An old brownstone sits upon one of the oldest avenues in the old city of Tours. While it has a view of the river, it is a view of the industrial parts of the waterway, far from the tourist hotspots of the cathedral and palace. The brownstone has seen better days... years... centuries. It was built in the 19th Century as part of a new age, a new hope that has by now gone sour with disappointment.
     To be in a house with walls that did not let in every breeze or with a roof that did not leak would make me uncomfortable. This place is old, falling apart, neglected, decaying -- all of the comforts of home! I have enough money. My fellows say: Iovis, how come you do not move to the centre ville, eh? Join us in the new age. New age. I have seen new ages come and go and always it is the same age.
     No, this place suits me...
     I woke with the shadows still on my shoulders. I sat on my bed, ran my hand through my hair and told the girl of the Rose to get out. They come to me because I let them be free. They like how danger tastes. They like to be fucked by danger, to live and to die, and somehow survive it all.
     I scratch my back where I felt it last, that sneaking suspicion that I am being followed. I snort at it. Me. Followed. Good luck with that. Tonight, I will be expected at court. I will be late. They know better than to expect otherwise. In the meantime, I will go out. And I will see if this feeling stays with me...
     He appears well after sunset, some two hours after. He is dressed similar to before, the black leather pants with the black leather coat. His hair is curly, wild, like he just woke with it that way and his hand through it only makes it go feral. The black boots are American. The tee-shirt is black, the silkscreen of some band. His senses are pricked, his dark eyes alert.
     I am onto you. Come, you want to follow me, come on. Iovis grins, his cherubic face suddenly wicked, and he laughs in a dare, heading into the side alley that belongs to his building.

     He slipped away to one of his lairs, letting shadows pull him from this city away to another world. He slept, confident that he would wake and return before you left - Time being what it is, and so different between this world and that.
     And now he has returned. He waits, patiently. Did anyone know that he could be patient? Gwilym Gwyn Garu, who can't even be comfortable in his own skin for ten seconds in a row! But when he is hunting - oh, oes, then he can be patient, children. Oes, indeed.
     He is a shadow among shadows, his cloak and boots archaic. His clothes are skin-tight and seamless, as if he's grown the black cloth as a second skin. (It is, in fact, if put under a microscope, pudding-skin; finely grained as crushed sugar, taken from a beast which never was in this world at all. Science's attempts to disprove it would make it melt away, unrecorded, unlamented. He wears it against his skin with the confidence of a man who's killed worse shadows than this.
     The boots are kid leather; so are the gloves. The cloak is weighted, padded over the weights so as to make no noise. The hood pulls forward to shadow the brilliance of his emerald vision, the brightness of red-gold hair. A thief knows well to hide his valuables, to say nothing of his distinctive markings.
     Gwilym watches from above as you go into the alley, head tilted to one side; he is careful. Cautious as he makes his way along a gable, slow to let himself down onto the ground. See without being seen, oes? That is the way...

     He is a bawdy thing, this Whomever He Is.
     He knows you are behind him. He cannot hear you, but he can feel you. He knows the pin-pricks of a thief's knife without having to feel the blade or even see it.
     The alley's darkness surrounds him until he dissolves in it, a glance given in the direction he believes you to be. And he slips away with a taunting chuckle. You want me? Catch me. Kill me. Thrill me. Iovis Macarelli steps into the Void.
     A stiletto in hand, he cuts against the shades of the shadow realm, marking them as surely as he would words in sand or soil. "Dear Cat: You should not play with your food. Signed, The Mouse." Ha, I am being too clever.
     Snorting a laugh, Iovis dashes and disappears, a swirl of shadowy smoke curling in his wake. When he steps out of shadows, he is in another alley, in another city. It is Paris again. Another night in Paris. He heads out of the alley of widows to the avenue. Prostitutes stand here and there. Some of them leaning against lamplights. Others leaning against walls of Montmartre structures.

     He reads your writing, and his head tilts in the other direction. The Mouse is uttering a challenge to the Cat. Green eyes glint, and the corners of his mouth quirk in the shade of his hood. Challenge accepted.
     I always thought of myself more Fox than Mouse, but when I am pursuing, I suppose I can be Cat instead...
     Reaching through shadows is something with which he is intimately familiar. He has been caressed by shadows; now, he gathers them in his hands, platting them around himself like reeds or rushes, pulling them around himself soundlessly. You have a brief respite as he follows your trail.
     "Shadow, twilight, treble, in and out," Gwilym whistles the words softly, the cry of an eagle's tongue muted. One foot touches briefly onto the Shadow Road; skims it, and then is gone. Tours vanishes; replaced by Paris. Oh, oes, he recognizes Paris.
     The last time I was here for long, my mother was angry with me, and my brother and I fell into one another and never quite fell back out. There is a prick of anticipation upon my blood whenever I find myself in Paris since; what will I fall into this time? Will it be as pleasurable? Will it have as much weight, as much momentum?
     Do I hope that it won't ... or that it will ...
     But he cannot stay as he presently looks, not and go unnoticed if he emerges from shadows. He remains in the mouth of the alley, a pair of green eyes peering out to search you out. Do you feel him, again on your trail? He waits a moment; he can summon up a thousand outfits, a thousand disguises if he needs to. But what you do, first - that's what he needs to see.

     You are a persistent puss. You are still back there...
     Iovis does not glance back at you, nor does he waltz with the whores down the French boulevard -- though he was tempted, hovering pimps notwithstanding. He walks. That is all he does. He does not run...
     And yet space folds for him...
     He moves five times the speed of a quick-walking, similarly heighted Italian man. He is a blur in the darkness, a breeze and a premonition to those he passes, but no more. Are you as quick as you are resourceful? Are you as fast as you are free to move about in shadows as he?
     Iovis ducks into an alley, the shadows pulled around him once more. The smoky darkness renders himself invisible on the material plane, though he is not yet striding on the astral. He takes a position on a fire escape and he waits. He waits to see who follows.

     Persistence is not his middle name (Fiona doesn't hold with Puritan notions of naming a child in the hopes of them acquiring the trait) but he is nonetheless keeping with you. He does not have the skill of speed, no. But he has other skills; and, as any good thief does - he cheats.
     Instead of breaking into a run, he attaches the shadows, dropping from one to the next. It is night-time; there are shadows everywhere. As you begin to gain speed, he stops merely walking, instead hopping from shadow to shadow to shadow, leapfrogging from one small pond to the next.
     An alley. If it were me, I would set up an ambush; find out exactly who it is who's after me and worry about why after. Unless I were in a hurry; if I were, then I would step through and be done with. I? I will do neither of those things. I will not walk so readily into a trap I could have set myself.
     Gwilym steps through to what you would term the astral, but which he simply calls the Shadow Road. Into a puddle of shadow he gazes as if looking upon a mirror; or into a bath, for to part them, he sticks one small finger into the corner to keep a peephole for himself. He does not see anything, and that's odd enough to make him frown; you aren't on this side, you aren't apparently on that side. Where are you?
     If you do not show yourself, I in my curiosity may have to do something rash...

     So, you are smart enough to know not to enter the alley after me, and clever enough to disappear into thin air. I hate you suddenly. Well, what is there to do? I am not going to run around all night with you on my ass. Not without knowing who you are, si? And maybe you buy me dinner first.
     If you are so clever, figure this puzzle out...
     Cloaked in shadows, he steps from alley to shadow-road. By the time he makes an appearance, he is already disappearing, the smoky blackness dissipating to Nothingness here. Who knows where he has gone?
     But floating on the shaded air, twirling like a leaf shrugged off a tree, is a five-by-seven card. Like a tarot card in make and design, its surface is highly stylized, bearing a symbol of black crossed-stiletti on a red field of broken hearts with gold coins in the corners.
     A calling card from the Genoan...
     On the back of the card...
     Nothing...
     Where has he gone? Where the shadows take him, where the blackness like smoke hovers on the air before it disappears...

     You appear; you disappear. Enigmatic and elusive; it makes me laugh. It piques my interest - and for too long, I have grown dull. Tarnished, like silver left to rot, uncaressed by greedy fingers. This polishes me with intent.
     You appear, you disappear, and in your wake, you leave something behind. Cursed? Trapped? Layered with some little-known and long-lost venom of South American tree snakes? Probably not; if you wanted me dead that badly, I suspect I'd already be dead. Either that, or you would haul me in close first. Of what use is a chase without a satisfying kill?
     Still, I will be cautious. Letting my guard down now would be foolish.
     Gwilym draws a long-bladed knife from the folds of his cloak; what, go unarmed? You must be mad. He nudges the card; it fails to dissipate into smoke. It fails to turn into a three-headed hydra. It behaves as a card does and should. Then and only then does Gwilym reach with gloved hand to take the card from its levitating location, plucking it like an apple; turning it this way and that, one eyebrow rising under cover of his shadowed hood.
     And he smiles.
     A new challenge, where the initial one left off. You want to be pursued as much as I do. If you didn't... you would never leave behind clues to whet my appetite...
     The card is tucked with care into one of the many hidden pockets of his thief's cloak. He wraps shadows around himself, stepping sideways from the haunts of men and shadows alike, to the brighter world in which he makes his home.
     "I have coin enough to make someone persuade you to speak," Gwilym murmurs to the card in his pocket as he lands in the shade of an alley in the kingdom of Flowering Tree. Both gloved hands lift, pulling back the hood which masks the features of that kingdom's younger prince. A wave of a careless hand, and black clothes become coloured; less thief, more prince. And he strides forward with a light step and careless smile, guile and purpose hidden behind that brilliant facade.
     You have your whores, my Enigma; I have mine...

Posted by rowan at October 25, 2006 04:38 PM