The Chant of the Sibyl
Nov. 21st, 2007 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crowsAdrian stood at the prow of the boat, a live wire of intention that he had neglected to name to his lietennants, who stood by in a pensive veneer of patience. His eyes were bright across the water, discernably blue-green despite the subfusc, artificial light that radiated eerily off the shore, not too far off.
It bled off into nothingness, a nimbus of chemical illumination in the starless night. His so-called right hand, Caleb, stepped forward and nervously cleared his throat. Before he could speak, Adrian lifted a hand to pre-empt him, and silence reigned over the small group of men.
Whatever he was trying to scry out by simply staring harder than the night of the world could stare back at him, Adrian was not pleased with the results. There was some suspicion that the faith that surrounded Adrian James was checkered, that there were people in his company who were just along for the ride, for some provision of safety or self-importance or an elusive sense of belonging rather than for the belief that he was right, or travelling in a direction that aimed them at absolution. If any of those people were standing on deck with him that night, however, they feigned their dedication well with their shuffling feet and wandering eyes. The man displeased was not good for anybody near him, zealot and skeptic alike.
“She's not there.” He said under his breath, his expression hard as he stared into the heart of the half-distant glow.
“Do... you want to go ashore and see if we can find-” Caleb's voice withered in his throat as Adrian turned to eye him sidelong over his shoulder.
“I said, she's not there.”
“I thought maybe we might look for some information, so we know where to go next...” He said, straightening a little and holding his ground.
“I certainly hope you're not suggesting that the course I've set is aimless.” Adrian replied, turning away from them and striding away down the long side of the deck.
Caleb let his eyes slip beyond where the taller man had stood, staring with his own half-focus at the eerie glow from the shore. Faith he murmerred to himself, setting his mind's eye on an eventual landing, an eventual next chapter that would bear him – bear them all – away from the endless, heaving seat of bad weather and black water.
Slipping below decks by a back stairway that was primarily closed off from the rest of the boat, Adrian slumped into a small berth that he had kept largely secret from his followers and lieutenants. Slumping on to the unmade bed with his head in his hands, Adrian closed his weary eyes and tried to shift his mind away from the empty light on the shore, and the empty sea that lay ahead.
“Not a day, not for a day.” He said under his breath, the darkness behind his eyes flowering with color beneath his pressing hands.
A small sound at the door broke his maddened reverie, derailing the years-old trace that he was trying to maze out in his mind. On looking up, Adrian discovered Caleb standing at the door of the berth with his arms folded, face unhappy.
“Not a day what?” The other man said, unused to seeing Adrian through the cracks of a distraught demeanor, tired.
“That I haven't tried to find her.”
Caleb tried not to think much about the manhunt that Adrian had launched for a woman he'd been involved with before the [plague] had mopped up the world. He never spoke her name, never let anybody who had been in the fold before she vanished to speak it, but at the same time it drove their entire operation. Time on land was rare – for reasons that were twofold, as the chance of encountering a contaminated area were almost nil on the ocean and because movement was faster. And, because Adrian liked his boat, the desolation of the sea.
His obsession didn't always seem to be one of love, of yearning. He found other distractions amonng his flock, although they were infrequent. In his own heart, Caleb could forgive him that... it had been almost four years since he 'signed on' to Adrian's cause, and that had been a few months after She had been taken away (or run away?) from the group.
“I should have kept her closer to me.”
No wonder Adrian had come down here alone. There were moments like this, hidden from almost everybody on the boat, where he seemed to lose focus. He would fidget and ramble, slipping away from the iron will that he stood with before the fold, unshakable by any tribulation.
“I should have let her stay. I just never thought the world would allow something like this to happen.”
Caleb saw his chance, the aperture into Adrian's private world that would open and close as quickly as lightening descended from the sky in a storm. He hesitated for a second, staring down at a paroxical portrait of a powerful man. Adrian was at once intimidating and shattered, here behind closed doors, twisting his fingers in his sandy hair and staring at the floor. Caleb drew a breath as quietly as he could and held it, crossing the small space between himself and his leader and seating himself on the other side of the bunk. He'd known Adrian four years... someetimes, they were as close as brothers while other times Adrian acted not unlike they'd never spoken before. The lat few weeks had been a more distant phase, which Caleb was hoping to end.
“What do you mean, not allow something like this to happen? Things happen, Adrian...”
“No! Not this, not like this. Things like this don't happen.”
Closing his eyes for a moment, Caleb spoke carefully. “I don't understand. Please tell me why.”
Adrian surveyed his compatriot with a careful gaze, obviously struggling to stay calm, to stay present. “Everything, Caleb, happens for a reason... the world puts it all together. It's why we're here today and not in our graves.”
He paused. His focus was lapsing. Suddenly, something snapped in his mind and gasped, launching himself from the bed to pace the cramped room. Caleb found himself pressing closer to the side of the bunk, trying to stay out of Adrian's way.
“But... I needed her! She was the key!”
Caleb ached to hear her name, anything... despite the doubt he felt when he was alone, Adrian's intensity was infectious... anybody on this boat, no matter how miserable time got sometimes, anybody would have done anything to see Adrian happy. To see him moving forward... to see his goals met, however vague they often were.
“She was the key to everything. She was what I was given, so that I could succeed... before, I knew I had the power, I knew I had the face... the kind of face the people would follow. I knew I was destined to lead something great. To really change things, Caleb!”
Adrian was on his knees, then, his fingers pincer-gripped on the air as he knelt before where the other man sat on the bed.
“But I was waiting... maybe, maybe for a sign or for some... some word.”
Caleb thought that Adrian was going to dissolve before his eyes, a pool of black ash on the dark floor of the berth that rocked on the slowly heaving sea beneath their feet. He pressed, his mouth feeling sticky when he opened it.
“Who is she, Adrian?” All he managed to get out was a whisper, hot in the close space between their two faces. He swallowed dryly, pinned by Adrian's blue-green eyes, which seemed distant, distracted. “I want to help you find her.”
There was a long moment of silence, long and breathless enough that Caleb's lungs began to burn as he waited for Adrian to break, to speak. To say anything at all. For a few minutes, his face hung open, a mask of tortured indecisiveness and searching eyes that thinly disguised a maelstrom beneath. Caleb found himself leaning forward slightly, his heart poised on the edge of beating. Adrian was going to tell him.
His hands crawled over his face, covering his furrowed brow and the long planes of his cheeks. Adrian wore one ring, on the fourth finger of his right hand. It was a flat band of silver; never absent from his person. When he pulled his hands away, a smile had curled its way across his face. Bracing his knees for a second and pushing himself up off the floor, he crosssed to the door, having become an entirely different person before Caleb's eyes.
“Your loyalty is heartwarming.” Even his voice had changed, less desperate, less inverted. This was the reasonant, dark way that Adrian spoke to his followers; each syllable deliberate and slow. “However, I cannot grant your request.”
Caleb shot up off the bunk, one hand extended in demand. “What do you mean you can't grant my request? This is ridiculous, Adrian, I'm trying to help you!”
The taller man spun slowly toward Caleb, rotating on his heel until he faced the other man with clasped hands.
“If I speak her name now, the spell is broken.”
Caleb stared on in total silence, his empty palm facing the cieling.
“And I won't be able to find her, she will be lost to me forever... swept away...” He stretched his hand out away from his body, staring into the distance as his voice trailed off. “She's special, Caleb... talented.”
“What does that have to do with you not being able to tell us anything that will help us find her?” Caleb was raising his voice now, taking a step closer to Adrian in hopes to bring him a little bit closer to the reality that the rest of them lived in. Adrian snapped back into something that resembled focus, raising two fingers and eyeing him until he backed down.
“Some things come from this world, and some things come from the next.” His voice had dropped very low, words slow and silky. “There are ways in which those two worlds are never meant to cross... and then there are connections that are fated to be made. That's she and I. But I had to be so careful when we were together.”
It shut off, finally. Adrian's face closed, along with his mouth, and he pressed his palms together. “Get out.”
Caleb dropped his arms in angry defeat. Adrian held up a hand to him.
“I need to think. Go get the boys ready to go ashore.”
That was a relief, but Adrian's mercurial moods were getting worse by the week and Caleb was still concerned that things were on their way down. It was difficult to confont, after these years serving him blindly, that Adrian didn't have a way to save them, or some key to a new age that would dawn after the darkest days of man were finally over. Nonetheless, he closed up his suspicions and went to gather the necessary parties for a landside pit-stop.
Everybody was anxious to put their feet on solid ground. Life on the rig wasn't awful – compared to some of the areas that community was springing up on the scorched earth – but all of the adults were people who had grown and lived in a freer world, rather than one confined to the boxy births of a converted aircraft carrier.
“Caleb! Caleb wait up!” The voice that raised behind him, halting his steps, belonged to a teenager named Donovan Kurtz, an anxious budding zealot among the ranks of the flock. He was overly-energetic, chomping at the bit of his youth as if there would be no tomorrow... a picturesque example of 'apocalypse kids', survivors and refugees of the plague who were old enough to remember it starting, and have since started growing up in the aftermath. Despite this personality that some people found abraisive, Caleb had grown somewhat fond of him and the glow of adoration that surrounded the boy for anybody his elder. His respect was unerring, and his urge to please nearly canine.
“What is it, Donovan? We've got a lot to do.” Caleb tossed him an awkward duffel with a couple of respirators in it. “Make yourself useful.”
“Oh, yes sir... Caleb? Can I come on shore with you?” Donovan slung the pack over his shoulder, shoving his hands in his pockets and standing on hopefully.
Leaning over one of the trunks of gear, Caleb paused – he was trying to puzzle out the code of Adrian's moods while also determining what equipment it'd be best to take on shore with them with no information to go on regarding how 'hot' the area that they'd be landing in was. In fact, he'd entirely lost track of where they were... they'd been sailing in circles, every day the same for a week and a half, Adrian staring at the shore without in'structions.
“I guess... long as you don't get in the way.” Turning a smirk over his shoulder, Caleb eyed the boy. Seventeen, every member of his family dead from the plague. He was uneerringly positive for a child who was all alone in the world... Caleb guessed that Adrian's little flock was somehow enough for the kid.
Donovan grinned brightly, rocking on his feet. “Thanks! Oh, it's going to be such a break to get off this thing. I mean, not that I don't like it here or... but you know, nice to have a change, get out, see some things!”
“Yea, sure. I'm sure you want a piece of the grand adventure that the rest of us have been living.” Caleb rolled his eyes with a round laugh. It felt good, loosening up a little... the last few days had been tense and grey, but Donovan's enthusiasm was a welcome relief from the bridge of eggshells that existed as the only path to Adrian's ear.
“You guys are the greatest. I'll go get my things.” Donovan rushed off with the pack of respirators bouncing against his hip.
It bled off into nothingness, a nimbus of chemical illumination in the starless night. His so-called right hand, Caleb, stepped forward and nervously cleared his throat. Before he could speak, Adrian lifted a hand to pre-empt him, and silence reigned over the small group of men.
Whatever he was trying to scry out by simply staring harder than the night of the world could stare back at him, Adrian was not pleased with the results. There was some suspicion that the faith that surrounded Adrian James was checkered, that there were people in his company who were just along for the ride, for some provision of safety or self-importance or an elusive sense of belonging rather than for the belief that he was right, or travelling in a direction that aimed them at absolution. If any of those people were standing on deck with him that night, however, they feigned their dedication well with their shuffling feet and wandering eyes. The man displeased was not good for anybody near him, zealot and skeptic alike.
“She's not there.” He said under his breath, his expression hard as he stared into the heart of the half-distant glow.
“Do... you want to go ashore and see if we can find-” Caleb's voice withered in his throat as Adrian turned to eye him sidelong over his shoulder.
“I said, she's not there.”
“I thought maybe we might look for some information, so we know where to go next...” He said, straightening a little and holding his ground.
“I certainly hope you're not suggesting that the course I've set is aimless.” Adrian replied, turning away from them and striding away down the long side of the deck.
Caleb let his eyes slip beyond where the taller man had stood, staring with his own half-focus at the eerie glow from the shore. Faith he murmerred to himself, setting his mind's eye on an eventual landing, an eventual next chapter that would bear him – bear them all – away from the endless, heaving seat of bad weather and black water.
Slipping below decks by a back stairway that was primarily closed off from the rest of the boat, Adrian slumped into a small berth that he had kept largely secret from his followers and lieutenants. Slumping on to the unmade bed with his head in his hands, Adrian closed his weary eyes and tried to shift his mind away from the empty light on the shore, and the empty sea that lay ahead.
“Not a day, not for a day.” He said under his breath, the darkness behind his eyes flowering with color beneath his pressing hands.
A small sound at the door broke his maddened reverie, derailing the years-old trace that he was trying to maze out in his mind. On looking up, Adrian discovered Caleb standing at the door of the berth with his arms folded, face unhappy.
“Not a day what?” The other man said, unused to seeing Adrian through the cracks of a distraught demeanor, tired.
“That I haven't tried to find her.”
Caleb tried not to think much about the manhunt that Adrian had launched for a woman he'd been involved with before the [plague] had mopped up the world. He never spoke her name, never let anybody who had been in the fold before she vanished to speak it, but at the same time it drove their entire operation. Time on land was rare – for reasons that were twofold, as the chance of encountering a contaminated area were almost nil on the ocean and because movement was faster. And, because Adrian liked his boat, the desolation of the sea.
His obsession didn't always seem to be one of love, of yearning. He found other distractions amonng his flock, although they were infrequent. In his own heart, Caleb could forgive him that... it had been almost four years since he 'signed on' to Adrian's cause, and that had been a few months after She had been taken away (or run away?) from the group.
“I should have kept her closer to me.”
No wonder Adrian had come down here alone. There were moments like this, hidden from almost everybody on the boat, where he seemed to lose focus. He would fidget and ramble, slipping away from the iron will that he stood with before the fold, unshakable by any tribulation.
“I should have let her stay. I just never thought the world would allow something like this to happen.”
Caleb saw his chance, the aperture into Adrian's private world that would open and close as quickly as lightening descended from the sky in a storm. He hesitated for a second, staring down at a paroxical portrait of a powerful man. Adrian was at once intimidating and shattered, here behind closed doors, twisting his fingers in his sandy hair and staring at the floor. Caleb drew a breath as quietly as he could and held it, crossing the small space between himself and his leader and seating himself on the other side of the bunk. He'd known Adrian four years... someetimes, they were as close as brothers while other times Adrian acted not unlike they'd never spoken before. The lat few weeks had been a more distant phase, which Caleb was hoping to end.
“What do you mean, not allow something like this to happen? Things happen, Adrian...”
“No! Not this, not like this. Things like this don't happen.”
Closing his eyes for a moment, Caleb spoke carefully. “I don't understand. Please tell me why.”
Adrian surveyed his compatriot with a careful gaze, obviously struggling to stay calm, to stay present. “Everything, Caleb, happens for a reason... the world puts it all together. It's why we're here today and not in our graves.”
He paused. His focus was lapsing. Suddenly, something snapped in his mind and gasped, launching himself from the bed to pace the cramped room. Caleb found himself pressing closer to the side of the bunk, trying to stay out of Adrian's way.
“But... I needed her! She was the key!”
Caleb ached to hear her name, anything... despite the doubt he felt when he was alone, Adrian's intensity was infectious... anybody on this boat, no matter how miserable time got sometimes, anybody would have done anything to see Adrian happy. To see him moving forward... to see his goals met, however vague they often were.
“She was the key to everything. She was what I was given, so that I could succeed... before, I knew I had the power, I knew I had the face... the kind of face the people would follow. I knew I was destined to lead something great. To really change things, Caleb!”
Adrian was on his knees, then, his fingers pincer-gripped on the air as he knelt before where the other man sat on the bed.
“But I was waiting... maybe, maybe for a sign or for some... some word.”
Caleb thought that Adrian was going to dissolve before his eyes, a pool of black ash on the dark floor of the berth that rocked on the slowly heaving sea beneath their feet. He pressed, his mouth feeling sticky when he opened it.
“Who is she, Adrian?” All he managed to get out was a whisper, hot in the close space between their two faces. He swallowed dryly, pinned by Adrian's blue-green eyes, which seemed distant, distracted. “I want to help you find her.”
There was a long moment of silence, long and breathless enough that Caleb's lungs began to burn as he waited for Adrian to break, to speak. To say anything at all. For a few minutes, his face hung open, a mask of tortured indecisiveness and searching eyes that thinly disguised a maelstrom beneath. Caleb found himself leaning forward slightly, his heart poised on the edge of beating. Adrian was going to tell him.
His hands crawled over his face, covering his furrowed brow and the long planes of his cheeks. Adrian wore one ring, on the fourth finger of his right hand. It was a flat band of silver; never absent from his person. When he pulled his hands away, a smile had curled its way across his face. Bracing his knees for a second and pushing himself up off the floor, he crosssed to the door, having become an entirely different person before Caleb's eyes.
“Your loyalty is heartwarming.” Even his voice had changed, less desperate, less inverted. This was the reasonant, dark way that Adrian spoke to his followers; each syllable deliberate and slow. “However, I cannot grant your request.”
Caleb shot up off the bunk, one hand extended in demand. “What do you mean you can't grant my request? This is ridiculous, Adrian, I'm trying to help you!”
The taller man spun slowly toward Caleb, rotating on his heel until he faced the other man with clasped hands.
“If I speak her name now, the spell is broken.”
Caleb stared on in total silence, his empty palm facing the cieling.
“And I won't be able to find her, she will be lost to me forever... swept away...” He stretched his hand out away from his body, staring into the distance as his voice trailed off. “She's special, Caleb... talented.”
“What does that have to do with you not being able to tell us anything that will help us find her?” Caleb was raising his voice now, taking a step closer to Adrian in hopes to bring him a little bit closer to the reality that the rest of them lived in. Adrian snapped back into something that resembled focus, raising two fingers and eyeing him until he backed down.
“Some things come from this world, and some things come from the next.” His voice had dropped very low, words slow and silky. “There are ways in which those two worlds are never meant to cross... and then there are connections that are fated to be made. That's she and I. But I had to be so careful when we were together.”
It shut off, finally. Adrian's face closed, along with his mouth, and he pressed his palms together. “Get out.”
Caleb dropped his arms in angry defeat. Adrian held up a hand to him.
“I need to think. Go get the boys ready to go ashore.”
That was a relief, but Adrian's mercurial moods were getting worse by the week and Caleb was still concerned that things were on their way down. It was difficult to confont, after these years serving him blindly, that Adrian didn't have a way to save them, or some key to a new age that would dawn after the darkest days of man were finally over. Nonetheless, he closed up his suspicions and went to gather the necessary parties for a landside pit-stop.
Everybody was anxious to put their feet on solid ground. Life on the rig wasn't awful – compared to some of the areas that community was springing up on the scorched earth – but all of the adults were people who had grown and lived in a freer world, rather than one confined to the boxy births of a converted aircraft carrier.
“Caleb! Caleb wait up!” The voice that raised behind him, halting his steps, belonged to a teenager named Donovan Kurtz, an anxious budding zealot among the ranks of the flock. He was overly-energetic, chomping at the bit of his youth as if there would be no tomorrow... a picturesque example of 'apocalypse kids', survivors and refugees of the plague who were old enough to remember it starting, and have since started growing up in the aftermath. Despite this personality that some people found abraisive, Caleb had grown somewhat fond of him and the glow of adoration that surrounded the boy for anybody his elder. His respect was unerring, and his urge to please nearly canine.
“What is it, Donovan? We've got a lot to do.” Caleb tossed him an awkward duffel with a couple of respirators in it. “Make yourself useful.”
“Oh, yes sir... Caleb? Can I come on shore with you?” Donovan slung the pack over his shoulder, shoving his hands in his pockets and standing on hopefully.
Leaning over one of the trunks of gear, Caleb paused – he was trying to puzzle out the code of Adrian's moods while also determining what equipment it'd be best to take on shore with them with no information to go on regarding how 'hot' the area that they'd be landing in was. In fact, he'd entirely lost track of where they were... they'd been sailing in circles, every day the same for a week and a half, Adrian staring at the shore without in'structions.
“I guess... long as you don't get in the way.” Turning a smirk over his shoulder, Caleb eyed the boy. Seventeen, every member of his family dead from the plague. He was uneerringly positive for a child who was all alone in the world... Caleb guessed that Adrian's little flock was somehow enough for the kid.
Donovan grinned brightly, rocking on his feet. “Thanks! Oh, it's going to be such a break to get off this thing. I mean, not that I don't like it here or... but you know, nice to have a change, get out, see some things!”
“Yea, sure. I'm sure you want a piece of the grand adventure that the rest of us have been living.” Caleb rolled his eyes with a round laugh. It felt good, loosening up a little... the last few days had been tense and grey, but Donovan's enthusiasm was a welcome relief from the bridge of eggshells that existed as the only path to Adrian's ear.
“You guys are the greatest. I'll go get my things.” Donovan rushed off with the pack of respirators bouncing against his hip.