Prelude: Talking of Michaelangelo

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. ~T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Willow March 

''Breezes cause harmonic chiming among the frilly, dangling rose-hued leaves of the song willows that rise on either side of the winding trail that makes its serpentine way through the melodious forest. Pale lavender bushes sprout around the trunks of some willows, where bushy-tailed black and white chitters scamper about and snow moths with their ivory white wings flutter from leaf to leaf.''

The trail heads west toward the river and south, further into the March.

It is a temperate afternoon. A strong breeze blows over the land. Misty white fog roils across the landscape.

In wind and fog, the willow-wood is alive with chimes. And, walking from tree to tree, laughing in utter delight, one wayward bard, whose horse has been tethered to a tree along the trail. He seems fascinated with how the trees produce sound, gathering up the rosy leaves in his hands.

There is a shifting of the mist as it parts to reveal Gale, looking somewhat anxious. Her eyes scan the area with a frown, before falling on Taran. "Is everything alright?" she asks.

Taran laughs delightedly, and waves his hand around. "Look!" he says happily. "Trees that *sing* - have you ever heard of it?"

Gale rolls her eyes, and relaxes somewhat. "/Taran/," she grumbles. "I thought you were in trouble or hurt." She huffs, and then nods, looking around. "Nature creates some of the most wonderous things."

"No, no," the bard replies, still with a bright and rather childlike delight. "I would have clarified if I could, but the runes are very basic things." He chimes a branch against another branch, watching happily. "Is it not worth seeing?"

Gale flickers out of sight, and then reappears next to Taran, smiling. "It is beautiful. There are few too many places that have such a natural beauty in Fastheld, and I have seen many of them, but this is... exquisite."

Taran laughs. "Yes," he says happily. "I am always glad to find a beautiful place, but this? A bard's paradise, even with the weather so unpleasant. I must find a seed or three...I could start a small sapling in a pot, at least..."

"It would fit you, I think," Gale says with a nod. "You do amuse me, Taran... the simplest things can bring you the greatest joy and pleasure." She smiles affectionately, and then moves away enough to trail her fingers across a leaf.

Taran laughs again, the giant climbing up one of the trees a bit to sit on a branch. "I live my life," he says. "How can one live, without appreciating the joys of the moment and the wonders of the world? It cannot *all* be doom, gloom and destruction." He waves a hand around, indicating the grove. "You are *in* a *poem*. To tell another of this place, it is poetry on the lips - 'I walked through the white mist to a grove of rose-leafed willows, chiming songs between them, branch to branch on a windy morning.' - Is that not living poetry?"

Gale tugs absently on a strand of hair, pondering. "It is... a kind of poetry, I guess. I am not one for words, Taran-heart, so I cannot say for sure what would make a good poem and what would not."

"Beauty is poetry," says Taran with simple cheer, booted feet swinging. "The words from the heart, for any emotion, those are poetry." He hops off the branch again, landing with a solid sort of sound and a chime of leaves in the tree behind him. "Gale...this is the world. Beyond politics, gain or loss, beyond the brilliance and the darkness. Allow yourself to embrace it?"

Gale chuckles, "I am not as carefree as you are," she points out. "I... find it a bit harder to let go and be openly happy." She smiles and makes a little turn around her spot. "I /do/ think it is beautiful, though."

Taran reaches out then, laughing, to pull Gale in toward him - but facing her out, toward the wood, as his arm drops about her waist. "Try," he offers. "You have so little time. Still yourself, and open to the world. Skin to skin, the song in the trees and the wind in your hair, the curling of the fog and the scent of the coming fall and the river just out of sight. These things have always been here, beautiful before you knew of them and beautiful after we are both gone. Open to them, and take them with you." He bends forward to put a kiss in her hair. "Take it *all* with you."

Gale's eyes close and she leans back against Taran, sighing. "I do not have the heart of a bard as you do... I am trying. It feels open and warm, and while it visits, it does not invite me as it might to you."

Taran laughs, low and gentle, and lightly hugs. "You are impatient," he says. "It is not a sudden thing. Accept the world as it is, let yourself love what is beautiful in it. Take the time for it."

"I love you, does that count?" Gale asks, tipping her head back to peer up at Taran. "Is it at least a start to loving everything else that is beautiful?" She smiles, a hand dropping down to rest on top of his.

Taran smiles at that, and turns his hand to close about hers. "Can you see, at least, what beauty I find in it?" he asks. "T'is a reflective sort of regard, all in all, but look at this place that you have seen now - that perhaps no one else you know has ever heard of. Does this not make it, in a way, your own?"

Gale nods, "I can see the beauty and why you love it," she murmurs, her fingers tightening over Taran's. "But I cannot let myself open up to it as you can. You have had so much longer to try and find the way to be loved and love a place such as this."

Taran rests his lips briefly against Gale's hair. "And yet, when we have exhausted ourselves rolling on riverbanks, do you not look at the world, just for a moment, and realize how good a place it is? There is a fitness, a rightness...a perfection of inner balance, knowing for just a little while where one stands in relation to perfection, and that one is part of it."

A smile curves Gale's lips upwards. "I guess, if you were to put it like that... there is a peace and beauty after we can finally go no further. I think when I am curled into your arms is when I am the most at peace and can find the beauty that exists in this world."

Taran hugs lightly. "Try to find that place," he says softly. "And look upon this wood, and listen to its songs, with that mind and that heart."

Gale breathes out, "I think I can do that," she murmurs, pressing her lips together. "Or at least try. It is sometimes comforting to call on the memories of us in quiet together to help ease the anger that sometimes flows through me. Makes me sometimes lose complete control of my powers."

Taran tugs Gale down against the trunk of a willow, interposing himself between her and the bark. "Sit with me a bit, understand you are not alone. Open to the singing of the trees. Just listen and be, with me, for a few moments."

"Your friendship ensures that I am not alone," Gale says with a faint smile. "For this, I am grateful. Even if I do not see you as often as everyday..." She twists to look up at Taran. "I have belonged to the world of Shadow for so long... it makes it difficult for me to find the simple pleasures and comfort in what is around me."

"The world is neither Light nor Shadow," says Taran quietly. "Both hold sway, the children of both hold sway. I have felt it is important to remember this; we have no less right to the world than any other. We should treasure it. It is so easy to feel that the world joins the human belief that we are unworthy of it, but it is not so." He waves a hand at the wood. "The trees sing for us the same as for a sun-kissed, or an emperor, or a peasant. I find acceptance in that."

Gale squeezes Taran's hand. "It is easier for you to say that, because you believe in balance. I believe in belonging to either one or the other. There is no Light in me. If there was, my touch to the Shadow has long since stamped it out."

"And mine?" asks Taran lightly, gently combing his fingers through Gale's hair. "I am not ungifted with the Shadow; would you say, then, that striving for the centerpoint is a futile exercise on my part?"

Gale presses her lips together with thought, "I... would say that no matter how hard you try, there will never be an equality. For some reason, the Shadow manifested itself in you, and gave you a gift to control and learn. You cannot now be a part of the Light. There is no balance in those that have been Shadow Touched, or Sunkissed."

Taran 'mmms' quietly, nose in Gale's hair. "You may be right," he says. "But I also know that if I do not try, I will never succeed. I strive not for Light but for that place where the Shadow meets the human; I feel that is not beyond my reach, though it may take great effort, or some greater understanding which I now lack. So many of us on either side of the scale lose ourselves to this power granted us. Humanity may be beyond all of us, but there is yet value in the striving." He smiles. "There is beauty in the river and the singing trees."

"To reach humanity... for that, I have been striving," Gale admits. "But there comes a time when I feel you have to choose between your humanity, and to become a more powerful being, to be nothing more than the gifts you were granted," she murmurs. "When you choose to take the power, and forsake humanity, you can never go back... corruption occurs when you want both. The power and the humanity. And once corrupted, we cannot go back."

Taran nods. "Aye," he says, a bit sadly. "Though I think there may be a way, it is a path I can feel only dimly at present. It is natural, I think, to seek power - touched, kissed, or neither, we seek strength. But it is in how that power is used, and to what ends, that one discerns the noble from the grasping, the benevolent from the cruel. Faeyd is very, very powerful. Yet for all that great power, that mastery over Shadow's weave, I do not think I would call him corrupt. And I wonder at that."

Gale smiles slightly, "Corrupt... perhaps not in the traditional sense, Taran-heart, but I would call him corrupt, in his own way. You cannot have the mastery that he does without some form of corruption." She shakes her head, "But he is not evil. Would you call me the traditional form of corrupt?"

Taran frowns a bit at that. "I do not know," he says. "As I am not sure I quite understand what you mean by corruption, in that case."

Gale falls silent for a moment, fiddling with Taran's hand. "Corrupt... taken so far by power that you have tilted sense of humanity, or no real touch of it at all." She sighs. "I /am/ corrupted. I have been for a very long time. When you just want more and more... more power, more humanity, more recognition..." She makes a slightly frustrated gesture. "Any person is capable of becoming corrupted, but those that have given themselves up to power are more so because we have, more or less, given a pact to our respected source of power. It is not conscious, but it is true. When I took on my third school of magic, I realized just how much I had given up in order to venture that deeply into the Shadow."

Taran 'hm's a bit contemplatively at that. "Would you call me corrupt, then?" he asks curiously. "I find that I can do something...I embrace it, I learn to master it. And I find that in so doing, something else comes to my hand - as with the rune you showed me, leading to a gateway I did not know I could make. And it does cost me something, I know, to do something most people can never do. Yet I am not certain the loss of humanity equates directly with corruption. There is yet a piece of that ...equation, that scale... that seems to be left out."

Gale shakes her head, "You learn because you have a yearning to learn," she replies. "Those of us corrupt have given up a piece of ourselves purposefully in order to find more power. When I took on my third school, I did not know /what/ I gave up, but I would have gladly given it for the stronger powers."

"Or maybe love blinds your sight," Taran chides, gently teasing. "But I think I know. You did not even notice the trees were singing, when you came in answer to my call. And perhaps if you had come alone, you would have passed this wood by."

"Most likely, yes," Gale says with a frown. "It takes you to bring out the humanity that I lost." She sighs, "It comes naturally with you near me. I think this is natural, not corruption that brings me closer to humanity. More than I've felt since I was a child."

"If it makes you weaker in your own eyes, do you regret it?" asks Taran curiously. "Is the ghost of memory worth clinging to? Or is it only that you do not wish to let it go a second time?"

Gale sighs, "In truth, the greatest weakness comes from the vulnerability that is you," she admits. "I have been cautious about how people see us together, or else someone may eventually be smart enough to use you against me." She turns to press a kiss against Taran's cheek. "You are my greatest friend, and could not stand to see something happen to you."

Taran smiles as he brushes a kiss across Gale's forehead. "A most risky proposition," he says. "You might be afraid, but you might also be wrathful. And you, my dear, can do a great deal of damage when you are angered."

"Oh, they would not survive the encounter if they harmed you in any way," Gale says, her lips twisting into a scowl. She takes Taran's hand, holding onto it tightly. "To try and use you to bait me would be to sign their death sentence."

Taran smiles, squeezing her hand in turn. "I am *here*, Gale," he says gently. "I completely fail to see or sense any ambush in the trees. We shall stay apart when you make your hunts. What else can be done?"

Gale nods, "My hunting has proven successful so far, with none harmed," she says quietly. "There is no more death to be had, if I can help it." She leans in to Taran again, smiling. "I still enjoy coming to you at night," she murmurs. "To share the warmth of a fire or a tavern's bed."

Taran laughs quietly, wrapping an arm around her in a hug. "Aye, you are impossible to please," he teases. "In a tavern you bemoan the enclosed spaces. Out here, you speak of fires and beds. I shall just have to move a sturdy bed into the middle of a wood and perhaps cover it with a tarp to keep it dry until it is needed, so you do not lose the night sky."

Gale laughs and nods, "Yes... I think that will do quite well," she says with some consideration. "The warmth of a bed, but the beauty of the night. I am is always going to be a creature of night."

"There is nothing wrong with that," Taran replies lightly. "The moons and stars are never so beautiful in daylight. Myself - sunrise and sunset, those are my favorite times."

"The silence of night has always had an allure for me," Gale admits. "There are very few that stir in the evening, and I feel safer then than any other time of the day."

"Odd, when you think about it," Taran muses. "Humans need their eyes, usually, to know danger. Our ears and noses are not so good as many wild creatures'. Night blinds us, forces us to rely on lesser senses. Yet for you it is safety."

Gale smiles slightly, "I can disappear more easily into the night. Even if it is just a phaseshift to become harder to see in the shadows." She runs her fingers over Taran's cheek. "You can feel a person approaching before they do so... an extra sense that does not rely on eyes." She nibbles on her lower lip, "I dislike dawn."

Taran nods a bit. "Understandable enough," he agrees. "Sometimes it is hard for me as well. Are you staying, tonight? Or have you work to attend to?"

Gale slides her arms around Taran, "If you want me to stay, then I will," she murmurs. "If you have anything to do, I can leave and then return to you later when you find a quiet spot to settle for the night. I like spending my nights with you. I wish it could be on a more regular basis."

Taran smiles. "Tonight, I think I want to stay here and listen to the night-song of the trees," he says. "It would be nice if you also stayed. Will you?"

"I will," Gale promises. she leans in to kiss Taran briefly. "I would never turn down your company at night. Night may be the most peaceful time, but it can also be the most lonely."

"Well then, we shall rest here," Taran replies cheerfully. "You and I, the stars and the singing trees. Perhaps before dawn comes I will teach you to love them - or at least remember them fondly."

Gale chuckles, "I remember everything surrounding us at night fondly," she replies. "I have a new fondness for the shoreline, considering how many nights we have spent out there."