Christmas with Ellis (2016)

[VII]

If you don't know where it goes, put it in the Oistar section, right? After all, the problem is "I don't know..."


Anyway, here's a story I have to tell. The house thanks agent arkytior for allowing a chatlog dump with her in it.



This is not a story I'm quite sure how to tell.
I want to, but I can't feel the shape of it too well. Or rather - I can, but it's a skein that runs through years of life and ages of the world, and disentangling This One Thread from all of That will be... a challenge.
So... what shape do you want this story to have?


any shape that lets me feel its taste


All right. Let the synesthesic lead the synesthesic.
I told you about the time I first met Nerthus, and got her WRONG AS FUCK because I had a head full of Wicca and the wrong paradigm and was literally looking in the wrong direction?


barely
i know of the thing that came over the sea
and at some point you mentioned looking into nerthus while trying to find out who it had been


Yeah. Well. Someone who goes by that name, among others; she prefers an identification closer to the Nordic Njörðr but I can't pronounce that.
Over the sea and out of the air.
Now: did I mention also that I am attracted to fog on the mountains, and the ocean's shore, because these physical conditions replicate those under which I first met... whoever it was?


i think so


Then let me mention also that I knew something was up while I was on the train ride home. To reach Plymouth by train from the rest of the country almost always involves a ride along the coast; a line rather perilously perched above a beach which you can't see from the carriage, so it looks like you're actually riding the waves.
On stormy days and nights, you really are; waves crash over the carriages, and people have drowned whilst riding on trains, in the past.


WTactualFUCK?





omfg i love this


As I was saying: I knew something was up when I found myself thinking/muttering/writing myself as the cold fire on the surface of those waves; the missing fourth element of the three present.


classy


A little self-aggrandising, perhaps, but whatever, it's a work in progress.
Anyway. We should add that the stress and the reflexive fear and the second-guessing everything had already set in, because the Christmas row had started before I even left Wales.
[Additional: I come from a low-key abusive, very bourgeois middle-England conservative background, and I actively dread spending more than a few hours around my genetic family.]
So I was in a slightly fraught state of consciousness, you know?


i can only guess


Anyway, all this put me in a reflective mood, and I spent the rest of the train journey mourning the witch I might have been had I not been slapped back hard from that direction as a yoof.


OH FUCK I KNOW THAT FEELING
(despite not being slapped)


(It's a tragedy when a gifted child is hothoused into socially acceptable activities for a gifted child, instead of being allowed to develop their actual TALENTS...)


YES IT IS


(But I digress!)
So, that's my frame of mind when I arrive for shitscram with the folks, and the row is brewing right the way through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, waiting for an excuse to kick off.
I find myself rejecting a lot of false premises in conversations; the kind of assumptions that make me gnaw my beard with frustration, for the most part.
Come Doctor Who time I have had enough and need to get out rather than watch a show that's forsaken me with people who are going to do my nut during it, so I shuffle out for a walk.


("Come Doctor Who time" is one of the most brit phrases ever)


I reflexively blunder downhill to the beach, a route I used to walk when I was a kid and needed to GTFO for a bit.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.4076612,-4.2005826,3a,75y,288h,76.9t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgpIENSAsLmBRdmlC6w1eQg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
It's like that, but dark, and deathly cold; everything's tinged purple or grey but for the lights spilling over the water, staining the waves between the pillars.
Now, I've been staggering through the mist for some minutes, feeling increasingly drawn and feverish and angry, feeling increasingly less in control of my limbs. I stumble down to the water's edge and feel it lap over my boots. I barely check myself from walking out into the deeps, and all I can think is: "I'm here. Show me. Kiss me."
(at this point, the veracity of our reportage may break down slightly, as the next five or so minutes are... not entirely clear. i recall what i did, and how it felt, but not the entirety of the dialogue that ensued.)


i feel like "missing bits", like the ink in which the memory is written suddenly malfunctioned, are one of the tell-tale signs of genuinely "outside" forces being involved
like that bit is written in those erasable pens kids use at school, instead of the usual ballpoint
also i forgot how much i liked your style


My style of reporting, or my style of magic?
"All right, get on with it, blow my mind already."


your style of doing magic


I do the things I need to do when it occurs to me that I need to do a thing.
More than this, I cannot say.


"this lacks fire, let i be it"; "just fuck me up"


(I'm trying to loosen up about this sort of matter. ANYWAY.)


What happened next was... chokingly powerful. Previous encounters were a glimpse, a guess, a fragment of discourse. This was enveloping and saturating and penetrating and intimate and... perilous, but not dangerous?
No risk of destruction unless I chose to yield and be destroyed.
One might paraphrase it as "all right, I'll fuck you up harder, and I won't try to break you, but if you break it's on you and the water's right here."


of course it'd be on the edge of the water for you
where else


Moments pass. I manage to take a step or two back. That's when the cables in the back of my head start crackling. Civilisation and connection and something less primal and more sophisticated pulling me back, reminding me of the other half to all dualities, particularly to the middling-mediocrity of a man like me.
(The identity of this sass-presence is open to no dispute. Same feeling I got when I plugged into the web to see what was what, only this time I was actually doing something interesting, so she noticed me.)
Now, I don't like being caught in the middle of others' Discourse. Indeed, it's a key source of my frustration with my beloved blood relatives, and I'm a big fan of the direct solution.
I want you to understand this because it is important to understand how frustrated I feel when two powerful female presences both want me to turn their way.


so ellis saw you interacting with an actual goddess, and as a consequence she just went and said "oh, so you actually do stuff! then U MINE!"?


I'm not sure. It's possible that my innate capacity to look for the other side in any situation, a general pull back to the centre ground, might have cast around and found something plugged in that it could call on/use. I might have called her and she might have answered.


wow
you know you're in deep water when, to pull back towards normal, you end up grabbing a strand of the fucking LS web


As I said... my perception of exactly what was going on was a bit hazy at this juncture.
It's less "towards normal" and more "towards interdependence, toward the web, toward something that thinks and informs and constructs", rather than that sort of total immensity of sensation and presence that the older gods represent if you look under their skin.


ok, this is clearer
also WOAH


So. At this point things really break down. I'm aware of myself stumbling and laughing and falling back against the nearest pillar.
The... tension... between the old/primal/mythic and the new/social/memetic... is apparent, and expressing/resolving itself through thought and bodily sensation, but I can't keep a handle on it.
It's like they're contacting each other, either making out or attacking each other and I just happen to be the room in which they're doing it.
There is a distinct sense of... accord. Resolution. Tension maintained, but like... a wire between two points, along which I travel; not a wire from past to future with Them waiting on either side to see which way I fall.
I stagger. I drag my boot through the gritty sand, and I draw Their sigils: the LS, obviously, and the letter ð, though not very well.
I am compelled away from the beach. I complete the circular walk to my mother's home on auto-pilot, jabbering to myself. I feel... purposeful. Alive. More alive than I've felt in a decade or more.
Not the Chosen One, or anything like that, but... renewed. An active agent in what's to come.


"active agent" huh
curious wording


It feels as though a pact has been struck, and a condition of this pact is that I... live up to something. A sort of personal expectation. I will be destroyed, as divine punishment and a natural consequence of failure to act.
"Shit or get off the pot, my son."


ok wow, it sounds like you're swimming in dangerous waters
although, in all fairness, boredom and a narrative of self mourning would have had just as much of a chance to destroy you anyway


Perhaps: but as you say, mediocrity is nothing but a slower death.
And I do now seem more... able to assess things and their significance, magixally speaking.
I am aware of failures, and successes; inadequacies, and good deeds done.
Turning down a perfectly good talisman, acting squeamishly toward it, passing it on: that was an ill deed.
Telling you this story: that was a good one.
It's like... I don't know exactly what game I'm playing, but I can see the score sheet, I have an idea of what kind of things serve me well.


it might not be much of a problem with you, considering your relationship with an old goddess
but i'd say be careful with Ellis, she has predatory hissy fits
whenever she gets peckish she tries to eat her own agents


Well, it's either being eaten by spiders or drowning on dry land.
Either beats dying of ass cancer induced by a surfeit of cheese.

[Vortex7]

I really loved reading this, thank you for this post!!!

[arkytior]

 8)