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Vorpal shows up late in the evening's bonfire burn (but don't let that stop you setting your visit whenever it's appropriate! It took her a long while to figure out what she wanted to burn. She knew the concept, but the token was... trickier.
Time handled that for her.
She arrived with a simple, but functionally fantastic little candelabra she carved from wood, with her own fingers. It felt more proper to make it herself, with herself. Half of the nine stands are empty. Five have plain white candles, tiny ones, stuck in. The center stand, the tallest, is the only one that's lit.
She sits, and sticks the hannukyiah in the dirt at her feet, and takes the shamash to help light the other four. "This is what you get," She said to the flames as the newborn fires started to melt their way down the little candles. "Halfway through. You get the first half. The one where I was..."
Scared.
"Nervous. About reaching out to my people. About what might keep me separated if I tried."
She watches the little flames eke their way down the candles.
"But the only thing separating me right now are those nerves. That's what you get. The nerves. The dithering, the distractions. You get that first half.
I get the half that comes next."
She sits there, in the quiet and the dark and the hot front and frozen back.
Waiting for the candles to burn down.
Late is precisely when Sigrun arrives. Late enough so that the waking Darklings will have come. Late enough that the crepuscular Beasts are in bed. Late enough that the early risers such as herself are either well and truly abed, or like her too delerious to have their testimony to hold up in court.
She's done her best to conceal what she's been up to. She's bathed, she's washed herself clean, taken healing fruits, and then sown herself anew in heaped ash. Painted her face again in cracked corpsewhite. Blackened her teeth anew, tasted the bitter black on her tongue as she bathed it in it. Until her mouth tasted like the paste of the grave. Or ruin and loss. She's wearing her most threadbare chemise wrapped tightly for modesty by a white shroud, binding her chest tightly like a corpse. It's held in a knot pinned shut by a shattered sword.
There are ravens feathers in her hair, sooty tears either real or genuine beneath her eyes. She walks with the assistance of her spear, her shield nowhere to be found. She looks tired, though her eyes are somewhat wild and unable to focus for long on much of anything. She's carrying a bundle swaddled in her shield arm, something precious. And she reaks, just positively reaks of her own arterial blood. (edited)
The smell hits first. Blood. Fresh blood, stolen from its channel before it did its duty. Jackie stands and folds her hands behind her back, beneath her shawl- but no threat manifests. Just paint, coal, saline, ash. Her fingers slide off Sigknifr.
And off the other Knife.
She's shocked all the same to see its Sigrun bearing this scent, Sigrun with a bundle and her spear. She rushes to her, touches her shoulders, matching her speed as she triple checks. Any dangers? No? She's not here to stop or control Sigrun. Just to be present, be alert.
No dangers.
"Sigrun..? How can I help?" Hesitant, worried, seeking ways to help, not to question her aims. The fight, if there was one, is over, and that puts V's best talents to pasture. She offers her arm and hand, if they'll be easier than the spear, a shade at hand to collect it if so.
The hannukyiah stuck in the ground loses its first, sputtering candle, an eager flame working down the wick ahead of its time. (edited)
Brave face. Shoulders back. Smile, little duck, and paddle. "Hmm?" It's not that she didn't think not to try and hide the smell of her injury to herself. It's that she thought it would make a difference. The fact Sigrun is trying to play off and conceal a prior obviously pretty bad wound isn't really like her, though. "Oh. Jackie." Her eyes manage to focus on Jackie for an appreciable span of time. Her eyes get real big because Jackie is wicked cool to look at normally, but in shrooms she's mindblowing. "Whoa. Jackie.". The hands on her shoulders are helpful there for a moment, as she wobbles a little on her feet. She laughs about that, though, and then looks down at the bundle in her arms.
"She made me choose. We always are made to choose. I never cared for choosing." She bounces the bundle in her arm, resting it on her hip. "It was peaceful and quick. I gave her that. I sang her death. I told her we would be together again in the next life." She looks back up to Jackie with a quiet hiss of resolve. "I didn't want to do it." Then she leans away a bit, waiting to see how the admission lands. "But I wanted this more."
And so she sets her eyes on the fire. "I'm tired. Help me to the fire, Jackie. Please."
The wobble brings Jackie's grip some strength, from connection to stabilizer, and there's something on the detached, vulnerable rambles that speaks the truth of it before Sigrun gets to it. Every word, a mantra. 'Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.'
She smiles when Sigrun repeats her name. A gentle thing, sincere and small, full of care and absent judgment.
She. "Mother Freya?" V guesses quietly as she moves to pluck the spear and hand it to a waiting shade. One arm circles her back. The other takes her hand. She can only tip into Jackie or away from their clasped hands, now. But Jackie's behind, ensuring the path forward isn't obscured. "To the fire, and to the one in our hearth, after. Safe as houses." She tried to think. Who did she kill? The bundle didn't fit a body. But what it did fit was elusive.
"Who did she ask you to give up, love..?" The pace was hers. Every step supported, not a one hurried.
Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh shit. Sigrun's little face journey is pretty obvious. She thought to hide her injury. She forgot she's a blabbermouth around her motley. Maybe if she says nothing, she won't have to tell the truth or lie. Clever! That works for about four of her slow steps forward until she starts to feel guilty and slows to a stop. She is, in the end, too Sigrun to pull off even this most cursory of intrigues. And so she deflates a little and resumes her walk forward.
"My wrath. My war. My fair heart glad of blood. And my Sigsverd." Sigrun bounces the bundle in her arm indicatively to the sound of muffled rattling. "She is bone and dust. As I am bone and dust. As you are bone and dust. We are all measured and our times accounted for. So I intend to live." She assures Jackie in her waning ecstatic stupor. "I will live when I am here. I will live while I am here and no longer."
Once they reach near enough the fire, Sigrun starts to ease herself down unsteadily to the ground, depending on Jackie's help for balance what with the world lagging behind in her perceptions.
Distantly, Vorpal thinks to wonder about bone and dust. Is she? Really? But if Sigsverd can be...
"She asked for your heart, and left you your hearth? Is that the way of it, love?"
The easing is enough. Vorpal is not possessed of such a thing as just two hands, and they all help. She's already bled tonight- no need to tear the knee or aught else.
"You have stood and bled for our family so often," She murmurs. "You WILL live. And others will stand and bleed to ensure you do. I will. You told me once that you fought to secure a place, a safety, for what came-"
A pause, telling. The sound of a smile in the word to complete the phrase. "-next."
"Yes," Sigrun agrees with a sad smile that cracks her corpse paint further and sends a chip or two falling onto her shrowd. "Yes, you have it exact." She sinks down to her knees fully, resting back on her ankles, and finally slumps forward with Krilsbane until the spear clatters to the hard cold ground. She sets the bundle of furs down before herself, then pushes back upright to lean against Jackie.
"Only I was wrong, Jackie. Honestly, I'm wrong so often I'll never know why you all ever do what I say. There never is next. Next only exists in our heads. We live in now. We only ever have now. We only ever are now. Everything about us. That's real. Is now."
"So if now is all I will ever have? I choose to live it fully. With you all. Until I can't any longer."
That said she begins to open up the bundle. inside is Sigsverd, lovingly dressed in her best dress sheathe, her tang cracked clean at the bevel by a hand that knew where that hairline was. Because she made it herself. The hilt and guard are dressed in a baby onesie. Yellow, embroidered with three little cats chasing each other's tails. She carefully undresses hilt and crossguard, takes the onesie for herself, and balls it up, holding it close to her heart.
She sends a glance up and aside to Jackie, then lifts a finger to her lips. Shhhh.
The spear isn't left to clatter. Enough of Sigrun's work will- has- perished tonight. Darkness catches it with all the delicacy of a father scooping his toddler out of the third nosedive off the couch this hour.
"You might remember the times you were wrong. We remember the times you were right, and there are so, so many of such times."
Her words ring true- mostly. "Next might only exist in our heads, love. But that existence lets us know how now needs to be. I saw a Next a few days ago, and it was wrong. I couldn't bear it. So I unwove the loom and I rewove it right. That Next still lives in my head.
But it will never be a Now. And neither will whatever Next you gave up Sigsverd for, your heart glad of blood for. You have killed that Next and I have every faith that the Next you are steering our family to is the best it could be. I trust you because mistakes and wrongs and all, you will never stop steering for a better shore .
I don't think you know how." (edited)
"If I ever stop, right my course," is all that Sigrun has to say on that particular topic. It's well said, and well said praise and deserved praise are not something Sigrun's are shy about. "Thank you, Jackie." Sigrun stuffs the onesie into the knot of her shroud for safe keeping, then looks down for the last time on her beloved companion and truest friend through so many, many battles.
Her fingers trace over the rune she hammered in the tang. The rough, slightly clumsy evidence of her early work around the base of the crossguard. All the things about her that she grew to recognize as faults in her work that she never had the heart to bring to Sigsverd's attention. A mother's love forgives so many faults, and she loved this sword as truly as she will love her child should it come.
She's cried all she can cry tonight, however. This isn't about sorrow for her, it's about peace and remembrance for Sigsverd.
The four raven feathers in her hair, clipped there with copper wire fixed to runes, are plucked from her braids and tossed atop the pile. A fehu. An odthala. A berkano. And sigrun. And so Sigrun lifts up the furs and shattered steel, the leather and sinew and copper caps. The buckles and buckleather, the runes which spell her fate.
She chants the seal on her night long prayer and trance and journey, reciting the runes painted on herself in blood beneath the wrappings. "*Fehu. Odthala. Berkano. Sigrun." The lifted oblation is then tossed onto the fire with a great whoosh of air and rising shower of sparks. The furs go up immediately, and it isn't long before the pinging of fraying damascus folds can be heard.
"Of course." Two words, quietly spoken, sincerely meant.
The runes are seen and the feathers thus understood. The observance of Sigsverd is left to be, Vorpal's focus on sharing the moment. Her support does not undermine or supplant, it is given to support, to lift tired limbs when they sag, to let Sigrun do as Sigrun must.
Not to dictate those actions.
She notes, distantly, the last of five lit candles guttering, and sends cradling, dark hands to bring it to her far side. To wait it's time and it's turn. That wick, too, is measured. Its time accounted for. For now, it lives.
Sigrun is so tired. Bone tired. Exhausted. A stomach roiling from consumed shrooms long since vomited out across the floors of Sighall. The growling of her stomach speaks to a gnawing huger, too. But the weaeriness is the greater weight, and she chooses to clump against Jackie rather than do any other thing.
She has sat many vigils in her day. She has held the hands of dying men. She has taken lives looking up in her eyes and asking to be taken. She has sung the deaths of traitors and mourned the falling of beloved enemies. And now it's this little candle's turn.
She is not Jewish. She was raised Lutheran. She speaks Faroese. Not Hebrew. But this is the light's final moments, and it should not die alone.
Her voice is brittle and whisper light, and tragically painfully beautiful. Making the most trite, most saccharine, most anodyne of child bible camp songs into a dirge and a promise.
"This little light of mine,
"I'm gonna let it shine,
"Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine,
"...let it shine."
Jackie thought she was here to support Sigrun. To help her do what she must. And she was, and she had. Even now, much of Sigrun's weight- and, statistically, all of one(?) other's- rested, supported, against or by Jackie.
But when that fragile voice raises to push, to give the dying moments of Jackie Drexel's fear of connecting to her people some comfort, one tired light to another...
Once, long ago, Jackie took up a burden, and a kith, for a dying sibling. She carried that kith to where it had to go, and there, she gave it over to be reunited. And that might have been the end of it.
But Now is built on a thousand thousand Thens, and this Then persists in the quiet of the candle's passing.
Sigrun might see.
She might not.
But that tragically delicate little song brings tears to Jackie's eyes as she casts the lightless hanukkyiah into the flames.
And the shadow
weeps
stars.
She does. But she's also tripping shrooms, so.
That will escape not her notice, simply her comprehension for now. It's Winter now, after all. Someone should get to walk away from this with a secret for a little while longer, at least.
Sigrun will talk to anyone. About just about anything. It can be hard to get her to shut up at times. She is always moving, doing, building, talking. It is a rare gift, a truly and startlingly rare thing to have her conscious and in one's presence and silent, content, and still. Sharing a silence with a friend is proof of friendship. Sharing a silence with Sigrun is proof of devotion.
Then she takes Jackie's hand, moves it to her own belly, and puts both her hands to rest over it. Letting her share in that, too.
"Happy Hannukah, hon."
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