ORIGIN

He came up over the ledge with slow steps, shuffling feet kicking up dust. His weight was leaning on the oversized halberd, gripped in one hand that would have surely had white knuckles were it not covered in black pigment and fur.

Enoki had told him of the Bonereader. Boneseer. Bonecaster. He'd been given several names. Oliver had told him more, and now that he knew of the prior owner of his stone (and all the half-relevant or wholly irrelevant knowledge the bird-dog had also blurted at him in a stream of information seemingly designed to drown the mind), he knew of Black's history with her.

'She was the one who told him when he'd die. And he didn't listen, and he did.'

He intended to meet her for himself: to gauge her, test her. It sounded as though her abilities were legitimate. But if they were, he wanted the answers that she could give.

Wanted, in fact, whatever she could teach him.

He saw it up ahead, then: the pit of bones, the ledge overhanging it, just as had been described.

Shuffle. Shuffle. Click. Shuffle... His somewhat weary footfalls and the tap of halberd-haft on stone announced his approach, but just in case, he called out with his rasping voice.

"Bone Seer. The Sentinel has come for knowledge."

It was through Omen that she saw his approach: the black corvid with her single red eye, perched atop the ledge. The black shape, shuffling up, and recognition dawned in Omen a split second before it struck Giggle: she knew that shape, knew the halberd in its hand in particular.

...Black? she thought, in blank surprise, as the shape drew toward her den.

Omen took immediate flight, spiralling skyward with a pair of haunting, raucous cries, and Giggle saw through her eyes: saw the creature look up, its many eyes not Black--not at all--but... a strange shadow of him, certainly.

Had he survived the trial, after all-? Lived, and changed within his chrysalis? The last time she'd seen him--and Black was one of those she'd met periodically over sixty cycles or so of life--the last time, he'd left in a swathe of void-born shadows.

She hadn't liked that.

Half of her was ready to trot out with raucous greeting, to inform him she was glad that he'd survived--that her reading, so certain of his death, had been wrong. But the other half was instantly wary, not only from the void he'd carried but the strangeness of him now. And... 'the Sentinel?' He'd always called himself, 'the black dog' before. Had things changed..?

Her instinct, the showman's flair, had long protected her. Others had attacked her, from time to time, and she'd found that by pretending omniscience and supreme, hidden power--some sort of esoteric mystery--she could keep the worst of it at bay. If they thought she was some sort of witch who could see into all timelines, if they thought she was all-powerful, then that rendered her a little safer.

It was with that in mind that she trotted up to her ledge from where she'd been lying in a clot of mud and half-brown ferns. She wasn't sure if this was Black, or not: but it was his halberd, it was his magic, and those enough were reason to be wary.

She took a breath, gathered her magic, and stepped up onto the ledge with a dramatic movement, head held high and dark eyes wide as though with madness. It was calculated, but the effect was sure to be theatrical, particularly coupled with the surge of magic she sent into her cackle of greeting. It rang out over the stones, the bones, echoing and bouncing back, seeming to come from everywhere at once: impossibly loud and exceptionally creepy.

It was nothing spectacular--a spooky cackle--but it was enough that she hoped she'd made a distinct impression.

"I'm here; you've found me. Come, to the edge of the bone pit. Come, to the edge of the bones, and... tell me more of why you're here." Stalling for time, a little. If she'd been able to tell for certain that it was Black she'd have mostly dropped the act--but in case it wasn't, just in case it wasn't, she wanted some sort of dramatic upper hand.

She couldn't admit her ignorance.

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The sudden sound of small wings had him glancing up, and it was very much the imagery one would expect from a soothsayer who worked in bones: a black bird with a single red eye spiralling upward, followed by the ringing cackle of a witch. And then a hyena, heavily-muscled, scarred and caked in mud, stepping into sight.

She looked confident, and the Sentinel was about to form his own assessment of her when the whispers of the halberd coalesced into something altogether more sinister than usual. The voice it emitted--directly into his mind--often urged him toward this or that chaotic behavior. He'd learned to mostly tune it out, but now and again it would suggest he do something rash--like attack a conversational partner out of the blue, or impale someone who had helped him. Now, he felt something from it he had never felt, before: recognition. The whispers that coiled through him suggested that this weapon had encountered this creature before, though he doubted it held its own form of memory; more likely, the magic itself had struck her or been quite close, at some point prior.

her shape is wrong

He tilted his head.

destroy her

It was more vehement, more violent, than it usually was. He rarely fought the whispers, or argued with them mentally--and he did not do so now. Instead, he listened, and then did his best to simply ignore them.

It took him a moment, however--a vacantly-staring moment--to refocus on the actual situation before him.

"...The Sentinel has heard of her powers," he began, at last, and his voice, though rasping and hollow, did not ring as hers had done. "It has been sent to learn what it can from the caves. Of magic. Of combat. It would ask her to see into its future. It would ask her to teach it what magic she might. It would ask," and here, he paused, inspiration striking--"-how it will die."

Giggle peered down, consternation flickering through her mind. She'd hoped for some hint as to who he was, but she supposed she'd have to ask more bluntly.

Atop her ledge, she dropped to her haunches--and, flickering inspiration striking, she reached out for his mind.

The magic came, albeit falteringly. His magic was something else, something other, that touch of void she'd felt on Black's final visit. And his mind seemed to echo much the same: cold violence, erratic chaos. But there was no hint of Black himself in there. She pried briefly, but found no knowledge of her in him: he didn't know her. Though she could see only his surface thoughts, she saw no recognition there.

She drew her mind back, and pondered what this meant.

"So tell me, Sentinel: you hold the magic of the one who called himself The Black Dog. You hold half his shape, and his weapon. The last time I saw Black, I told him he would die. I didn't expect to see him again. I didn't expect to see part of him again." She studied him, for a moment. The spines, the neck-scales, the multitude of eyes; was he, perhaps, part Vargas or its spawn? The traits were unique enough to be noticeable, but his shape was not the same. Not a hulking, hunched monster. No, he walked upright, as best he could.

Her eyes narrowed in thought. "Did Vargas create you from his stone?" she guessed, and it was certainly a guess, though an educated one. He looked half like Black, half like Vargas, and Vargas himself had run the trials.

Omen flitted down to land by her side, staring down, and Giggle could feel her wariness. She shared it.

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She did not answer his request, his demand, instead asking questions of her own. He stared at her for a moment, the halberd's whispers becoming more insistent.

He looked instead down into the bones of the pit, and moved toward them, stopping just at the lip of the shallow hole.

"Its predecessor fell in Hydra." He paused, and looked up again, studying the hyena, studying her body language. She was tense, though she was giving little else away. And in him, indeed, there was no recognition of her: he'd never met her before. He was not Black. "It has been reformed by Master Vargas to serve as Sentinel for the Forge."

He stared, then, and waited: would she read his bones, or not?

A quiet, shaking breath escaped her. Okay, so he was Vargas's, then. One of the lot that had lived in the tunnel close by, violent and chaotic. One of the ones that had killed multitudes of Gembound in the "Trials," and pissed off the dragons in Monoceros, and called down this Lord Dhracia and who knew what else. Trouble, in other words; and Giggle didn't particularly like trouble. Vargas had threatened her at least once, and Black himself had been turning... dangerous, toward the end.

Her instincts were warning her of how deadly this could turn.

She took a breath, then, and started at a slow walk down her path that wound from ledge to pit. "I'll read your bones, then--it isn't my place to decide to turn anyone away. I'm only their conduit. But attack me," she warned, glancing up at him, "and your privilege is revoked. I expect respect and politeness and that's what I'll give you in turn. Okay?" If Vargas had raised this one, she hardly expected it to understand a social give-and-take.

Part of her was mourning, too, the loss of Black. Not greatly--she hadn't known him that well--but he'd at least insisted he was a guardian, there to protect others, and that's how he had died. To know that his stone had been repurposed as another guardian, but a guardian for the violent monsters, saddened her a little.

"So long as you agree to my terms, tell me exactly what you want to know and I'll read the bones for you. You wanted--what, your future read, yes? And to know how you will die?"

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Her defensiveness was strange, to him, and he eyed her for a moment. The question flickered up, and he asked it after a moment's consideration. "The Black Dog--did it attack the Bone-seer..?" he asked. Was her wariness borne of experience? Had Black, the previous owner of his own stone, tried to kill her?

"It is here to learn," he added, indifferently. "Though the whispers say to kill her. Those, it does not obey." His fist tightened, clenching around the halberd's haft, as if to remind it that he were its boss and carrier and not the other way around. It wasn't exactly a reassuring sentiment, however--but this didn't really occur to him.

As she approached, he simply observed, head turning slightly to track her.

"These are the things it would ask," he confirmed, in his typical rasp. "What its future holds. How will it die."

She eyed him, and let out a dark huff of amusement. No, his remark wasn't reassuring. But it would do, for now. "No, he didn't attack me. I met him a very long time ago--he was one of the oldest of us. We're both very old," she added. "I don't know why you're hearing voices, but yeah, don't stab me." Her tone was dry.

She paced around to the edge of the bone pit, looking in and studying the bones. "He came with a friend of his, a long time ago, to ask the bones about another missing friend. I told them where to find her. I don't know if they ever did," she added. Memory, distant, trickled up--this had all happened before the void had taken her, and she hardly remembered things from back then. Before her mind had been half-scrambled by horror. "He was looking for something he was chasing, too. I don't know if he found that, either."

She glanced at the Sentinel, and then again at the pit. Lying there--cracked, broken--was the thick, strong skull she'd used to tell Black's final fortune. The one that had broken on a fall that shouldn't have broken it. There would be some poetic beauty to using it again--a bone for a Gembound she'd never expected to see again--but it didn't really suit this stranger. But then--what did? He was alien, other, sinister in some way. And he was a strange, half-broken echo of what Black once had been.

With a mental shrug she waded in, lifting the broken skull in her teeth and carrying it at a lope up to the ledge above. "This is the skull I used for Black's last reading," she told him, after setting it between her paws. "So we'll ask them, first, what lies in your future."

For a moment she simply sat there, studying the pit below. She was putting herself into the mindset of a reading, asking the bones mentally, first, what might lie ahead for the Sentinel.

What does his future hold? she asked---this echo of Black, this Black reborn. Shame they didn't get one of his bones for my pit, her thought process added. In her mind, a bit of the personality of the bones' owners came with each bone; it'd have been nice to have his input on his own sort-of progeny.

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She mentioned the whispers, and the Sentinel turned, striding toward the edge of the pit that looked up--and over it--at the tip of the ledge above. It put the pit between himself and the perch Giggle was moving to retake. He wanted to watch with a full view.

There he sat, cross-legged, lowering himself down. His muscles were a little weary from the sparring and the travelling that he'd been doing, and it was a physical relief to sit, for awhile.

"The weapon speaks," he explained--he didn't know its name. Had it been lost anywhere but Hydra, or lost for more than a few hours, undoubtedly the Collector would have reclaimed it--but the Sentinel knew nothing about its origins or name, for that matter, that the Collector had delivered it to Black to begin with. He knew only that it had belonged to his stone's prior owner. "He does not know why it whispers." ...A little strange, now that he reflected on it, that he'd never thought to ask. Most objects didn't whisper sinister suggestions into his mind when he touched them.

It was a good exercise in learning self-control, though at times the impulses were difficult to deny.

But in any case, Oliver had told him a great deal of what Black had lived through, and he knew the answer to at least one of Giggle's tidbits. "He sought a cat. It was found. A dragon of selfish bloodlust, white--it tried to eat this cat. There was battle. It survived, but within its stone, at first." No further information was given; he didn't know more than that. Well, he knew what Oliver had told him about Black's thoughts on the dragon--Baratheon, by name; it had been one of the only creatures Black had ever actually hated. But that hardly seemed relevant, here.

Giggle glanced past the pit at where the Sentinel had took up his seat, briefly distracted from her question to the bones. It sounded like he meant Baratheon; that made sense, and in fact distant memory flickered up that suggested this were the case. She'd met the dragon as a youth, tried to guide him, instruct him. It had seemed promising, but he'd never returned for further lessons; everything she'd later heard suggested he'd fallen on hard and violent times.

At least Black and his allies had survived, then.

She turned her mind back to the bones, and to her question, in silence. What lies in this one's future? she asked, again, staring at the pit, willing her mind to slip into that absent half-space where it was open to all the magic, all the reality, all of the everything around her.

And then, she picked up the skull in her jaws and tossed it to the pit below.

Its first fall, cycles ago, had crushed and shattered bones and cracked itself apart. She half-expected this fall to split it in half, but it didn't: indeed where it fell, it rolled along a little, easily and smoothly. Other bones came with it, some only a little distance, others tumbling alongside until it had settled at last in a final spot. And these bones all clustered around it, all unharmed.

Giggle perked a brow, and shifted her dark gaze to the Sentinel in some surprise.

"That's more positive than I'd expected," she admitted, immediately. "The bones speak first of a journey--one I think you're on now. A physical journey, but also a journey of learning from others--advice given, learning granted. The way the skull first rolled, and others came with it--they speak of communication and travel."

She turned, nodding down, and then shifted her body around so she could trot down the ledge to search up a second bone. She continued the explanation as she came. "They way it moved and settled without damage, or damaging anything else--the bones speak of satisfaction. You move, you travel, a job well done, working with others. Whatever you task yourself with, you'll do it well and you'll find fulfillment. And in the end you settle with others: you'll be strong enough on your own, but your real value and your life will be spent with a like-minded group." Vargas's lot-? She couldn't be sure; she only knew what the bones were telling her.

She glanced up, looking to the Sentinel as she came to a halt at the edge of the pit. "Do you have any other questions before I move on to your death?" she asked, giving the last two words a sort of sarcastic irony.

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