hellonspectacles | The beginning of a beautiful friendship

When it seemed as though there wasn't much more to be done--Darrow explained to the best of his ability, his packet fetched from the train station and the contents enumerated on the walk from there to Chelsea Cloisters--Darlington had given Palamedes his number, half in hope of some future meeting and half out of some kind of insurance given how overwhelmed he'd seemed to be. There was a mystery to the other man, with all his talk of a different world than the one Darlington knows, but something that might develop into a kinship, too; he hadn't forgotten the pointed excitement in his expression as they'd talked about liminal spaces and pocket universes, of creating bubbles and dropping anchors where once there'd been perhaps nothing before. It reminded him of everything he loved about magic, about Lethe, about lifting the curtain away from the mundane world and getting a look at something spectacular, and whatever the differences between his home and Palamedes', that was perhaps enough commonality to serve as a foundation for something lasting.

The subsequent lack of contact over the next couple weeks is there at the back of his head, a niggling thought that can't quite resolve itself into a worry, but when his phone buzzes and he sees the oddly formal missive filling the screen, Darlington finds himself both excited and oddly relieved. Where some see lunacy, others perceive genius, he replies. Admittedly, I'm not sure where the opinions of furniture rank in that. Tea sounds great, and the the conversation, even better. I'm in the city now, free this afternoon--let's meet around 1?

He'd expected they'd meet at a cafe, but when Palamedes replies inviting him to his apartment, Darlington's more than happy to accept. He might have gotten used to the fact that the secrecy of the Ancient Eight and of Lethe meant little to nothing in Darrow, but there's still a comfort in discussing them and their histories behind closed doors. He parks around the corner from Chelsea at the appointed time and heads towards the building and up the stairs, finding the door to Palamedes' apartment with ease. He raises one hand, and knocks.

In my experience, furniture can be quite judgmental.

Palamedes has the teakettle on already when he hears the knock on the door and goes to open it. In a small gesture towards hospitality, he has tried to straighten up the apartment somewhat, but that has mostly meant placing his books on the kitchen table instead of leaving them scattered about, and putting his papers and notes in slightly neater piles.

Still, his living quarters remain in a state of scholarly chaos often associated with the Sixth House. In deference to his upbringing on a space station, Palamedes has closed the blinds to block out most of the natural light. One wall has become home to a growing collection of post-it notes that would make a dogged detective on an early 21st-century procedural proud. And while he has attempted to make some order out of the chaos of his library books...there are still quite a few of them.

He opens the door and welcomes Darlington in with a smile. "Thanks for stopping by. I think the chairs were about to revolt."

"You nearly lost the chairs?" he quips. "God, I showed up just in time."

The apartment he steps into is more low-lit than he'd expected, the shades drawn on every window he can see, but the hastily-neatened chaos is clear enough even in the lamplight. And familiar; the stacks of books and piles of papers wouldn't have been out of place in his old bedroom at Black Elm, and there was something almost Dawesian in the array of notecards tacked up along one wall. Strange as it is, it only puts him a little more at ease, makes him more certain of the similarities he'd already begin to notice between them.

"Seems like you've been busy," he says, casting a curious glance over the clutter as he follows Palamedes further into the room. "Can't say I blame you."

Palamedes leads Darlington into the kitchen, which is only more ordered than the rest of the house because Pal isn't about to let his books get covered in food. He takes down a couple of mugs and the little box of assorted tea bags he had bought during one of his adventures with commerce.

"I'm working on a way to exploit the link we seem to maintain with our former lives. We're not just dropped here--whatever is controlling this universe is also capable of sending us meaningful gifts, even memories, or so I've heard. Doing so must require a whole other mechanism, and if I can figure out what it is, then maybe I can find a way to reverse it. We could send messages home. Milk?"

Darlington sifts through the tea as he listens, finding a black tea that seems serviceable enough and adding it to one of the mugs. It all makes sense, this idea of trying to use whatever connection they all have to home to possibly get some answers; the link may be limited, but it's not severed entirely, and even a restricted pathway is still worthy of exploration. Darlington only regrets, just a little, he hadn't thought of it first.

Palamedes mentions meaningful gifts, and Darlington smiles, turning to look at him. "You heard right," he says. "And it's not just small things. Last summer, I found my house out in the countryside. Sans furniture and everything else not literally part of the structure, but other than that exactly the same as the one I remember from home. I'm still...frankly, I'm in awe of the power that mechanism, as you call it, has to bring in something that large."

He remembers the question at the last minute. "Oh, and milk would be great."

Palamedes half-laughs. The idea of Darrow's strange mechanisms being able to transport a house sounds absurd, though he supposes there's no reason to think that size has anything to do with the difficulty. "I guess mass isn't a factor, then," he quips, taking the milk out of the refrigerator and bringing it to the table. "That's...amazing," he says. "I have to admit, I've been trying to get my hands on one of these 'gifts.' I thought examining one might prove useful." He doesn't quite ask if he can see Darlington's house, though it's clear that he wants to.

"Definitely not a factor," Darlington agrees, smile turning wry. "In truth, Black Elm is a little larger than your average house. A lot larger." He can all but picture the look Alex would be giving him, were she there. It's a fucking mansion, Danny. We live in a mansion. He looks over the clutter on the counter, finding the container of sugar and adding a small spoonful to his mug. "Not even counting the surrounding grounds."

Palamedes is polite enough not to ask the question outright; Darlington, equally mannered, hears it anyway. He's introduced so few people to Black Elm, in Darrow or in New Haven; it was a piece of his heart, the only home he'd ever known, the thing he'd tasked himself with keeping alive, at times to the detriment of everything else. At fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, the secrecy had been a survival mechanism--and after, something like a habit. But the people who've seen Black Elm are the people he trusts, friends of his and now of Alex's, and though this is only their second meeting, Darlington already finds himself counting Palamedes in that number.

"Tea first," he suggests, "and finally telling you about Scroll and Key and all the rest of them, and then I can drive us out there?"

Palamedes is still having trouble reorienting his sense of scale in Darrow. The Library had been quite large, but space for collections was considered far more precious than space for people. As a result, living quarters were sparse. The study Palamedes had earned when he became Master Warden had been larger than his bedroom; his apartment here in Darrow is larger than both. For all he knows, the home Darlington describes could be as large as Canaan House, or as small as the sixth floor of Chelsea Cloisters.

Though he tries not to nakedly show his delight, Pal is clearly pleased by the offer. "I'd love to take a look," he says. "There's something I'd like to try once we're there, if you don't mind. Nothing invasive." He taps his finger on his chin and adds in a murmurs, "A house might make things a bit logistically complicated, but I'm sure I can sort it out-"

He's interrupted by the whistling tea kettle. "Tea first," he agrees, getting up. "Tell me about these ominously-named societies of yours."

Palamedes might not mean nothing invasive as something soothing, but Darlington's reassured by it regardless. And intrigued, not least by the fact he describes his idea as logistically complicated, a phrase that back home might've meant anything from the brewing of the Bullet to the first Aurelian rite he'd attended his sophomore year, a twelve-hour odyssey of legal terms and tightening of loopholes. "Of course," he says. "Just let me know what you need when it's time. And any specifics you'd care to share before or after."

Black Elm held magic enough for him, and had his whole life, but that was a thing born of history and nostalgia; a different kind of enchantment than whatever the other man might be planning, but just as important.

Picking up his mug, he follows Palamedes as the kettle begins to whistle, a smile crossing his face at the dramatic accuracy of the descriptor he uses. "They get both more and less eerie-sounding from there," he says. "Hell, I'd probably put the Locksmiths pretty squarely in the middle." He pauses, considering the best place to start, knowing already how different the other man's world is from his. "On the surface, the Ancient Eight are a collection of elite organizations at Yale, the college I was attending before I came here. Secret clubs with powerful and successful lists of alumni--presidents, businessmen, authors and journalists, celebrities. And they are, very much so, but from their first days they also each built themselves around the study and practice of a particular kind of magic."

"I'll show you when we get there," says Palamedes, and though his tone is casual enough, there is a certain playful twinkle in his eye. He wonders if psychometry is among the otherworldly talents Darlington is familiar with and finds himself hoping, just a little, that it is not.

From time to time, Palamedes does like to show off.

He turns off the stove and pours the water into Darlington's mug, and then his own. "Funny, you could say something similar about the Empire. We have nine houses, but only eight are functional in any practical sense. And we're awfully protective of our specialties. Go on."

Darlington has to laugh at the crypticness of it, the amused glint in the other man's eye that suggests something both uncanny and meticulously planned. "Well, now I'm definitely looking forward to whatever it is."

He listens with interest to Palamedes' explanation of his world, the organizational structure of...nearly everything, perhaps; a place more controlled by its houses than even the most crackpot theories about the Ancient Eight ever dreamed. When he mentions that there are nine, Darlington's eyebrows tick up, just slightly. "Technically, there's nine of us, too," he admits. "Though Lethe doesn't operate like the other societies, and our function's a bit different. Which I'll get to."

For a moment, he watches the steam curling up from his mug. He'd explained Lethe and the rest to a handful of people in Darrow, but never in exhaustive detail; not since that first sweltering day in New Haven, walking with Alex through the Green. In a way, he's a bit out of practice, a thing he'd never have expected. "Of the eight Houses of the Veil, there's five major, three minor." As he continues, Darlington ticks each off on his fingers. "Skull and Bones, specializing in divination, specifically splanchomancy and extispicy. Scroll and Key are the portal magicians, though they're also practiced in astral projection. Book and Snake, necromancy. Wolf's Head deals in therianthropy, though most people reduce it to mere shapeshifting, which tends to aggravate them. Manuscript's focus is glamours and perception magic. Aurelian does logomancy of...just about any kind you can think of. St. Elmo's used to be powerful weather magicians, though their power's been on the wane for decades. Berzelius formed itself in opposition to the rest, determining they could do through science what the rest achieved by magic. As far as I know, they haven't succeeded yet."

It's a lot of information. As Darlington pauses for breath, he looks across the table at Palamedes, trying to gauge the impact of it. "With me so far?"

Conceptually, most of what Darlington describes is understandable to Palamedes, even if it sounds as far-fetched and magical to him as it might to someone who didn't come from a universe quite so rich in the uncanny as he did. He's heard of people who claim that a sort of reverse psychometry could be used to divine the future, though they tend to be fringe thinkers; he knows people who dismiss much of what the Third House does as a manipulation of perception; weather magic sounds like terraforming by another name. But it is, of course, the mention of necromancy that catches his attention.

"Go back," he says, sipping his tea. "Tell me more about Book and Snake."

He'd taken notice of the way the other man perked up, almost, at the mere mention of necromancy. It's no surprise when Palamedes asks him to backtrack, though as with everything else about him, it's enough to pique Darlington's curiosity a little bit more. "They're the fourth oldest, founded in 1863. A little less than a hundred and sixty years ago by my reckoning and longer, I think, in terms of yours. Most of the rituals I've observed of theirs involve the invocation of spirits. Raisings. They can also create glumae, spirits that can pass through the veil between the living world and that of the dead and serve as messengers."

The Lettermen had always been one of the vaguer societies, their Thursday night activities cloaked both in the grim secrecy working with the dead almost seemed to require and the more amorphous and equally shadowy nature of who it was usually fueling the requests that drove each rite. It makes them difficult to explain with the kind of detail Darlington wants to give. "As an example," he continues, "the last ritual night of theirs I was present for involved the controlled reanimation of a corpse, who was then used as a conduit for the spirits of recent casualties in the Ukraine. Soldiers with information on troop movements that someone in the State Department had an interest in hearing." He shakes his head. "It was a macabre sort of relay, one ghost after another, a translator standing by to take down whatever was said."

“Ah, speakers to the dead,” Palamedes says with a wry twist of his mouth. All respect to Lady Pent, of course, but he had always found the calling of revenants unnecessarily dramatic. They were awfully unreliable beings, anyway. “…Hell, I had never thought someone might call a revenant for the purposes of military intelligence. And using a corpse? Completely unnecessary. How dreadful. How Eighth.”

Now that he thinks about it, calling up dead soldiers sounds like exactly the sort of tactic the Cohort would employ. Palamedes doesn’t like it one bit.

"A network of dead informants who needn't listen at keyholes when they can walk through walls," he says, quoting from The Life of Lethe. Palamedes' distaste at the idea is obvious, even if some of the terms he uses to express it are not. Darlington can't entirely disagree. "Which is the kind of purpose you apparently turn such power to when one of your alumni was recruited by the CIA before he'd even graduated. Before he was even tapped, frankly."

Picking up his spoon, he stirs his tea, then lifts the mug to take a sip. "What does your Eighth do, that's so similar?"

"Besides make you want to stand in a sonic for a few hours?" Palamedes deadpans. It's not a very politic thing to say, but it isn't like anyone here is going to go reporting that the Master Warden of the Library is being bitchy about the Eighth House. "Like your Book and Snake, they're quite good at calling revenants, but what they're really interested in is harnessing the power of the soul, and they don't have much time for silly things like ethics." He makes a face. "The word soul is so imprecise. In any case, they're not content to only manipulate dead souls, poor things. What really interests them is harnessing the souls of the living, drawing energy from them and converting it into necromatic power."

"And for what it's worth, I've never met an Eight with any sense of humor whatsoever."

Darlington might not know what a sonic is, but the general sentiment is clear enough. He smirks. "They sound about as much fun as Manuscript," he says, and while--just like Palamedes and his Eighth--he shouldn't get a vindictive satisfaction out of maligning his least favorite society, he can't exactly help himself. "Who do have a sense of humor, to be fair, but it's spent on inventive so-called pranks and other ways of fucking with people. There was an incident in 1982, a party that ended with a girl thinking she was a tiger. And never stopped. Her parents caught her trying to maul the mailman."

There was another example of Manuscript trickery more recent and more personally embarrassing to Darlington, but he wisely keeps his silence on that for now.

"Harnessing the souls of the living, though, that's a new level of disturbing. Tonally similar to the kind of ethics violations that led to the founding of Lethe, honestly."

"They sound like quite the barrel of laughs," Palamedes says dryly. "Thank God, none of the Houses have found a way to permanently disrupt someone's neural pathways like that." A beat. "I hope."

It doesn't surprise him, exactly, to hear that the morals of Darlington's magic-wielders are as tenuous as those of the heirs he had encountered at Canaan House, but it certainly is disappointing. "And you're part of Lethe, right? Does that mean you supervise them all?"

"Small mercies," he murmurs, though it's a relief when they move on to other conversational ground. He nods, picking up his mug again. "I am, and we do. Our stated purpose is to serve as an oversight body, monitoring the rites practiced by those eight and making sure nothing they do leads to anyone in or out of the societies coming to harm. It makes the magic we do a little more patchwork, grounded in spells and artifacts, but it all has its purpose."

"And do they respond well to your oversight?" Palamedes asks, his voice laced with sarcasm. Now, he's thinking less of the Houses as a whole, and more of the Sixth in particular. Since he rose to the rank of Master Warden at the age of thirteen, he has been attempting to manage a space station often fueled by too much intellect and too little sense. Necromancers of the Sixth tend to steer away from work that Palamedes would consider ethically dubious, thank goodness, but they're still an intransigent, navel-gazing, and altogether too argumentative bunch.

On its own, the bluntness of the question might have been enough to raise his hackles, sending him into the cold Arlington affect that Alex always rolls her eyes at when he tries it with her, but Palamedes asks with the kind of well-worn sarcasm Darlington recognizes instantly. "Depends on the society," he says, equally wry as he huffs out a laugh. "Aurelian's generally inoffensive as it is, although the last rite of theirs I was present for got...complicated when one of the wards broke. But you try and tell the assholes from Skull and Bones anything that sounds even remotely like a consequence and it's don't you know who my dad is in stereo."

He lifts an eyebrow, looking across the table at Palamedes. "My girlfriend would say that's their response to everything because they're all rich kids who've never been told no in their lives, and I don't think she's wrong." Alex would also say it more colorfully than that, but the general principle still held.

"I think your girlfriend is probably right," Palamedes said with a sympathetic shake of his head. The Sixth might be aggressively meritocratic, but that made them unusual among the Houses. At Canaan House, he'd seen the arrogance of bloodline in action, subtly and not-so-subtly.

Of course, the scholars of the Sixth always find plenty of ways to create their own hierarchy. "In the Library, it's always Archeo that gives me the most trouble. And Archives, of course." He grins briefly. For all her aggressive performance of professionalism, Zeta had never quite gotten used to having her requested budget denied by her son. Then again, she would have made trouble for the Master Warden regardless of who they were.

"She'd be delighted to hear me admit it, but Alex usually is," says Darlington, his tone sliding into something utterly fond for a moment. "Annoyed the hell out of me when we first met." Most things had, in fairness, but they'd settled in to one another afterwards--both there and here.

He listens as Palamedes describes the hierarchy of the Sixth, a system that seems as byzantine as anything he'd encountered at Yale or Barton, let alone between the societies. "Oh, God, of course it'd be the archives," he says, echoing the quick grin Palamedes flashes him. "Good to know some things are constant between worlds."

Palamedes chuckles. "They're quite territorial. And, frankly, unnecessarily petulant about the perception that archeo is generally considered flashier. But God, don't tell Juno Zeta that unless you want a lecture about the linear meters of storage archeo is wasting. And that's when it isn't even budget season."

"Should she ever make it to Darrow, I'll keep that warning in mind," Darlington says dryly, already able to picture this Juno Zeta with an accuracy he's not sure is wholly misplaced. Working at the Peabody and spending countless idle hours in Beinecke--before and after he'd started at Yale--had given him at least a bit of grounding in the tensions between archaeological collections and those more paper-based but no less physical. "Although in terms of storage space, I should tell you about the library at Il Bastone. Lethe's headquarters."

He takes another drink from his mug, the neglected tea inside now a little closer to lukewarm. That was the price one paid for getting wrapped up in conversation. "It's a sizable house, built in 1882 and acquired by Lethe six years later after the owner abandoned it, but it's a city house. Constrained by the size of the lot. It doesn't sprawl like...well, like Black Elm." He makes a small nod of acknowledgement, a gesture towards their plans for the day. "You'll see. Anyway. Lethe's collection of books kept growing, and before long there wasn't enough space in the house to hold it all."

Edited 2021-05-18 03:07 (UTC)

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