Liem to witness. Painful. And Matt's not sure what to do with that. He can't remember the last time somebody said they were worried for him. ]

Well ... you're already helping me, [ he points out, likewise gentle. Or perhaps careful. Like he's trying to keep a ball in the air. ] Showing me the sights, helping me brainstorm income streams.

[ A pause, and Matt adds, ] I know I don't, uh, look like much. But I've been taking care of myself for a little while now. I promise I'm tougher than I look.

[Liem suspects that, regardless of Matt’s gentle reassurance, the other man doesn’t really understand where his concern is coming from, or what he’s worried about. He doesn’t know how to tell Matt that regardless of how terrible Horos was and how punishing the Regent’s hold over their people felt, a lot of the suffering he saw Matt go through seemed like it was made worse by his need to deal with it by himself. By his need to be tough, strong enough to confront his own struggles without making them someone else’s.

He knows that need intimately, after all. But he’s also familiar enough with the feeling to know that pushing isn’t likely to get him anywhere.]

I believe you.

[He pauses in the courtyard outside the Community Centre, considering while he looks at the other man. There are other things he feels vaguely like he should say to him, but he doesn’t know how to bring any of them up; so he doesn’t. Instead he asks,] Would you prefer to keep exploring, or find somewhere to sit for a while?

[ Matt wants to see every inch of this city, honestly. But he feels like he can do that on his own time. He knows his attention would be split if he tried to get the lay of the land and talk to Liem at the same time, which feels unfair to both Liem and Springstar. ]

Someplace to sit sounds nice, [ he decides. A small smile. ] I haven't even asked you my standard Shard-Bearer questions yet, so on my end, there's lots to talk about.

[ Suffer is still jangling around at the bottom of his brain, busily writing Greek tragedies, but Matt tries to push those thoughts away. At least until he can shape them into something productive, or at least probative. Also, does Liem believe him? Matt finds himself missing the way social interactions seem to work around other people marked by the Stargazer Aspect. The way inarticulate emotions will bubble to the surface and render themselves legible. ]

We’ll sit, then.

[Not here; even though there are benches outside the Community Centre, Liem would need to be literally on his last legs before he’d settle for resting outside in Springstar’s double sun. Instead, he leads them through the plaza and towards a cafe, so they might head inside and into the shade.]

What are your standard shard-bearer questions?

[Liem’s tone is conversational. If he’d known Matt had a standard array of questions to offer first-thing, he might have saved the community centre tour for after. Still, they’re here now, heading for quiet and dark and coffee: three things Liem has come to appreciate highly. There’s plenty of time yet for questions now that they’re heading off the street.]

[ Matt doesn't register any surprise that they're eschewing the sunshine. The sunlight is a lot more direct here than he's used to, and plenty of people back home wouldn't want to be out in it for all kinds of reasons. Photosensitivity, vampirism, worries about sunburn or skin cancer. Plus, he's secretly rooting for someplace to grab coffee, even though there was no need to keep that a secret and he could've just asked. ]

Well ... only one of the questions is standard, [ he admits. ] It's important, though. I've been asking everyone why they chose the way they did.

Ah.

[That would be one of the most pressing, he supposes. It wasn’t really one that he had occasion to ask, since he arrived with the very first group of this current generation. There were no senior shard-bearers to help him along: only his peers, working through their own decisions in their various ways, and the leaders of each faction, who had been a little less busy in those first weeks, it seemed.]

Well… I wasn’t eager to choose either side, at first; that’s why I took a rather long time to decide. [He glances at Matt again, his look considering.] How much did the others tell you, about the place we knew you from before?

[ Matt returns Liem's gaze, trying unsuccessfully to disguise his curiosity (and a hint of fretfulness). ]

Not much, [ he says. ] That it's the same mission here as before, [ Amos ] that my performance was less than stellar. [ Silco. ] A bit of catching me up on the interpersonal side of things, how we knew each other and what we shared. [ Sebastian.

There's also the part where he lost a hand, but that seems super grim. Matt decides to at least wait until they're sitting down before he mentions that bit. ]

Edited 2024-02-06 16:49 (UTC)

[Liem isn’t exactly surprised to hear that the things Matt has learned about his time in Horos have been less than comprehensive. How would one even go about digging into all that, especially on a first meeting? But some of it is relevant to Matt’s question, so Liem can’t exactly leave it alone.

He does, however, give it just a moment, nodding and then holding the door to a cozy little coffee shop so Matt can precede him inside. They may as well get caffeine before diving into the kinds of topics that talking about Horos eventually necessitates.

Once they’ve ordered drinks and grabbed a table, he continues.]

It was quite similar, yes. You could liken the group we were a part of to Zenith, broadly speaking. But that place was different in a few significant ways, one of them being that “Zenith’s” dictator there ruled basically the entire civilized region. Another was that new shard-bearers were not given a choice of whether or not they wanted to harmonize to that side.

[ Liem is now Matt's favorite person in all of Kenos for showing him a coffee shop with chill vibes. It's stiff competition for the top spot, because Matt's met a lot of super interesting people thus far. Maybe favorite is a ranking, though, like how all dads get a #1 DAD mug.

He'd intuited that this part of the conversation wasn't going to be pleasant. But now, hearing the word "dictator," he's very glad to have a comforting beverage in hand. ]

Jesus, [ he says. ] "Not given a choice"? Like ... how, exactly?

[ He's imagining spells or spiritual possession, maybe one of those MK Ultra scenarios where supersoldiers are drafted and molded by the government. But he supposes someone could hold a gun to his head and say "harmonize to Zenith." Would it work without his fundamental cooperation, though? ]

[Liem doesn’t know who Jesus is, but he assumes this is a swear, and Matt is correct to do so. His mouth thins as he pauses, since he doesn’t want to freak Matt out, but also, Matt already went through all of this in person in another universe, so he should be able to handle it secondhand.]

Newcomers were brought to a secure location and confined there until they harmonized. They were fed a… [—he falters a little, here—] what I can only describe as “concentrated despair,” in order to reinforce the belief that their worlds were gone, and couldn’t be brought back.

[He takes a deep breath.]

For me, that was some months before we were brought here. We were all purged upon arrival, but after that… I wasn’t eager to sign up for either side, regardless of how different they might seem.

[ The language Liem uses is somewhat distancing. You could almost think he's describing something he witnessed, rather than something that happened to him. But Matt doesn't blame him. A soft horror suffuses his face, draining it of color.

His brain is quick to spin up questions and rejoinders. The semantic distinction between saving and reviving. The fact that some of the people who joined the Zenith side under extreme duress seem to have chosen it again, with less duress this time. Though that's not a mystery to him, is it? A stranger with a birds-eye view into his past might see how he and Vincent met, then Matt's choice to date him--clear-eyed, no teeth at his throat in that instant--and find it puzzling. A sign of Matt's stupidity, or naivete. He knows these things can be more complicated than they appear from the outside. ]

I can understand that. [ Quiet. ] If something was working on you before, I'd find it hard to trust that it wasn't happening again.

[ Which does make him wonder about Cyrus and Yima. He trusted so immediately that they were honest, if not necessarily perfect. ]

[Liem nods slightly, though he doesn’t know that it was necessarily distrust about the influences involved that was keeping him from pledging to either side. A large part of it was just the choice in general; he hadn’t felt like he could possibly know what was truly right, so how could he choose for either side? Especially because this time, the choice really was only his.]

It was challenging—and I didn’t know how I could discern how true either side’s position really was: Whether our worlds really were gone for good. Whether going back was truly possible.

[He folds his fingers around the plain black coffee he ordered, pensive.]

But I made promises in the world I came from, to my country and to my god—so I thought that until such a time as I found evidence against the possibility of returning home, I should give my services in support of Meridian’s cause. And here I am.

[ Matt definitely has questions about this quasi-involuntary servitude they evidently shared, things like are Amos and Silco okay and did I ever mention a guy named Vincent. But he's not sure how useful those questions are just now, and he doesn't want to poke at something so painful.

For the moment, he nods, faintly surprised that Liem wasn't sure what to believe but tucking it away for later. The mention of god and country draws a softer expression, a mingling of wistfulness and recognition. ]

A lot of people on the Meridian side seem to have that, [ he says. ] Some really concrete obligation back home. You're the first I've heard of that has one to a god, though. [ Rather than, you know ... being a god. ] I respect that. If I had a situation like that, I'm sure I'd choose the same way.

[Amos and Silco are definitely not okay, but that’s a matter for some other conversation, probably, unless Matt really wants to bring it up. Suffice to say that most of the people over in Zenith are probably not normal, but especially not the ones who came over from Horos.]

Did you not have a community where you lived, Matthew?

[The way he says it, it’s clear he doesn’t just mean a neighbourhood, or a place where Matt happened to live. He means a community that he could be a part of, that accepted him and valued his presence. Some place it would be hard to leave behind, to divest himself of.]

Ah, well-- [ Matt looks sheepish. ] I mean, I had a cohort in my program. And some of my self-perpetuating wards were showing great early results, so I was doing a lot of work on the ground where I lived, and I know a few other practitioners. It's just, the way I see it ...

I'm sure I must've told you all about this before. [ NOPE. Matt, oblivious to his failure to communicate across multiple timelines, traces the handle of his mug with a fingertip as he considers his words. ] I only learned I could use magic as a teenager, and it was ... like a light coming on for the first time. I felt so connected to everything, and everyone. I have people I've loved, and places I love, but what I feel the most strongly is like.

[ He looks up at Liem, with a crooked smile like he fully expects to be laughed out of this cafe. ]

I think there's an energy that binds us all together. Something that gave us our shape, and our desires, and it's--way, way too big to understand fully. But it's good.

[Liem remembers Matt telling him that he was lonely, and that before learning magic he’d been lost, without direction. These things do not give him confidence when he considers the situation Matt is in now. He does not trust Matt to do what is best for himself, when he is so keen to look to the world around him for a sense of purpose.]

So—your community is wherever you are, you mean. In Kenos, in your original home, or somewhere new.

[He seems a little melancholy as he says this. Even in Horos, after attuning to Kenoma’s influence, Liem had yearned desperately for the land he’d left behind. He cannot imagine ever belonging somewhere new. He hadn’t even belonged in Taldor, really—he just belonged to Abadar, and he’d been content with the knowledge that one day, when he reached Abadar’s realm in the afterlife, he’d have a place he was truly supposed to be.]

I don’t understand, though. How can you feel that way, connected to the existence you came from, and have doubts about whether it should be saved?

[Knowing him as he does, having suffered alongside him in Horos, Liem has to assume that Matt wouldn’t have come down so firmly on Kenoma’s side if he’d been able to decide for himself—but at his own level of harmonization, he can tell from looking at Matt’s shard that he also hasn’t opted to lean towards Meridian, either.]

Sort of, [ Matt agrees, though only hesitantly. ] Maybe everywhere is my community. And places that aren't even places, in the way we're used to experiencing a sense of place.

[ "Place" doesn't taste like a real word anymore, but at least Liem isn't laughing. Even if Matt's answer doesn't seem to have satisfied him.

Though Matt doesn't blame him, really: First of all, Matt has never successfully explained his view of the cosmos to another person and has long since stopped trying. Not even at 3 am when everyone's really fucked up. And second, Liem's question is one Matt's been asking himself. He puffs out a breath. Glances down into his mug for a moment, gathering his thoughts. ]

I guess, because ...

So we know we're not the first creatures to ever live on our planet. There were others before that went extinct. And that event was supposed to be really sudden--we don't know a whole lot about it, but we know that much. And before that, we don't know how the universe originated. There might've been another universe that collapsed and created our current one, there might be infinite universes that are always moving away from each other ...

I guess I'm trying to say that I don't know if it's right to bring my world back, when cataclysmic events are part of nature. My world got its start in the first place because something else made space for it. I've never done, like, necromancy or anything, but the stories about bringing things back that are gone are pretty gnarly.

[Matt’s response draws a frown from Liem—it can’t not, when he says things like I don’t know if it’s right. It inspires the same reaction as if he’d questioned whether someone should try to resuscitate a drowned person, just because they were past the point of struggling. Death is a part of life, so why try to help those on the brink of it, right?

He knows that isn’t fair, and isn’t what Matt means. He’d just hoped things would be more different with a version of him who hadn’t been steeped in Kenoma’s dogma.]

You said something similar to me in that other place, when I first arrived. [When Matt first found him, naked and still half in shock in the Champion Shrine.] Not about necromancy—you compared reality’s destruction to a forest fire that lets new life grow from the ashes.

[He hadn’t agreed with him then, either… but ultimately, he hadn’t had anywhere else to go but with him.]

What if it isn’t like that, though? What if something ripped it apart and ate the pieces, and is coming for what’s left? No bed of fertile ash: just a hungry darkness. Is that “right”?

Oh. [ Intrigued, but cautious. Matt's sensitive to rejection on points like this, and interprets anything that isn't overt assurance as faint damnation. ] Well ... I believe in that too. That at least on my world, destruction can be the necessary force that creates something new, after.

But you're right. [ About that characterization of the darkness. ] It's a lot of unknowns. And to that point, what if it's a hungry darkness looking for worlds to eat, and resetting everything just like it was in the moment before that happened--what if it puts us all in the same situation again? [ He laughs, sheepish and a little overwhelmed. ] One version of me already met you. So who's to say we haven't done this a hundred times, and haven't figured out how to break the cycle yet?

[The things Matt says come so close to making sense to Liem, and yet they keep falling short. He makes it sound like what Meridian wants is to wind the clock back, to turn back time until they get to the point before everything went wrong. Liem will admit to not having all the answers, but that has never been his impression of Meridian’s goal.]

Resurrection is not… time travel. That’s not what I’m suggesting. Before coming here, I didn’t think time travel was even possible.

[Now… he doesn’t know. The whole situation with the Iconoclast Oracle was a strange one, and he isn’t sure what to make of it. He frowns for a moment into his cup of coffee. Takes a meditative sip.]

The longer we’re here, the more I think that before we can do anything, Meridian or Zenith, we first need to defeat Oblivion. Otherwise whatever worlds we flee to, new or old, will just be consumed regardless.

[ Matt winces a bit, guiltily, for not what I'm suggesting. Most everything he says here is a hypothesis, of course. It has to be. But he can see how it sounded like he was leaping to a conclusion, and he hates when other people do that to him.

However, at the talk of defeating Oblivion, his expression sharpens curiously. ]

Okay, now that makes sense to me. [ And indeed, the maybes or apologetics that have colored his tone thus far in this conversation are absent. ] I mean, I don't know how you're defining Oblivion, but if you mean just broadly the thing that destroyed our worlds--yeah. I agree.

And what's really interesting about that goal to me is that it doesn't really require fighting each other. In fact, a war sounds like it'd get in the way.

[Lifting his coffee cup, Liem regards Matt over the rim as he sips it, considering the tenor of the other man’s musings. It’s a little interesting to see Matt trying to straddle both sides of the line here, when he’d been so firmly on the side of entropy before. Perhaps this is truer to the kind of person he was before the Kenoma’s indoctrination wormed its way into him.]

That is what I mean, yes. The way our worlds were ended, they were clearly undone by some outside force. And the things I’ve seen here have made me think it might be… if not aware, then at least a distinct entity. Like an Outer God.

[This is not a comforting thought to him, particularly because it seems unpleasantly plausible. And how does one kill an Outer God? Can it even be done?]

I don’t know why things are set up to be this way here, though. I spoke with someone who’d been here since the first Oracle War, but they were either unwilling or unable to disclose who’s set Kenos up to be this way.

[ Distinct. Aware. Matt thinks of the hungering shadows again, the ones he saw in the depthless shallow of Yima's pool. Only this time, he doesn't think of them as creatures unto themselves, but as the tips of clawed fingers. In his mind's eye, the hand extends a long way back. ]

Unwilling or unable? [ Matt frowns. He wonders if this is the person Gavial alluded to--the sketchy mage. ] Did you talk to them? I mean ...

Based on what I've been told, [ with a briefly irritated moue--hearsay! great! ] the contest has never actually been successfully completed. And even if this is some god's divine will to have us fighting for these opposing goals, I kind of feel like ...

Okay, I've been trying to explain this to people. [ A sheepish smile. ] But there's this concept in a religion where I come from called "anahata nad." It translates to "the note that strikes without the two parts touching," and it means basically that when you expand your view of the cosmos, you can see ways where things that appear to be in conflict can actually harmonize, and there's space for both. So even here, in a place that seems really driven by heightened polarity ... why shouldn't there be a third way?

Well… When I say “spoke with”, I mean over communion. I have not been unlucky enough to meet this person face to face.

[As far as Liem knows, everyone who’s actually seen Aetós in person had terrible experiments done to them. He only knows what they look like because of the memories of one such person.]

This person, Aetós, told me that when a resolution cannot be reached, the shard-bearers are all “purged” by… who or whatever governs Kenos. They said that they alone of the first generation were able to discover it, but that they could not say why information on these past, failed generations is so lacking. I am fairly certain their silence must be part of whatever bargain they struck in order to be allowed to continue existing here.

[Does that make Matt’s theory more likely, or less? Liem couldn’t say, but it certainly adds an extra sense of urgency to their conflict, which was already urgent to begin with.]

But… the shadows, and these other strange phenomena that have been happening of late; I think they might herald something terrible. Aetós said they had never seen anything like it—at least, the people appearing and then vanishing again in mere moments—and I wonder if it’s because… whether we succeed or not, this generation might be the last.

[Perhaps Oblivion has finally begun to catch up to them even here.]

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cw: some discussion of abusive relationships

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