The hyena sat tense at the edge of her bone pit long after the others had departed. A strange and nervous tension seemed to grip her frame, her thickly-muscled body tightly still as she stared into her bones. Dark eyes seemed to see nothing else, and for a long while she appeared unaware of her surroundings.

Skeena leaving again. Vinea off on her own. Serek, with no response for several cycles, now. Had these Children of Rot killed him, let him die..? Had Vinea gotten lost? And what of this--this Collector? Could he be trusted?

The hyena was contemplating throwing the bones when she realized she was not alone. A sharp glance up, her body tensing further beneath her--but no, it was not this mysterious new stranger with his tasks and his rewards. No; it was the spider, having lingered behind the rest. Giggle's hackles slowly lowered back down, and she likewise settled herself slowly back onto her haunches, peering at Thothaga.

Her masculine voice came forth somewhat rushed, and hoarse.

"What is it? I have never seen anything like you, whatever it is you want." Her mind seemed a little scattered, at the moment, but a flick of one round ear and she fixed her attention more firmly on Thothaga.

________________

ROLL THE BONES

@Thothaga

As a maiden she tiptoes shy with her light
She is modest and pure as she graces the night
Thothaga stayed behind while the others went on ahead. She was finally alone with the Bone Reader, the gembound she had wanted to meet ever since she was spiderling. The hyena could foretell one's fate with roll of bones, an impressive feat. The Collector may have given Thothaga the ability to change fate, but she wanted to see it too, and after all these cycles, she may have her chance.

As the Bone Reader snapped around, Thothaga was taken aback. Giggle seemed tense, as if she was expecting a foe to leap at her. Surely, she does not think I am lesser?! Giggle did not bat an eye at her before, why now? Then, to Thothaga's relief, the hyena relaxed. She did seem to remember her after all.

"Ha, I never see anything like myself either." Thothaga replied, sounding slightly amused. She still had yet to find another talking spider. Thothaga crawled closer to her, and shuffled her pedipalps anxiously. There was a mixture of nervous excitement brewing in her stomach. "Bone Reader," She began, staring at the hyena. Her eyes glistened with eagerness. "Please, tell me... how do you read bones?"

"Listen to me."
Thoughts...

TAG: @Giggle // OOC:

Giggle relaxed further as the spider spoke in a fairly normal manner; with humor and a plea that she could not, by her own honor, refuse. She let out a tense breath, and turned, looking over her bone pit, her forepaws settled neatly before her.

Then she turned back to Thothaga.

"My name is Giggle," she said hoarsely. She didn't normally bother with introductions, with social niceties, but she was looking over the spider and wondering who she was. This spider now held the ability to reroll fate's throw, if the Collector was to be believed--and Giggle was unsure if that was too much power for one Gembound.

Or a trick, to be played at the spider's expense.

Still, she showed wisdom by coming to her, by asking of these things--not that Giggle saw herself as some sort of paragon. Rather, she saw those who sought knowledge to be wise, patient, instead of impulsive... generally-speaking.

"I do read the bones, and I will teach you how, if you wish to learn. I only ask that you don't leave partway through! Some do," she added, "not in disbelief but thinking they suddenly understand it all." She paused, memories of a pale tawny lion, young and impulsive, if friendly, flashing through her mind. His thanks and departure when she'd still practically been mid-sentence. The nerve! She'd never seen him again.

Giggle shook the thought away, pushing to her feet and pacing to peer down at her pit.

"One thing to know," she began, speaking slowly and carefully. "Is that it is not only the bones that speak. Everything is together--everything in the world interacts, and is one. To harm one thing will affect other things; to help someone or eat something or walk through a cave has effects. There is magic in this world, and it is spread throughout; and there is darkness, too." A pause, again, in which she stared too-long at her bones, memories of shadows and staring eyes and nothingness bringing with it a tremble and a surge of hot hatred.

For a time she stood there silent; then she continued, pulling herself from this trance. "If there are truths in the present, then there are truths in the future! What lies around us is what becomes that future, and so we only need read it, like carvings on the wall, to know where we are going. And the magic--from the bones and spirits of the ancestors, to the life all around us!--speaks. It aids those who listen! It answers those who can understand."

Giggle paused, peering back at Thothaga's many eyes, and for a brief moment, she had a fleeting thought that despite their alien nature, they were rather beautiful.

"The point I am trying to make is that everything is one, a great web of life and magic and stone, and any part of it can speak to you. For some, they see truth in dreams! Others, in stone, in the fungus, in visions. I see it in many things, snatches here and there; but the bones speak to me most clearly. Do you understand?"

An earnest peer at Thothaga.

She was trying to make the point that all things were interconnected--and if Thothaga came to understand (presuming she did not already) that the dice she now held could affect all of that, so much the better. But moreso, she wanted the stranger to grasp that not all had to read bones. Perhaps Thothaga would find her truth in crystals, or in the rain, or the shimmer of puddles over the cave floors; perhaps, in a twist of literal irony, she would find it in the glimmer of her spiderweb threads themselves.

________________

ROLL THE BONES

@Thothaga

as a maiden she tiptoes shy with her light...

Thothaga sat quietly and listened to the hyena words. She was wise indeed, perhaps beyond her cycles, the perfect teacher to guide her through the magick woven within the cave, a better one than the Spire, who gave her no feedback. She was patient, unlike those that Giggle briefly mentioned. Thothaga knew she would not be completely satisfied until Giggle was. Thothaga was more than ready to learn, she was ready to grow.

A revelation came her as Giggle spoke her wisdom Of course!. She imagined a world as the giant silk web, like Giggle said, everything was together, everything was connected. Prey caught in the web would disturb all the strands, no matter where it landed, but it was the intensity that guided her. The bones weren't the only things that could speak to her, the crystal die led her to the Collecter, and her dream of the Spire ultimately led her here. Thothaga followed the hyena's eyes down the bones, and wondered what she was reading.. or imagining. Strangely, she never followed up on the "darkness" she mentioned.

The Collecter's gift could have a very big impact... very big... Thothaga sinfully thought of ways she could use it to her advantage, but she still felt cautious of the magick it held. It was possible it could backfire, and she would sow a fate worse than indented.

Thothaga found herself looking back at the hyena. She agreed with everything she had to say, but there was still one thing she wanted to know. "A great web of life, magick, and stone.." She repeated, doing a motion that could be interpreted as nodding. "I understand, many strands make a web, and web is still until disturbed, a struggling butterfly makes all the strands tremble. I can feel the vibrations... everywhere, they are strongest at the source, they speak to me, I try to understand, but Bone Reader--I mean Giggle... " She paused for a moment, wondering how to word this. "...I listen, I see, but I cannot read."


"Thothaga speaking."
Thothaga thinking. @Giggle

Giggle listened, sombrely. For a long moment she considered Thothaga's words, trying to figure out what, exactly, it was that the spider meant. She seemed to be saying that she was certainly attuned to Origin's magic--and beyond that, that she could feel its fluctuations, perhaps even follow them to their source. But she couldn't read them, couldn't understand what it was that they meant.

It was best, though, to clarify this before launching into detailed explanations, just in case she was grasping this all wrong.

"You mean that you can feel fluctuations of magic, yes--disturbances in it, changes? You can sense how strong they are--like in a web?" Giggle had of course seen spiderwebs before, though they weren't as common here in dry Canis. "You can follow them, but you do not know what they mean?"

The hyena looked down, scanning her bone pit briefly. She then plucked up a thick femur, and trotted over to Thothaga with it, dropping it at the spider's many feet.

"What do you make of this?" she asked, curiously. It was a completely blind experiment; she had no idea what Thothaga might do. Touch it with magic? Look into its past, or its future? She wasn't sure what the spider did, how she tackled her link to the caves (and to everything, and life itself), but this was as good a place as any to start, and to try and find out.

________________

ROLL THE BONES

@Thothaga

as a maiden she tiptoes shy with her light...

Thothaga stared at bone for a moment, her pedipalps twitched as if she were thinking. Then, taking a leg, she rolled it closer and picked it up with her fangs. "It is a bone..." She said a matter-of-factly. Thothaga reached out it, to feel its past and see the creature it once was. Perhaps she would get a glimpse into Canis' past as well. Even though the room's magickal current was sparse, it still held some life. Though fleeting, Thothaga clung to that link, and did not let go.


"Thothaga speaking."
Thothaga thinking.

@Giggle

Sorry about the shortness D:

The hyena stared, then broke into raucous laughter.

"It is a bone. Imagine how it got here..?" She was wholly unaware of Thothaga's use of magic, and continued to speak. "A Gembound's life--from beginning, to end; all of the little things that made it up, all the influences from outside sources! And it ended here, and is now in your--feet."

A pause, as she stared at the spider's strange legs, then she looked back to Thothaga's many eyes. "All the interactions that brought it here. The bone was never alone; it was part of a body, which was part of a world. A thousand things, pieces of probability--moving, affecting, adjusting--and if you are a seer, you can look along those lines! Along those possibilities--or back into the past, to see the parts that brought it here. Everything is a part of the same whole. You see? --But perhaps the bones do not speak to you. Perhaps you can look for--something else."

The hyena paused, tilting her head, and thinking. Perhaps she could see, reach out into the future as she had done in the past, and look to aid a fellow potential Seer. Perhaps if she could find a hint, she could guide Thothaga toward Seeing, of her own account.

________________

ROLL THE BONES

If you want to give me the 'substrate' /method that you want Thothaga to use for fortune-telling--like runes, bones, gems, stone, arcane, or whatever--I can edit it in, or put it in my next post, as one of the possible futures Giggle sees for Thothaga? That's what she's looking for, at the moment.
@Thothaga

Thothaga would see the following: a flickering, dim image of a creature in the darkness. It has six limbs, but only four are in use; the other two are twisted, unusable, jutting from its back at an unnatural angle. Of its hind legs, one is dragging, perhaps wounded, or perhaps also crippled. Past that, it's difficult to tell what it is--perhaps canine, though it seems to have a long mane, like a skunk or striped hyena, flowing along its spine. A very long tail balances behind it, ending in an assymetrically-bumpy lump if some kind. The creature is limping; it is dark. The last thing she notices before the vision fades is that it is not alone... but all of the other silhouettes in the shadows are lying lifeless on the ground.

Giggle would likewise see. She saw Thothaga weaving spiderweb, pulling meaning from its silver strands. She saw an unearthly magical glow around the great spider, and could see that she was perched nearby the Spire. The vision shifted. She now saw Thothaga standing, peering down, into the blue-lit glow of flowing water, somewhere in the cave: she let a fang-ful of leaves flutter down, and watched them as they spun away. The vision shifted a third time, and she saw Thothaga drawing black-haired leg-tips through a pool of blood, tracing meaning from its clotting shimmer.

@Thothaga

as a maiden she tiptoes shy with her light...

"They all died here..." She said softly. Then, she remembered what the breastplate told her. Thothaga dropped the bone. "I think there was a rebellion, and they all died here." She looked around at the piles of bones around her, the imagining the sea of lifeless bodies from her vision. Thothaga thought about the creature she saw, it looked wounded and dying. The bone had to belong to them. "The owner of this bone, they were not alone when they died.." She told Giggle. Then again, the creature was the last one alive. "Or, maybe they were..."

She touched the bone again, this time speaking to it. "Well, am I correct?" Thothaga flicked the bone into the pit. It clattered into the pile, scattering the others around it. Thothaga stared hard at the bone pit, but nothing was clear to her. She turned back to Giggle, curious.. "What did it say?"

"Thothaga speaking."
Thothaga thinking.

@Giggle

Giggle was rapt within her visions, stirred out of it by Thothaga's sudden voice. The spider's tone was soft, entranced, and Giggle's rounded ears swivelled forward to listen. At her question, though, the hyena let out a raucous laugh.

"You just told me. I didn't look at it. But-! I will look at what it says of its past. Usually I ask the question before I throw it--and I do the throwing. But perhaps it will speak."

She paced over to the pit, staring down at it, looking at the way it had fallen--how the other bones had rocked toward it. As if it were alone, as if it had collapsed, surrounded. "A sacrifice, or a loss, or both," she said shortly. "In battle, I think. Perhaps we see the same thing. And I saw something else, while you were looking at the bone."

She turned her dark eyes on Thothaga, contemplating. The methods of reading magic, developed by various Gembound, were prolific--there were many, and they seemed to increase every day. But the hyena had seen something quite specific with the spider. "At times I can peer into the future directly. But I think there can be many futures. I saw you looking into bones. I saw you looking into pure magic, as I do--the streams of time, the web of reality! I saw you looking into water, dropping leaves to fall away with the current, and watching how they went. I saw you drawing your legs through a pool of blood, and watching that. You will find your walkway through the web--your way of reading!--in one of those. Or more."

The hyena sounded quite confident. Her readings, after all, had never failed her yet.

________________

ROLL THE BONES

@Thothaga