Veilwoven

• Veilwoven (I)

  73rd of Nemulum, 336 EA

  Ishikar, Athal

  Cooking was an exercise in control, for Belmaia. She stirred, and tasted, and added salt. She blended the flavors just as she liked them, as she knew others would like them. When she did it, she did it for the others in the house. It made her feel good to nourish them.

  “What are you making?” Livia hovered across the low counter separating the kitchen from the dining room.

  “The empanadas are already in the oven.” Belmaia turned from the blaze that filled the stovetop to face her friend, never stopping her working movement as she spoke. “I’ve got squash, and rice on too.”

  “That sounds good.” Livia had a sallow quality to her, the food would do her well. “That was always Shayleigh’s favorite of yours.”

  Belmaia tensed at the name, but still she continued her movements. She couldn’t stop doing, it was on her to keep it all together.

  “It’s a good dish.” She glanced past the conversation, “You know, I’ve been meaning to try some variations on them. My aunties would always be trying new fillings, and it would always bring the whole street over to try.”

  “Would you want people to come over?” Livia’s voice tilted upwards into a cloying sort of hope.

  “Oh,” Belmaia thought long and hard about her answer, pausing her preparations for the briefest of moments, “Of course I would. That’s what the temple is here for, right? As a waystation? To breathe life back into weary travelers, in the name of the Stria Intranscendent.”

  “Sure enough!” Livia took on a glow to her, as though for a moment it was she that was the flame and Belmaia the moth.

  “Still though,” Belmaia could feel the spirit shatter across from her as she began to equivocate, “There is so much to do around this place, things that need doing. I don’t have the time to go out, not just to bring people in. More people would be more things to do, and between my duties patrolling the aether and writings on the Stria I’ve barely got a handle on keeping things together here for just us.”

  Livia sulked as Belmaia came around to her side of the counter to set the table. “It doesn’t all have to fall to you, you know. New people could help.”

  “I know, but for right now it is on me.” Belmaia sighed through the words, “All I’m saying is that I don’t have the time or the vigor to be going out of my way for new folks.”

  She could see that Livia was not satisfied with that answer, as she served plates, and so she conceded, “If they come, they come. I would not turn away a traveler. What sort of cleric would I be if I did?”

  The spread of food that night was bountiful, beautifully cooked. Belmaia was proud of herself, for what she had made. It was a shame that she would be the only one to eat any of it.

• Veilwoven (II)

  91st of Nemulum, 336 EA

  Ishikar, Athal

  Belmaia pushed out from the aether and into a place that she knew all too well. She felt the presence of the lake to one side, the valley’s rise up the other, with trickling streams leading down from one to the other.

  She strode towards the priory. In truth was just a home, painted green, simple in its construction but filled with all of her devotion.

  In her movement she felt that some piece of the roiling fog stuck with her, even at her practiced exit. Her focus was clouded, like a dispersal of the senses. She needed to just push through. The world would not stop turning on her account, and it was her prerogative to ensure that it didn’t. 

  She found Livia on the porch bench, braiding and unbraiding a length of cord. “Bel!”

  “Good evening, lovey.” Belmaia hiked herself up onto the stoop with some haste. “How have you been? I feel like I haven’t seen you around, this past little bit.”

  “Oh,” Livia had to follow inside to keep up, as already Belmaia was beginning to flow about the place cleaning. “I’m alright, I guess. I’ve been with Jac.”

  “Of course you have.” Belmaia continued about her way into the kitchen, only vaguely patronizing. “Just wanted you to know that I’ve been missing you about the place. How is Jacinthe now? Any better?”

  “She’s good and bad, it’s hard to tell sometimes. Just depends on the day.” Livia settled herself in a chair, looking slightly bedraggled, “She’ll be alright though. I was actually hoping-” 

  A strange curiosity, a deviation from the way this conversation normally went, burgeoned through for Belmaia. “What does she say? Jacinthe, when you come around, does she say anything about you?”

  “What?” The question seemed to stutter Livia, more than Belmaia had intended, like she was a loosely held pile and the question had pulled something out that she might have needed to keep stable. “What do you-”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Belmia jumped back in, realizing her mistake. “Don’t worry about that love. Let’s get about the choring, yeah?”

  “Oh,” Livia rubbed at her temples, “Al- Alright. I suppose so. But, like I was saying-”

  “Right, yes, but before that-” Belmaia began to thumb through a ledger of sorts, dusting it off.

  “Bel,” Livia interjected with a sleight huff, “I’m sorry but I’m trying to tell you something.”

  Belmaia’s focus snapped into clarity, and in that she could see that there was sadness to her friend’s expression.

  “Right, yes, of course.” She forced herself to slow her movement, pushing on to join her friend at the table. “What’s going on, how can I help?”

  Livia took a heavy breath, “We were talking about Jac earlier. She’s having a hard time here.”

  “Is it her health?” Belmaia knew the words to say, she had said them before.

  “It is and it isn’t. I mean, the times when she’s feeling bad in that way aren’t helping. But it’s not just that. Since she’s been back, she’s been feeling this place grate on her more. She’s taken her fair share of blows here.” Livia wring her hands. “I think those memories were something she was glad to put away when she had to go back to be with her family, and now that she’s here again they’re out in full force.”

  “That’s tough, really tough.” Belmaia spoke in practiced condolence. “It’s hard when the people we love are hurting. How have you been holding up, through all of this? I’m sure it takes a toll.”

  “I’m doing- I’m fine enough.” Livia steeled herself, “What it comes down to, is that Jacinthe is going to leave. And I think I’m going to go with her.”

  There was a moment between them, as Livia let it sink in.

  “Oh,” Belmaia pushed up a smile, not wanting to add to the burden. “Well that’s great.”

  Livia finally exhaled. “You mean it?”

  “Of course!” Belmaia widened the smile, “I’m glad for you. If that’s what you feel like is right, then it must be Dokeoh’s will. Such is the way of the Stria. So what’s the plan, then?”

  “Well, for the next little bit we’ll be in Lasa. We’ll stay with Jac’s family while she recovers. And then from there,” Livia shrugged, “It seems like we could kind of go anywhere. The faith will come with me, after all. We’ve been talking about Danai, something small in one of the more remote demiplanes. We could live our little lesbian cottage dream!”

  Belmaia meant what she was about to say with all of her heart, breaking as it was. “I have full faith in you, friend.”

  Livia seemed as though she might tear up. “That means a lot, friend. I was worried you’d be upset.”

  “No, no.” Belmaia pushed those feelings down, wishing for the aether that they weren’t felt so acutely even after having been through this leaving so many times before, “I’m glad for you. And you should know, that if you ever were to return, you’ll always have a home here under our roof.”

• Veilwoven (III)

  97th of Nemulum, 336 EA

  Ishikar, Athal

  Belmaia needed her tears to be kept to herself, and so she climbed up to the undershodden roof of the temple.

  She had hoped to be alone, but instead she found that great winking eye of the crescent moon staring down at her. She would settle for it’s presence.

  Between sobs, she gazed out over the great grassy knoll there that she had planted herself in all those long years ago. At it’s edge she could see the forests she had wound her way through and the aether that had taken her.

  It was a muted mass, the aether. She knew it well enough too, just as the glade and the temple. It was space beyond space, a bank of mist meant to curtain one world from the next. Her belief in the Stria Intranscendent, that patron faith to wanderers, gave her some affinity for it despite it’s dangers. She walked it most days. Looking out then she thought for a moment that perhaps she had let too much of it in, had become too much like it. That clinging fog was hollow, like water, and hallowed, like rain.

  An ominous rustling broke her from her wallow. She wiped away her dejection, but not quickly enough to escape Livia.

  “Hey?” The waifish woman drifted across the rooftop, framed in silver like moonlight. “Are you alright?”

  Belmaia considered for a moment airing out her pain, but it was hard in that moment to ignore what Livia was. She was a frail sort of thin, wispy and made more so with every day that passed, and on top of that she was trying to move on. She was always going, endlessly never leaving. Livia would come back, Belmaia knew that for sure, but she’d not be the same. Some part of her would be gone, just like the last time and the time before that.

  It was foul, that repetition that Belmaia craved. She knew it to be so, deep down, but she simply could not allow herself to face it headlong. Instead, she chose to pull herself further into the illusion that these things were as they should be. “It’s nothing. I’m just taking some air, is all.”

  Belmaia let her gaze drift back to the aether, she nestled herself further into the heart of the home she had built to keep herself forever stable, and she willed herself veilwoven.

• Veilwoven (IV)

  98th of Nemulum, 336 EA

  Ishikar, Athal

  There was a slump to the end of Belmaia’s days, a sort of slow collapse from the shape she held herself up in. The coming of the night’s dark brought out this routine comfort, her settling at the kitchen table with a cup of the bergamot tea that Livia had first planted in in their garden long years before her first leaving.

  A present chill came over the room, setting Belmaia’s spine to tingle. She felt the hairs of her arm stand suddenly on end, and felt for all the world as if she was being watched.

  She turned, slowly, to survey her surroundings. She could see into the kitchen, down the long hallway through the living area past to the stairwell leading up to the second floor. She was along, and yet still she felts that clinging embrace of the cold. She reached up in fearful care, resting her hand on the amulet that was he holy symbol. 

  It was just then that there was a knock at the door, breaking her out from her anxious flow. Belmaia allowed herself a steadying breath. This was normal, and everything was fine.

  She could hear the sounds of conversation outside, the shuffling of feet. She opened the door to two figures, both women. The first she noticed was scowling. She stood tall and carried a thin stave. Hanging from her ears were two cast-silver birds skulls. The other was more striking, wiry and wild looking with her nest of hair and the runic tattoos scrolling across her body.

  “Good evening.” Belmaia started, lingering inside the threshold of the temple. “How can I help you?”

  The taller woman looked back over her shoulder, as though she wanted to leave. Meanwhile, the shorter woman’s gaze bored into her with bug-eyed intensity.

  “We have come to inquire about lodging here.” She started. “I am called Svaljna. My compatriot is named Mepka.”

  Belmaia ushered them in, that ragtag pair, gearing herself back up into working order. 

  She found that when contrasted with the outdoor air the chill she had felt in the house had faded. Still, though, as she conducted the conversation, she could not help but feel that that unsettling presence had been real in some strange and eminently worrying way. 

  She knew that in taking her oaths to the faith she had made it her calling to welcome travelers, to care for them. Still though, bringing these two in made the house feel noticeably more empty after so long between just her and Livia, and for that she silently mourned.

• Veilwoven (V)

  103rd of Nemulum, 336 EA

  Ishikar, Athal

  In the depths of another evening Belmaia stirred the pot, chopped the vegetables, and tended the fire underneath it all. She moved with a pretensive intention, the sorts of movements a body makes when the mind is unwilling to remain as preoccupied as it really is.

  “This stew, it smells very good.” Svaljna offered helpfully, sat at the table on the other side of the low wall partitioning the kitchen from the dining front. 

  Mepka grunted her agreement, however begrudging it was, from Svaljna’s side.

  “I’m glad to be cooking it for you.” Belmaia ran through her practiced hospitality, “It’s good for the hands, and for the spirit, to be cooking.”

  “Much spirit to you, then?” Mepka took a tone with just a hint of a bite to it, undercut only slightly by her state unease.

  Belmaia thought on the question, pushing a smile up to her face to buy herself time. “I do believe so. Do you have faith, Mepka?”

  “I do not.” Mepka held that sharpness. “In my time I have found dogmatism to be a prospect for pain.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but glad to know that we can still be friends. You’ll find no dogma here, only community.” Belmaia was glad to see Mepka’s surprise, that tension she had built up at the question initially dissipating into confusion at the unexpectedly amicable response. “I have met many clerics of many faiths, but the Stria Intranscendent teaches us that the world’s way is to move, and there is no truer tragedy than to resist the concept of that movement.”

  “How is it then that you find yourself all alone here?” Svaljna looked to Belmaia with a piercing directness. “You speak of community, but there are none here to be with you?”

  The food finished under Belmaia’s hands. She poured out into bowls, feeling her chipper facade slipping with the completion of the task. “Yes, that is the case. There are those that have spent seasons in my life, a girl called Livia most recently, but I have not seen her since you all have arrived.”

  “Will she be back?” Svaljna asked thoughtfully.

  “No,” Belmaia sighed, “I don’t expect that she will. It’s rare that they do.”

  “She’s not the first?” Mepka asked with a softer tone now.

  Belmaia let herself feel the sadness, a rare luxury to her. “Not the first, no.”

  “What was she like?” Mepka took bowls and sat them for herself and for Svaljna.

  “Livia? We were each mothers to each other, at different times.” Belmaia smiled again, this time with a more earnest melancholy. “She was older than me, but I brought her into the faith. I showed her those way, and watched her grow into her spirit in a way few ever manage.”

  There was a flicker then, in her speech, a minute pause as she shifted in her chair with an equivocating discomfort. “She grew past this place though, her time was ready to take her elsewhere.”

  Mepka and Svaljna looked meaningfully to one another.

  “Have you ever thought about leaving yourself?” Svaljna posed the question with a gentleness belying hesitancy.

  “So keen to get me out, are you?” Belmaia laughed, “No, I mean I don’t expect so. My place is here.”

  With everyone else served, she finally settled down to begin eating herself.

• Veilwoven (VI)

  107th of Nemulum, 336 EA

  Ishikar, Athal

  The night was cold and dark, and the hallowed walls of the Stria’s temple had been trespassed upon by a clinging force of malevolence.

  “I just don’t see what we’re still doing here,” Mepka crouched in a huddled on the bed, directing her frustration at Svaljna across the room. “It’s not her.”

  “Why not?” Svaljna winced as she brushed knots out her hair, “She has the way about her, a powerful sveida. She has been kind and hospitable, as a holy woman should.”

  Mepka grimaced. “I won’t have some templeheaded prude on the road with us. I just won’t.”

  Svaljna felt then a sudden instinct to turn around, some immediate sense of danger. 

  “Mepka.” She hissed with wide eyes.

  “No, really,” Mepka spun herself up, “There’s a fatal flaw there, religion. You can’t trust a woman of faith, not to have your back. When chaos strikes and the water is rising, they’ll sell you down the river and not feel a lick of remorse if their gods tell them it’s right. It’s like-”

  “Mepka.” Svaljna hissed again to cut her off, and this time she was listened to. “Be very still.”

  Mepka tensed and turned around. Hovering above her, the air around them all bitter and frigid, was the spectral face of death. Livia was a ghost, sunken and sallow, the intangible flesh of their face rotting off into wispy trails of mist.

  “Ahtr-” Mepka had just enough time to call the barest half of an arcane word before the spirit leapt to invade her senses.

  Svaljna watched in horror as her friend convulsed, overlaid by the phantasmal being. She ran over, grabbed her shaking shoulder to steady her. Mepka’s body went stock-still at the touch.

  She turned her head, her eyes filled with a faint blue light. Svaljna felt the kick to her sternum before she saw it, and she tumbled back across the room. The ghost possessing Mepka stood, stretching and flexing, as Svaljna tried desperately to suck in the air which had been knocked from her lungs.

  “Maia!” It belted out, grating over Mepka’s voice. “Why can’t I leave, Maia!”

  “Cer’i Psalre Ibel-ratiij” Svaljna pushed herself back into a corner, and began a chant of her own. She felt her magic wash out over her possessed friend, resisted and ineffective.

  The being snapped Mepka’s head over to Svaljna, it’s tone all of spite. “Would you replace me? Would you be the tether, that holds us all to this place? What home is this, but ours?”

  Before Svaljna could reply from her stupefaction, the door burst open to reveal Belmaia.

  The ghost turned with scraping movements through Mepka to look at Belmaia, and smiled a faint spectral smile in recognition.

• Veilwoven (VII)

  107th of Nemulum, 336 EA

  Ishikar, Athal

  “Livia!” Belmia’s voice echoed through the small room, as though the intensity with she had locked onto her friend’s possessing form had opened up boundless falling space between them. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why can’t I leave, Maia?” Livia cocked the head she had taken.

  Svaljna’s head whipped from Mepka to her host. “Belmaia. Stop this.”

  “Quiet you!” Livia hissed contorting herself into a horrifying visage that sent Svaljna skittering back against her better judgement.

  “She’s right Livia, stop this!” Belmaia began to sob, “This isn’t you, you wouldn’t do this.”

  “Why can’t I leave?” She repeated, her eyes slitted through Mepka’s.

  “I don’t know!” Belmaia began to sob, the pressure of maintaining the fantasy of life that had been mounting within her since her friend’s death all coming to a head, “I don’t know.”

  “Liar!” Livia raged, flailing Mepka’s body around in harm of the self that was not hers.

  There was a moment, there, in the pain and the chaos of it all, that Belmaia saw things for what they were. She saw her friend, trapped in this home, trapped with her.

  “It’s me.” Her tone was hollow with a truth that had been ground down to the smallest grain. “I’m the reason you can’t leave. I can’t move on, and so you couldn’t either.”

  “Ghahhahah!” The catharsis that washed over Livia’s spirit was cathartic, ecstatic even, but it was not beautiful. It was the relief at the end of a mangling that left only a memory of a memory of the original beauty.

  “I’m sorry, Livia.” Tears streamed down Belmaia’s face as she lifted her holy symbol aloft. “Elganth, please forgive me.”

  Livia’s cry cut out at the invocation of the third god in the Stria, the god of finality and closure that Belmaia had turned from in her pride. Mepka’s body sent rigid as a corpse, and the cleric began to chant her exorcism.

  “Savesh T’izet Lisr Kan’tkuiri Rinivlodce Pel’h Melaki Soihs’nunnehv”

  It was a prayer that used every word of power that Belmaia knew, and each of them felt like glass running along her throat. Even in the horridness of it, though, she knew it was right. She knew in her heart of hearts that it should have been done a long time ago.

  Mepka writhed and contorted. She spewed profanities, she scratched at her own skin. She was lifted into the air, her head snapped back, and out from her eyes and her mouth a sickly red light turned slowly to white. That white light, finally made pure, lifted out and ascended out of that fateful home.

  The spirit was released.

  Mepka collapsed to the ground, bleeding and gasping for air. Svaljna rushed to her side, began to administer healing.

  Belmaia crouched to the floor and cried, as she allowed herself to feel everything that she had been overwhelming herself with slip away.

• Veilwoven (VIII)

  112th of Nemulum, 336 EA

  Ishikar, Athal

  There was a peacefulness to the Aether, a certain finality in the way that it wove together all that it touched. Belmaia steadied herself for what was to come, she walked into that soft bank of mystic fog outside her temple home, and she returned to a prayer.

  “Leatrin of all new things, Dokeoh of greatest change, Eleganth of the true zenith. Three most holy of the Stria Intranscendent. Forgive me, for in this world I have neglected my faith and halted against the rightly turning of the world that is your will.”

  The words tumbled out, mingling with the aether as only the truth long arrested and at last set free could. They echoed infinitely, through the space that was no space. She could feel the aether fraying at her edges. She was bare of any of the protective magics she typically cloaked herself in. She had chosen to enter that way. She had made herself prostrate. 

  “Please,” Tears shuddered from her eyes and wiped away into nothingness as she became disembodied. She began to raise, to yell into the void. “Tell me what to do! Guide me, you who lay out all paths! Guide me!”

  There was no response to her plea, no angel nor beacon of divine light to will her forwards. There was only her, fading from this world in the dejected remnants of a blasphemy against development that she had willfully engaged in for far too long. She was not sure how long she stayed, hoping for that sign. Time did not work that way, there. She only knew that at some point her self was no longer, and then it was again. 

  She felt herself reconstitute into an exertive corporeality. When she had feet to trod once again, she put one in front of the other. She moved, steadily forwards, and she emerged from the aether into the light of the morning sun.

  The two women Belmaia had welcomed into her home were waiting for her, in the copse. Their presence there, remaining to be at her side for this, spoke volumes.

  “You were in for hours.” It was a simple statement of fact from Svaljna. “There was no sureness that you would return, or else be swallowed.”

  “It needed to be that way.” Belmaia returned with a matched sureness. “It needed to be.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Mepka asked, softened greatly in her attitude towards Belmaia. “Did you find your gods?”

  “No. Or at least, I’m not sure.” Belmaia thought a long moment, staring into the veil. “I think that might be the point, though. I am here, I did not die. My gods are the gods of the road and of the aether and of life, and perhaps I will find them out along some path I have not yet tread.”

  Mepka nodded in appreciation of the sentiment, as Svaljna smiled knowingly to herself. 

  Belmaia turned to give one last long look to the place she thought would save her and had instead had left her to fester and rot. She thought of her time there, of all the joys and eventual heartbreaks. She thought especially of Livia, as that wonderful girl she had been before she had been held in stagnancy. She gathered the packs she had collected, all the things of this world that she truly wished to carry with her into the next and the one after that as well. She took up with these new companions by her side, and with them she began a long pilgrimage to moving on.