low sky // Cassius Ellwood-Luxe

[Altair]

27 July 1973, 18:04
Disgleirio gan-y-môr
Porthcawl, Wales

It was not a house, by any description thereof. It could be described, perhaps, as a small mansion. And old.

He didn't know if he liked it. He could sense already that there was too much history, too many chances of something wandering through the halls that noone would take notice of but him. It whispered to him, in its own language, and he felt tired.

He liked the ocean view though. The smell of the sea. The breeze playing with his hair, lightly.

And it was warm.

As he walked up to the entrance, he did not know quite with what he'd be met. As a person, he'd changed considerably. As a man, he'd visibly withered. The young Marcus Vega - the Quidditch Captain, the Head Boy, the member of the Advance Guard - had been a tall, muscular, resilient sort. Although he'd always been slender, languid in his features, the man that stood there now was thin, skeletal, as though ridden by disease. Dark hair had started greying, and his eyes were mismatched - once a stark blue, one had now turned a cloudy grey.

The cloak that draped his body was black, plain but silky and light. It danced quietly in the summer breeze. Under one arm were four books packed in brown paper.

An arm extended, knuckles knocking on wood.

It had been fourty years.

[Cassius Ellwood-Luxe]

It was unusual, perhaps, for a man such as himself to answer his own front door.

His grandfather had employed servants, his father had retained them, and Lysander had inherited them. All of that had fallen to the wayside in the aftermath of Lysander's sudden death, and all what followed. People dispersed, fled, during wartime.

That was, of course, some time ago. Cassius was greyer than he had been, more stooped, maybe, beard neatly trimmed but peppered with silver. His face was lined, hands appropriately aged.

There were staff, these days, of course. The burden of keeping a house like Disgleirio by-the-sea was beyond the skills he'd been raised to, and-- as his grandmother often said-- was "beneath him," his station, position, birthright.

But, of course, that was why he had written to Lukas Altair in the first place.

Of blood comes all were the words chiseled into the stone at the crown of the threshold of the house, in English at the interior, Welsh at the exterior: his family's motto, determined centuries ago by a man who would have hated him, interpreted and re-interpreted by countless heads of family over ages and ages of succession. The stone was worn, but resolute, and the words themselves showed their age only at the edges of their bevel.

They dogged Cassius.

(Eve's voice, scoffing, "You could strike them, you know-- have them removed. You can do that sort of thing.")

It was tradition that stayed his hand, the weight of history that lived on in this house, despite him. There were things that were bigger than him, than his small desire for a better world, than he and his choices and his halfblood children. The house lived on, year by year, weathering Atlantic storms and bloody familial tragedies, as a reminder: you are only one small part of this wretched whole. His father, his ancestors, were all interred in the cliffs over the beaches nearby. Blood pooled everywhere around him here, dripped from eaves and seeped from walls, spoke with the voices of a thousand, living and dead, steeped in expectation of what he ought and ought not to do as someone born in the circumstances that he was.

So, Cassius answered his own front door. His own hand turned the burnished brass doorknob, and he gripped the side of the door to pull its weight forward, letting light spill into the foyer.

Two unusual men stood at the worn threshold of an ancient, breathing manor.

"Hello, Lukas." Cassius said, and he smiled.

[Altair]

Of blood comes all.

The words hovered ominously above him and set the tone for the delivery, for the coming night. With a collection of books such as those under his arm now, the reminder was on point.

He glanced at them quickly, as Cassius Ellwood-Luxe was revealed in the doorway, with a smile that could be felt but not returned, if only because he was raged and ravaged by too much else. The past month had been one of turbulence, as though he'd ripped off a bandage to an emotional wound that had never healed. Somehow, it served to propel him forward.

Now he found himself on the threshold of something new.

They were opposites, in the way that Cassius had let himself emerge by the deep pool of expectation, of taking on the duty and living a life that had been carved for him at birth. They were opposites, in the way that Altair had gone for hard rejection, had burnt their house to the ground and come out on the other side, forever changed. The name that he'd taken was his own, never soiled or defiled or superimposed on him by the external.

Now Cassius took it in his mouth for the first time, and Altair felt humble for it, in the upfront respect that he was given for his choices. Most of his schoolmates reverted to Marcus, and he did not stop them, but he also had not put much thought into their doing so. Lukas was his name, but its vocation echoed with dark shadows - it had hardly ever been used by others than the innermost circle of the Supra Mortalitas. Its utterance caused a discrepancy - a paradox - that forced its way through the cracks and crinkels to harden and freeze and cause disruption in its way.

Which was exactly what it was supposed to do.

And in that way they were the same.

Like weed in a bed of flowers, they had refused to give in. No matter the poisons they'd had to defer, they'd remained standing in a position created by their own force, becoming the center to storms of their own creation. They crystallised liked frozen moisture in mortar, building their cracks slowly, invisibly, until the structure crumbled and fell apart.

Stubbornly, the chaos commenced.

Now they stood eye to eye.

Lukas meant light, thought Altair, as he spilled into the heavy shadows of the foyer and felt at the burden of the other's choices. It weighed him down, as he kicked his shoes off and looked at his companion for the night. Already here, the walls appeared to shift, changing, revealing a wallpaper soaked with the silver splatters of blood.

He could not keep his eyes from wandering, from taking it all in.

"Where to?" he asked, absentmindedly.

[Cassius Ellwood-Luxe]

He knew the weight of a name; of course he did. And Cassius knew that there must have been a reason Marcus Vega forsook his, reaching instead for an identity self-forged, asserting a self that bloomed beyond the individual's initial creation.

Cassius had been young, self-absorbed, but he remembered the strange string of deaths at school, and how they, to a person, returned wholly changed.

Some more than others.

The man who was Lukas Altair resembled a ghost in more ways than the symbolic, with his mismatched eyes and gaunt appearance. Yet there was a whisper of the youth Cassius had known, looked up to, not terribly far beyond the surface.

He moved to shut the door, cutting the low evening sun off at the root, and shrouding them in the irritating dimness of the foyer.

"Through here," Cass said, gesturing as he stepped forward down the corridor to the left, toward the back of the house. There was a grand staircase on the right that led to the upper floors, looming over a smaller corridor that also led straight back.

It was a fairly straight shot to the Heart Room. Doors, open and closed, lined the corridor, interspersed with warmly glowing wall sconces. He could hear his grandmother talking beyond one of them, no doubt caught in a disagreement with her daughter-in-law; they got along when they needed to, bonded by the decades of misfortune they'd been made to share, their husbands both prematurely dead, the pair of them left to their devices as mistresses of the house.

It was a title Eve refused to honor fully. Cassius had long since decided it wasn't worth pressing.

There were always other matters to attend to.

The dim corridor opened up into a large hall, bathed in golden natural light. The far wall was dominated by a set of windows that spanned up three storeys, the beachy moorlands visible beyond, the sea-- calm today, blue-- peeking in from the left. The walls were burdened with shelves and shelves of books, a collection begun centuries before. Nooks set into the shelves allowed for private reading in armchairs, desks. Above, there were balcony railings set up against the open corridors of the second and third storeys, allowing a glimpse of the portrait-lined corridors of the top floors.

Near the windows was a likely-looking sitting room setup, with an old sofa and chaise arranged around a very large fireplace crowned by a landscape painting of the manor, commissioned by some patriarch years and years ago.

Cassius crossed to the table beside it, and picked up one of the bottles that sat there.

"Make yourself comfortable," he told Altair, reaching down for a pair of crystal glasses. He set to work pouring the amber liquid into each, then turned, offering it out to his guest.

"Eve won't be joining us today, I'm afraid," Cassius said, with just a hint of a smirk. He moved to settle into sofa, taking a sip from his glass and setting it on the low table between the seats. "She has business in London."

A breeze rattled one of the loose panes high on the window. He glanced at it, then back to Altair.

"I appreciate you coming all this way." Even with apparition, the trip from east coast to the west was significant. He paused, aware of the nuance of his next question. "How are you?"

[Altair]

He needed but a direction, allowing himself to be pulled into the trajectory offered, and he moved quietly but without hesitation, bathed in the gold light of Disgleirio's corridors. Voices let him know they were not alone, but the shadows did too, flickering before him in the dim light, avoiding its penetration.

Like a stream, they spilled into the heart of house and he ended up by the windows, staring out to feel a stir at the foreign landscape. Foreign not because he had not been to Wales or could not find anything like it in his part of England, but because he had grown up in love with the forest surrounding his own family's house.

The great outdoors had always meant a lot to him.

"Make yourself comfortable."

The voice of the other drew him out of his head, and he placed the pack of books on the low table in a break of routine. At this point he would usually have unpacked them with great care, spreading them on a great dining table or desk, then hold them up to the customer for their close inspection. Sitting on their golden chairs, in rooms of great portraits with carved frames, they would have offered their thoughts and snarky comments and demands of discount.

But this was no routine delivery.

Accepting the glass, he remained standing a moment longer, drifting back to the view, as though needing the light. The room was spectacular, and much to his liking, if not for the portraits on the floor above. It reminded of Muspell, if only the part that was open to the public. Most of his place was hidden on the floors underground, most as a means for confining and protecting against the things that he had dragged from the deep recesses of the world.

"Eve won't be joining us today, I'm afraid."

"That's a pity," he said - words that he meant but could not feel. For all that he would love to see Eve, it was enough to be facing one old schoolmate in his haunted manor. He caught the hint of warmth in Cassius' tone, and appreciated it, unconcerned whether it was actually meant for Altair or just spurred by a real love for the former Raven, now Cassius' wife.

"How are you?"

It was at this point that they truly made contact, when Altair turned his gaze from the view to meet and linger on the eyes of Cassius Ellwood-Luxe. It was in the tone of his voice, in the lines of his face, an expression of something real. It touched at something dark, something deep surging in Altair's chest, a ragged edge where he'd torn at the most valuable parts of his being.

And he sat down, placing one leg over the other, dragging a long-fingered hand through dark hair.

His encounters with Eve had always been saturated with his demons and he saw them now, dispersing into dark corners to soak in the secrets of the Ellwood-Luxe Family and House, silently intermingling. They would work to gather information, though not because he'd told them to. It was a long time since the fragmented creature that was Altair had been whole, and over time he'd entered into symbiosis with some of the things that he'd encountered - most often they joined with him and he simply could not get rid of them.

"I don't know," he answered, honestly. The best description that he had of his current state was feeling empty, but it was not necessarily emptiness in a bad sense. Despite the unravelling of late politics, and the fact that his vision sent him on a spin more often than not (just then, for example, he could see one of the manor's walls crumbling and falling to the ground in an eerie silence, books fluttering to the floor like snowflakes*).

"After accomplishing pretty much everything I set out to, it's as though I've finally gained access to things that I should have processed twenty years ago, and more."

His sin had always been Greed, never Pride. But he was proud, now - despite the road to getting there, he'd walked his path. And in this self-forged chaos, there was an unmistaken, if unsettling, peace.

"How about you?"

The blue of his seeing eye remained lively, a portal to the student he'd once been.

*Altair suffers from seeing things that are not real - he can sometimes tell, but often not.

[Cassius Ellwood-Luxe]

He'd always stumbled over concepts that touched on the subject of entitlement. The very thing he'd been raised thinking as his inevitable prize-- this house, its ownership, the very family itself-- had been rather unceremoniously snatched from him early in his adulthood, after all, and he'd had an incredible amount of help from those who believed in him to re-achieve the end he'd always thought of as his birthright. The end result was more or less the same as though he'd risen to the station naturally, as had been planned, but the course events had instead ground into him a hard-learned sense of humility, an appreciation for the fragility of things like station.

But hearing Altair, speaking on his youthful ambitions realized with the pride he deserved, Cassius could only raise his glass to it.

"Bravo," he said, having picked the thing up, tipping the glass toward his upturned lips. "I'll drink to that."

Forty years was practically a second lifetime; Cassius could only guess at the things that Altair strove for, especially as an ambitious young wizard with dubious connections. Altair's name occasionally came up in relation to strange goings-on, but it was always difficult to track what wasn't just rumor.

"Me-- I'm quite well, I'd say. We're all hale and healthy. It's been business as usual for some time now."

What was there more to say? His children now grown, there was a predictability to life that Cassius had to admit he had once thought would never come to him. It was a type of peculiar freedom that he would have railed against when he was young, but now, closing in on the age his own father had been when he'd passed-- admittedly young, but still-- Cassius savored it.

He studied Altair for a moment, then turned his attention to the packages on the table. He nodded to them.

"It seems you were able to find the titles I asked after, then?"