The Sentinels the breeze it wrapped around me, as I stood there on the shore

another all welcome! anyone @Lasher would enable near. powerplay consent of @Lasher given!

for two whole days, deirdre refused to yield to any when it came to the matter of the The Place From Where the Light Came. she revolted with panicked whimpers that would break your heart (if you had one), and was never forced. if ever her sister went, deirdre trailed along until the last moment, when she would break away and stare from the inside, shoulders rolled and spine lifted to create a hunch in her back so she might look like the veritable being that tolled the bell from the cathedral of notre dame. and so like the phantom, she only revealed half of her face from time to time, and then shrank back into the darkness to watch from there. the light was warm and inviting, but the wind was biting and the earth was frozen in a colorless white. her family colored the landscape, but she never took the time to observe much more than that. she would listen to the sounds they made and be content with that, while distracting herself on the safe, warm, familiar inside. if emaleth was gone for too long, deirdre might fall into a fit; but she never was, as though she knew.

this place was her newest womb. outside was foreign and unfamiliar. from within, deirdre discovered every thing one could discover. like, the mark her body left on the place she slept. and that her tiny nails could create indents in the earth. that in particular she marveled at, and created her own puppy-printed art. scribbles of claws marked the interior den floor, and there deirdre drew all she knew. her sister could recognize it all, but to anyone else it would surely be unintelligible. she and her sister shared the language of nonsense, and they fluently shared it together. no one but they two could comprehend it, try though they might to speak to The Giver and The Bringer.

on this day, however, deirdre had drawn all she knew. her soft blue eyes beheld it proudly, and she yipped to her mother and father. emaleth at present napped, and her father looked to her for a long moment. a shaft of light broke through the mouth of their home as the hour shifted, and deirdre's gaze lingered upon the heavenly ray. too long, it seemed. for her father mistook it as interest and moved toward that rather than her, and deirdre protested and whined, no, would you come here! he responded, but as he could not understand her babbling, she could not understand—or pick up on—a single thing. he wouldn't listen to her, and deirdre toddled clumsily toward him, so that she could use these lovely milk teeth to pull him to her like she could pull the other things they brought. deirdre was unaware that this might hurt him (never would she desire to do that), and as she approached she appealed to his better judgment. i made something for you, and for everyone, would you come see? came her babbling nonsense. but The Bringers eyes swept toward where the light came, and her own eyes could not help but follow.

that was not strange to her. what was strange was the light and the way it shifted as the clouds moved overhead. it was like a dance, and it moved in a peculiar pattern over the snow. deirdre was lured, drawing nearer to the exit—a single paw went over the threshold! lowered, to touch the white earth!—

but it withdrew sharply:

nope.

deirdre clutched this arm to her breast and whimpered, her face utterly scandalized as she looked at the snow. the old wise druid perhaps in her heart was gone for a moment in favor of the horror she truly felt: how dare! before the face melted into a vision of perfect sadness. why? why would you do this to me? i haven't hurt you!

but... but... the mark she had left! she looked at her father, uttering a disconcerted yet wonderfilled question: i... i did this thing? ... before looking back at the shape.

deirdre, the powerful witch, felt a little bit stronger for her 'magic', then.

lasher cameo!

taltos was charmed by the tiny yippings and squeaks shared between deidre and emaleth -- it seemed they spoke to one another, though he would never know the secret language of infants. she turned the glowing blue of her eyes upon him; he quelled with love beneath their intensity. her small teeth moved to nip, to draw, before she made plainly clear her interest in the light shining to dispel the den's shadows.

he watched, delighted, as deirdre crept toward the mouth of the den. of course, he would not let her wander into the snows and succumb most undoubtedly to frostbite, if not the cold itself -- he tensed his muscles, ready to uncurl his body and step to grasp her delicate nape between his powerful jaws, and remove her from out-of-doors in a return to her mother's embrace. but she did no such thing. 

the image of her small and pale body, paw clutched to her chest, indignation writ into the features of her face, caused the druid a great chuckle, and as she whined toward him in questioning, he smiled at her. "snow."

where ... did all this come from ......

in looking to the dun man, deirdre watched his lips move and heard the incomprehensible thing that came from them. her brow furrowed, and the cherubic witch turned to look back toward the world. this cold did not feel calamitous where she stood, but she knew that if she moved into the snow-field she would not like what came from it. it was knowledge gained not from seeing, but from the sting it gave to her soft paw exposed only to the earth here, and the soft rugs of fur. deirdre did not wish to be surrounded by it, and so stepped back and pressed further into the warmth of her father.

it seemed deirdre had enough. she was ready to return to the depths of their dusky abode, and beckoned to her father to join her. i won't go, she babbled to him, preferring the dimlit atmosphere here to the too-bright scene out there. she and emaleth were veritably cimmerian for their desire to dwell only in the dark—deirdre would take the dark warm here over the cold light there, without question! but this was her when she understood; but understanding was leaving her, day by day. the babe had begun omnipotent, but now any knowing, any certainty, seemed to escape her. not totally, not yet, but soon she would forget it all, and all things she had carried with her would leave her in a violent deluge. 

deirdre was aware that this would happen. she had been asked a question—do you want to understand Them? it took no thought, so immediate was her reaction: yes! but the answer was cruel. to understand Them, you will understand nothing of what you once had. something else--when you speak but five words that came from Them, and truly understand one, you and your beloved will speak The First Language no more, nor will you understand it! you will relearn it all. deirdre was crushed by the weight of this knowledge. to no longer speak with her! deirdre wept at the feeling, attributed to night-terrors. her sister would know, of course. by her telling, or the telling of those whom spoke to her, it mattered not.

but as The Giver and The Bringer spoke to her and her beloved, deirdre felt the temptation more so to know what it was they talked of! the voice had been tenebrous but not at all evil, a guide. an unspoken thing that showed her paths she might take, and informed her of the consequence. well, to understand them, the price to pay was much. sweet, powerful witch; We could take you with Us, where you would know it all in an instant, and know it all forevermore! and that was tempting, too! but it meant leaving this, and not being a part of it, and deirdre was so very near taking a bite of that sinful apple that nothing else would matter anyway, because in The Great Forgetting—where one forgot the answers to all of the universes questions—she would forget The Knowing, which was grand!, but in comparison to the life to be discovered, living and questioning seemed grander.

you see, the answers to all of the questions of the universe were supplied immediately. deirdre knew what came first, and how the world came to creation, and whether or not it was a Who or a reason of science that created the world, and if there even was a Who to worship, and if that Who came before or after the place on Earth came to creation [which came with the knowledge of the worlds genesis]. these were all very important! but what was not provided was the means to communicate them, or the means to understand those who roamed the earth who asked the questions. she knew the point of existence, but others lived for different and independent ends, and so as to get to the point of that: all lived to answer their own questions, all before they were moribund. when she had come to being inside of The Giver, deirdre could not understand why others would choose anything else but the offer of Knowing for always (the funny thing was that at each New Body she inhabited, that Old Question lingered); but as she felt the gaze of her parents, and the body of her sister, deirdre could interpret why.

the words she was told of love and its meaning and its existence could not compare to the feeling of it from those that surrounded her. they had told her of life and its temptation; how it would pull you in again and again! but the voice seemed to honor her will, and love her, in turn, for her choices. its love, too, felt unconditional.

deirdre, in thinking this, lay there and watched her father with apt interest. for she was still tugged in two directions. the witch knew she would need to decide soon, and felt the approach of sickness that would take her from this world if she chose to become a part of nature, then and there. to be the wind that kissed The Giver and The Source, to be the stream of light that warmed Their backs, to be the river They drank from to slake Their thirst... to speak the language of Ancients unto Them, as the Ancients did with her then.

she shivered at the vision of it. terribly lovely. her wise eyes stared even still at the gaze of her father, where she willed him to aid her Old Soul in her journey of becoming new again; she had a great magic in her, a culmination of something withheld until now in The Givers seed had truly blossomed in the womb of The Source, that now brought them to this moment where she thought, and imagined, and he watched with a warmth that kept the will to continue on her path with the living greater.

deirdre was aware that she would do it, for the Two that stayed and sated and warmed her body and her soul, if they would... they would what? she was not sure. deirdre sighed and averted her eyes at last, the weight of her decision truly overbearing. she was not too young to make it; deirdre had lived for a long, long time, truly. she vaguely remembered the peril of her previous life, and knew that life had not always been such a way, and that this was yet another chance. deirdre remembered, too, years and years of her own questions; questions she laughed at when she again, at the time of being reborn, she remembered. she remembered, too, she had always been a great and powerful witch, formidable and strong, condemned though, by those with cold and cruel hearts...

but this life here would be perhaps the greatest that she had lived yet. her skin prickled at that. a question without an answer. Those that Know would not reveal that... but she felt that she knew it to be so, as her gaze again shifted to the man.

lasher felt a stirring of the spirits roundabout the whelping den, and he knew that deirdre had found within herself the gift of rampant thought; even now, he could all but see the cogs of her tiny mind turning, working to make sense of all that she saw 'round her. it reminded him instantly of how he had discovered the snap of synapse, the machinations of reasoning, the moment that suzanne had called him forth from the lash of wind, the breath of rushing rain, from the mountains, from the molten lava that roiled beneath the surface of the very earth -- he, created from her witch's memories of the only men she had ever seen, dark-haired, blue-eyed. a simple sylph, the salt of the very loam, and it had been with her child's mind that she had been able to see the shape of him in the gloom, and call him forth into existence.

that moment now deirdre experienced, on a smaller scale -- witch though she was, the child was flesh and blood, born of a mortal mother. she would never know the struggle of a spirit to adapt to a living body, to fit his limbs and hips and joints into the unyielding sinews and corpuscles of a mortal form. deirdre and emaleth would adapt themselves in a reverse manner; their bodies would meld to the spirit of the witch within. haunting beauty would be their lot, he knew.

it had been siku's savage loveliness that had drawn the man to tartok, for the soul of the witch was one with the heavy bearlike body of the mountain dweller. but she had abandoned him, and despite the explanations of tonravik, lasher still carried the hurt buried deep in his breast. but that was the past; his eyes were fixed upon the future now, embodied in the small pale body of his white witch. she had come into the age of knowing, which taltos understood now to be the moment after one's eyes opened in the body chosen by the soul for its next vessel.

these spirits had chosen the empty bodies of the children for their thrones, and so had brought life and vitality within the woman to the babes. but here, here was the connection between the awareness of an unborn infant and the awestruck realizations of the opening eyes, the comprehension of the primal mind meeting the emotion, and it was a truly wondrous thing to behold.

perhaps she had once knew all these things; perhaps she had known them the moment the wandering spirit melded with her embryonic flesh, but lasher would never comprehend such. it was only that which he sensed, which he himself had experienced, that led him to the assumption that deirdre also knew such things. emaleth's awakening would come soon, and they would be matched, more than a force upon the world.

presently, his tiny girl turned to him, and lasher roused himself to pad to her side, to glance upon the snow and kiss the top of her downy head. he was silent, however; deirdre did not question, for in the infant blue of her eyes had been born a new awareness, and she only requested his company in this moment, which the druid was happy to give.

she knew, now, all; she even knew that she would forget all that she knew if she kept this path, but deirdre understood that, too, and so as she looked to the man it was the only thing she could think of. it was a tumultuous affair, but she betrayed none of the pain her heart felt then. when The Giver came near, all of her thoughts seemed to stop, in fact. as she looked to him, deirdre had the strangest moment of recognition, the mildest form of deja vu, and she evinced the thought to him in a sharpening gaze—like, for the first time, she truly did see him—and projected unto him the thought of knowing, and the conviction that came with it; the tilt of her head asked of him, don't you know me? but the moment passed, fleeting, stolen, disallowed by the spirits who did not, themselves, know how she had found the thought to grab at! but now, truly, they gutted it from her, so it would not influence her one way or the other. it was like never knowing the thing at all. and do you know how quick the moment occurred? in the span of milliseconds! too easy to miss, if one blinked in between the span of it.

old, infinitely old! and back to the task at hand, the deciding.

her muzzle dragged over the short length of her soft foreleg, dark eyes falling to emaleth. what would be her decision? one way or the other they were connected; in the beginning, deirdre was influenced much by her doings. deirdre was tempted to ask, tempted to rely on her for this, too, but knew that it was one thing she could not, would not do. their souls were on the same plane, yes, but would they board the next one together when that layover came? deirdre would not let emaleth know what her not doing so would do, unwilling to cause the dominoes to fall in a way unmeant.

deirdre leaned into his affectionate gesture, neck craning as her tail moved. deirdre could no longer be morose over things if she wanted to discover what she must do; so instead, deirdre stood and bumbled toward him. i want to show you what i know! deirdre spoke eagerly, the words untranslatable to his adult ear; but he could see, like she could see, and so she drew again all that she loved. she drew the three of them, she and emaleth drawn as one thing (she did not know herself to be an individual), and then around them she swept lines. around the thing that represented her and emaleth, deirdre drew more lines.

of course the whole thing was blurs and lines and not at all a masterpiece; it was definitely the art of a child, and very hard to depict. but what she knew was this world here, and also, there was more to draw, that this was not it, there was more! but deirdre looked up to her father, pleased with her current work; after all, she could translate it with ease, being its artist. and emaleth, too, would look on it and know. the lines of the spirits that hung thinly and thickly around them, varying in size, varying in strength. around her father there were also a great many lines; in fact, the scribbled thing looked almost like the sun. it was curious, that. and she had known why for a moment, but it had been taken from her, and there was no questioning of it; there was only the awareness that it was there, that it surrounded them.

it was lightest around her mother; more like eyes simply watching, without desire to intervene, hovering benignly above. it all looked like nonsense, but her lips curled into a smile as she watched him, leaning upon the scaffold of a lean leg; to her, it was priceless knowledge. us! she babbled delightedly, the sound coming from her for him to here as a short bb! sound.

a charming and charmed child indeed was deirdre -- her melancholy at the weight of the new knowledge swiftly faded in her father's presence, and she began to sweep at the floor of the den with her minuscule paw. the light lifted the emerald of his gaze to the fore -- taltos was stunned by the largesse of her artistry, though it was nigh unto undecipherable. he was merely surprised by the preciosity of his bantling, that she should draw so soon what was around her.

the druid was too far removed from the world of babes and the spirits around them to realize the meaning of the lines, but the crude sun he did see, and gestured with his muzzle to the sky outside their natal shelter. "sun," came his misguided explanation -- perhaps she had seen a ray or perhaps the glow of the orb itself briefly though the thick clouds of winter.

his own eyes traveled to emaleth; lasher settled himself down upon the floor of the den and brought deirdre into his embrace, mimicking with a smile the small and exultant noise that unfurled from her lips.

deirdre watched him, and though she could not understand him the babe thought that he understood her. he sounded pleased, and happy, and deirdre could not help then but express it with a bursting run around a foreleg. her heart soared at the thought that he might understand the vision she brought him, that she had pressed against the earth, and all she could do was believe that yes, he did know! deirdre, the prodigious witch, would show herself to be exemplary in her crafts. but her art now was far from brilliant; her cognitive connection was disjointed in how she displayed the things she saw, and what was more was that she found her drawing to represent a perfect likeness to those that she outlined most crudely. her paw never left the earth, making most everything a swirling blob.

as he settled, and drew her nearer to him, deirdre smiled ebulliently. deirdre loved nearness to others, particularly her sister, but she so adored The Giver and the Source that she could not help but press herself as near to them as possible when she was reminded just how much she loved them. now seemed to be that moment; deirdre moved to headbutt into his chest affectionately, no aggressiveness to the gesture at all; she simply sought to become one with him, to force her way into him. deirdre felt she had done just that, and that in doing this he could feel the strength of her love; she was only given pause when she heard his mimicking of her, only in his voice, but it translated, and deirdre's head whipped upward. you... understand?????? came the jargon that emaleth truly could interpret. but in his response, identical to hers, deirdre looked up at him in shock and happiness, and could not help but yell in her childish lilt-and-language, us! us! us!

she reared onto her hinds and her tiny paws fell toward his nose, which would act as the little witches support if they landed there. deirdre sought to look into his eyes with her own awestruck ones, as though they might tell her more.

listen[/b]

in her prime, deirdre had been a flower quivering in the winds of carlotta's hateful passions. there had been no love for her in the old house, in the corridors she traveled; nor in her chambers had she found respite, for even her mind had been haunted by the ghost who served her family. she died as she had lived, briefly, her fragile flame snuffed out by the breath of some ignoble god. but this deirdre would not be so, for already there lived a power within his child that rivaled even stella's, even that possessed by mary beth. 

but not the dark magick that had been spun into a curse by marguerite. no, his witches would never touch the darkness that had fueled that wretched creature, not while he had breath in his body. taltos would not allow it! suddenly frightened, he gathered deirdre closer, their interlude forgotten for the moment. he would not have it.

presently he looked back at her little drawing and smiled, shaking himself from the fear that had gripped him.

deirdre continued to look upon him, waiting for him to again speak with her in her language. but he was mute, and so her head only tilted. the feel of him was different, and it caused deirdre to fall into a noiseless state, her being restrained by the chains of her nervousness. it was the intuitive feel all children had that alerted them to something serious, like the doe warning her fawn of a true and present danger. deirdre was that fawn, and waited for the danger to pass. it mattered not what it was, only that it was there and that The Giver knew; this one knew more of the world they were in than she did, and so she trusted him implicitly.

but whatever concerned him passed once he drew her closer to him, and deirdre did not resist. she forgot the danger, too, and did not wonder about it once it was gone. in that moment, she suddenly felt overcome with tiredness, and she could not suppress the yawn that came from her.

his own emotion had affected her; the servant grew at once apologetic, and swept the yawning deirdre into his arms with a murmur of contrition. his mood sparked her own; when he churned with inward chaos, she had grown cold and withdrawn, and when he basked in the sunshine of her joy, she had become radiant. he must learn to master himself around his daughters, who had both already proven themselves to be more self-aware at a younger age than his previous brood. 

kissing her downy head, taltos held the white witch close to his bosom, that she might hear the cadence of his heart and feel herself calm in his embrace. calm, comforted. sated by the lack of commotion in his soul.

deirdre snuggled up against him as he brought her near, then pressed her head against his chest. for deirdre, this was a favored spot, where she could hear the drumbeat of his heart and know of peace and wellness. it was the same for emaleth, who deirdre also kept her face against. life, were the music and lyrics! life, life, life, over and over and over again.

the babe was sated, and her lids drowsily slid downward. with the steady, strong song his organ played and the warmth of his body surrounding her sleep was irresistible, and deirdre did not even think to try to do so.