Collective Soul: Hope, Gathering
Dec. 16th, 2023 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsSeparated from Quentin, Hope finds herself hunted by strangely familiar pursuers.
The waves pushed Hope into something like shallows. The thick trunks that jutted from the water were not unlike a grove of mangrove trees, but instead of mud and silt her feet found pieces of shale while unseen creatures shrieked at her from the canopy. Beneath the surface of the water those same indistinct shapes were still moving with her, dragged along by the tide like flotsam.
Surrendering to the water had been easy... though it hadn't been anything like it usually was. The strange figures were not menacing per se, but they did make her uneasy as blood from some of the figures mingled with the water in pinkish clouds, while others crawled over each other, almost tearing into each other as they seemed to search for something. With the waves finally quiet though, Hope focused and floated up from water, silk billowing around her as she studied the writhing mass below her for a moment, but then scanned around for Quentin. He was nowhere to be found though.
Something grabbed her ankle. The texture was slimy and wooden as a rotting branch, but tendrils of it curled around her leg like fingers. At the end of it was a mangrove tree -- almost.
A face writhed in the bark, eyeless and featureless but for a keening mouth. Part of a shoulder and arm jutted from the trunk as if the tree had grown around a body. Movement flashed in the corner of her eye, and there was a sharp crack as a great armored thing emerged from the thicket to slam into the branch, breaking its grip on Hope's ankle.
"Run," came a voice.
A man in a pith helmet had appeared immediately below her, hunting rifle clutched in one hand. Blood was staining through his vest, He turned to face her and barked, "Run!"
Hope quickly rose some more, speeding away from the thicket of mangroves, but the vague figures were still writhing in the water below her. Adrenaline surged through this time and she felt her outfit change. Finely chased silver armor flowed down her shoulders and chest, inlaid with thin gold wire. Cream silk still billowed around her arms, but silver gauntlets inlaid with gold wire pulled them close to her underarms. The same cream silk floated around her legs, now revealing glimpses of the silver armor covering her legs and knee high boots. The same energy flowed up her face, a delicate headpiece pulling her hair away from her face in a complicated arrangement of braids.
"Pretty but . . . not enough."
It was the man in the hunting vest again. He was soaked to the waist from pushing through the high water, but he had managed to keep pace with her in spite of it. It was clear only sheer will had kept him going: his face was grey from exertion and blood loss.
"It is a start." Hope simply replied as she studied the figure floating next to her. He did not look very threatening with how bad he looked, even though he was still holding the gun. Something tickled her... something seemed so familiar... "But I am open to suggestions?"
The man was staring at her. There was an echo of Hope's own confusion in his expression, as if he, too, was trying to place where he knew her from. He had a horseshoe mustache a few shades darker than his greying hair, though his eyes were hidden by a pair of sunglasses. A crack spidered through one lense. He broke their gaze with a brisk shake of his head.
"Weapon," he said shortly. "You'll need a weapon." Lip curled in disgust, he looked at the rifle in his hands. "Not that I'm much help. No bullets."
She tilted her head a little. Weapons were not something she usually considered in her trips to the astral plane. "I do welcome any suggestions." Suddenly she felt something move behind her and a strange armoured thing joined the man in front of her. And suddenly a surge of energy pulsed through... it was far weaker than the one a month ago, but the 'feel' of it was unmistakable.
"Mr. Haller..." She whispered softly.
The armored thing lumbered to a halt. Easily nine feet tall, it had the lumpy abstraction as a figure made from play doh. Its face, if it had one, was covered by a bronze plate. Like the hunter it appeared to have taken heavy damage. Its steel body was blackened and dented in places, and liquid that might have been oil leaked from between the plates. It turned the glass lenses of its face on her. Around its neck had been engraved the words "TERMINUS EST".
The hunter's expression didn't change. It wasn't a simple lack of recognition, it was as if the words hadn't registered at all. "Suggestions she says," he muttered, slicing his eyes towards the armored thing. "What about you? You got an endgame in mind?"
The behemoth turned from the hunter back to Hope, as if considering this. When it spoke its voice sounded strangely young.
"I remember . . . a sword."
"Yes, we created a sword together before." Hope easily confirmed. "You want to do the same again? We can certainly try.." Hope held out her hand, though something niggled in the back of her head.
The hunter gave the creature a dubious look. "You want to put yourself in her hands?" he asked.
"You keep shooting blanks if you want. But they'll keep coming for her." Unperturbed, the creature reached out to Hope with a limb that terminated in something like a mace. As it drew close to her fingertips the steel seemed to flow into her hand, reforming itself into a hilt and the merest stub of a blade, snapped off almost to the pommel.
The hunter spat a curse. "Not even half a blade," he muttered. "You want something done right . . . fine."
He, too, extended a hand, and sublimated himself into the weapon. His addition did not complete the sword: the blade it formed was only half the length it should have been, its edge chipped and ragged, but better than an empty hilt.
Eyeing the weapon, Hope hefted it carefully. Something still felt off and the sword glowed with a faint aura, patterns of red, yellow and orange in many different shades playing over it... that hadn't been there before. It was more clear than ever that this sword was a part of Mr. Haller. Letting out a slow sigh, she turned around. What she needed to do, she couldn't do by running away.
Turning around, she held the slender rapier, even only half completed, at the ready and sped back towards the water, her silk skirts billowing after her.
Roots erupted from the surface of the water to grasp at her skirts, but they were clumsy with confusion, and she more agile. She dodged a gull that flew with the hands of a woman instead of wings only for a dolphin, burdened by a humanoid shape with outstretched arms fused to its spine, to leap into the air before her.
They were fragments, personalities born to hold slivers of trauma David hadn't been able to process. Packing the belongings of the fellow patient lost to suicide. The sizzle of his own flesh as a club burned around him. A nurse's screams at the bone jutting through the skin of her arm. The crunch as he broke his father's wheelchair.
A broken heart.
They lacked definition because it wasn't necessary. These undeveloped selves had been formed to carry specific experiences until they could be either folded into another aspect or carefully compartmentalized where they could do no harm. Now, torn free, they groped for completion. Their questing flesh adhered to whatever they could find: pieces of the astral plane, stronger alters, even each other. Back in the trees a figure that seemed hewn of salt screamed as a pair swarmed from the water to bear it down with greedy arms.
And now came Hope, glowing like the sun against the lids of their sightless eyes.
The world looked different with the sword in her hand. Not only did the sword shimmer like the sun, despite the turmoil that the colors signified, but the strange creatures as well. These pitiful things were not just the weird things the astral plane occasionally threw out, but they were Mr. Haller himself... or at least fragments of him.
Hope stopped abruptly, staring at the sword as it shivered in her hands. Pain and anxiety bloomed across the colors that kept flickering on the sword and something similar seemed to happen with the creatures surged at her, but then backed off as they became aware of the sword. "This is wrong." Hope spoke softly as she lowered the sword, holding it with two hands gently. Instinctively she carefully drew on the energy it was made of, untangling the energy the sword was made of till long colorful ribbons were draped across her hands. "I cannot help you if I use you to hurt yourself."
The sword resisted. The ribbons shimmered with threads of yellow and orange as the fragments in her hands instinctively fought to retain a cutting edge, confused by what was being asked of them, unable to comprehend a way forward other than violence.
But Hope's hands were familiar. While the pieces she held did not understand, her intent resonated with something deeper than their instincts. Slowly, very slowly, the muddled hues began to soften towards green until finally the fabric went soft and pliant in her hands.
The ribbons gently moved in an invisible breeze as Hope observed all the alters beneath her. If they wanted to pull Mr. Haller back together, they would need every single piece. Glancing back and forward between the ribbons and the alters hovering nearby, she hesitantly separated one ribbon for the others and searched the crowd of strange entities around her.
A flower with eyes, sharp teeth and tiny wings caught her eye, hovering almost on its own to her left. Carefully tucking the other ribbons out of the way, she held the single ribbon like a lasso and tossed it at the strange figure. The ribbon streaked through the air, seemingly moving on its own and wrapped around the stem of the flower, the teeth snarling and snapping at it. The teeth did not sink in ribbon though, but in a thick, colorful guirlande of flowers. Hope raised an eyebrow, the guirlande not anything she had ever seen at the events she planned. "Interesting."
As it sank into the garland the flower's confused anatomy receded, leaving behind only a yellow chrysanthemum. The ribbons in her hands shivered like strands in a spiderweb. Frayed threads of connection, barely visible, trailed from the edges and into the writhing landscape below. Like calling to like.
Slowly Hope scanned the guirlande, a heavy feeling settling in her stomach as identified more and more of the flowers. Tansy, yellow and hostile. The mourning of a deep crimson rose. Jealous clusters of marigolds and a sprig of orange-lily hate. Lavender blooms of distrust nestled between the foolish stars of columbine.
The ribbons kept quivering in her hand though. Slowly Hope raised her hands and loosening her grip, the faint threads of connection growing more clear in her mind. "Go..." She told the ribbons. "... go and find the ones you are meant to bring home." Carefully she shaped the energy as she sent an invitation down the silky thread. Calming chamomile in recognition of their patience in adversity. Fragrant thyme, praising their courage and strength. Soothing aloe, shining with affection.
Armor faded away as Hope floated in the midst of the dancing ribbons and flowers, cream silk billowing freely around her. Flower embroidery drawn in slender silvery, coppery and golden threads kept shifting across the fabric, even the ribbons woven in her hair. Her skin shimmered with golden and silvery glitter.
Even in their mindless state, something within Haller's fragments understood they had been carved from a greater whole -- an existence more than just snapshots of pain. The invitation Hope extended, woven from this greater existence and energized by her own will, attracted them with the gravity of a planet. Threads of connection tightened as unfinished humanoid figures began to separate from astral detritus, drawn towards the garland and the security it offered.
The fragments joined easily, but here and there one of the ribbons would pull taught as a fishing line. Some other, greater personality had been snared in the dragnet, and, like the hunter and armored creature, had an identity clearly enough defined that their first instinct was to resist. In the end, though, the promise of unity was too appealing. One by one they relented, becoming just another link in the chain of flowers.
Except for one.
A ribbon had snaked into a thick clump of mangrove trees. Now it appeared to be snarled on something hidden within.
Long guirlandes of flowers coiled together, creating the impression of abstract human figures, almost like an artist had gone wild with greenery, though they remained connected with the strands Hope still held, even though her gaze focussed on ribbon in the mangrove trees. Narrowing her eyes for a moment, Hope sped down, following the ribbon. The water held no more strange creatures and she was easily able to enter the mangrove trees.
There, slumped against a tangle of roots, was a man. Or what was left of one.
He appeared to be in his early fifties, and might once have been powerfully built. Now, though, his body had been ravaged. The flesh on one half of his face had been torn to expose muscle and teeth, and the meat of one arm had been sheared away to the point it was no longer functional. His simple white t-shirt was dark with blood, and gaped oddly around his abdomen as if something below the fabric was missing. He could have been dead, but at Hope's approach he cracked his sole remaining eye.
"I . . . know you."
"Somehow you also seem familiar." Hope gathered her skirts and knelt down next to him. "What is your name?"
"Name? What was it . . ." He paused to cough, and hacked a glob of blood into the water. There was a pinkish foam at the corner of his mouth.
"Doesn't matter," the man said. His lone grey eye slid back to her face. "Get out of here. Dangerous."
"I am perfectly fine and perfectly safe." Hope soothed as she reached out and untangled her last ribbon from the foliage. "Can you grab hold of this? I am going to take you home."
"Can't leave. Others . . . the others. My responsibility. Until they're safe. I stay." His eye wasn't focusing on her, but the fingers of his working hand tightened against a twisted root. He coughed again, blood flecking his mustache.
"They are already under my care. You did a fine job protecting them." Hope held out the ribbon once more, quickly changing her tactics. "But they will not leave if you are not with them. You now can best protect them by coming with me and joining them."
"You?" The man's eye rolled again, but this time found the garlands in her hands. Slowly, his gaze traveled up to find her face.
"We hung light around your neck," he said, in a voice that came from far away. "You took us. And you flew."
"I took everyone where they needed to go. I managed to bring them home." Hope confirmed. Slowly she reached out and took his hand, wrapping the ribbon around it. "And now I need to bring you home and help to make you whole." She focused, her mind spinning as she quickly considered which flowers might work. Buoying the man up in front of her with the pride of amaryllis, the hidden worth that so often went unseen symbolized by coriander, the so-very-fitting name of gladiolus for determination and finally malva for protection, but also of rest.
The ravaged man looked at her for a long time, disorientation and instinctual distrust playing across what remained of his face. He studied her, who had come not armed and armored, but in light silk with arms full of blossoms, and hesitated.
At last he raised a shaking hand.
"All right," Jack said. "You take us where we need to go."
He brushed the tips of his fingers to the ribbon.
Hope watched as he too became a guirlande and she carefully picked it up, draping it across her neck and shoulders before lifting off. Once she broke through the foliage she paused and carefully scanned the mangrove and the water... No more alters were to be found and she sped towards the abstract humanlike figure. She pulled the guirlande from the shoulders and draped it across the figure.
The final strand wove itself between the others as it settled onto the figure. The facsimile was still incomplete; in some places a wire form was exposed, as if waiting for more material. But no more hands reached from the trees, no more faces appeared on the creatures that swam beneath the water. This patch of the astral plane was clear.
Slowly Hope floated herself in front of the figure, remembering the first steps she had taken when they had rescued everyone. She laid her hands on the hands of the figures and ivy and holly quickly wrapped around joined hands, linking them together. Releasing Haller's energy Hope shifted directions. Sinking back into herself she focused on Quentin and when she opened her eyes again a firm line of shimmering colors pulsed between herself and something in the distance. "Well... let us go..."
The waves pushed Hope into something like shallows. The thick trunks that jutted from the water were not unlike a grove of mangrove trees, but instead of mud and silt her feet found pieces of shale while unseen creatures shrieked at her from the canopy. Beneath the surface of the water those same indistinct shapes were still moving with her, dragged along by the tide like flotsam.
Surrendering to the water had been easy... though it hadn't been anything like it usually was. The strange figures were not menacing per se, but they did make her uneasy as blood from some of the figures mingled with the water in pinkish clouds, while others crawled over each other, almost tearing into each other as they seemed to search for something. With the waves finally quiet though, Hope focused and floated up from water, silk billowing around her as she studied the writhing mass below her for a moment, but then scanned around for Quentin. He was nowhere to be found though.
Something grabbed her ankle. The texture was slimy and wooden as a rotting branch, but tendrils of it curled around her leg like fingers. At the end of it was a mangrove tree -- almost.
A face writhed in the bark, eyeless and featureless but for a keening mouth. Part of a shoulder and arm jutted from the trunk as if the tree had grown around a body. Movement flashed in the corner of her eye, and there was a sharp crack as a great armored thing emerged from the thicket to slam into the branch, breaking its grip on Hope's ankle.
"Run," came a voice.
A man in a pith helmet had appeared immediately below her, hunting rifle clutched in one hand. Blood was staining through his vest, He turned to face her and barked, "Run!"
Hope quickly rose some more, speeding away from the thicket of mangroves, but the vague figures were still writhing in the water below her. Adrenaline surged through this time and she felt her outfit change. Finely chased silver armor flowed down her shoulders and chest, inlaid with thin gold wire. Cream silk still billowed around her arms, but silver gauntlets inlaid with gold wire pulled them close to her underarms. The same cream silk floated around her legs, now revealing glimpses of the silver armor covering her legs and knee high boots. The same energy flowed up her face, a delicate headpiece pulling her hair away from her face in a complicated arrangement of braids.
"Pretty but . . . not enough."
It was the man in the hunting vest again. He was soaked to the waist from pushing through the high water, but he had managed to keep pace with her in spite of it. It was clear only sheer will had kept him going: his face was grey from exertion and blood loss.
"It is a start." Hope simply replied as she studied the figure floating next to her. He did not look very threatening with how bad he looked, even though he was still holding the gun. Something tickled her... something seemed so familiar... "But I am open to suggestions?"
The man was staring at her. There was an echo of Hope's own confusion in his expression, as if he, too, was trying to place where he knew her from. He had a horseshoe mustache a few shades darker than his greying hair, though his eyes were hidden by a pair of sunglasses. A crack spidered through one lense. He broke their gaze with a brisk shake of his head.
"Weapon," he said shortly. "You'll need a weapon." Lip curled in disgust, he looked at the rifle in his hands. "Not that I'm much help. No bullets."
She tilted her head a little. Weapons were not something she usually considered in her trips to the astral plane. "I do welcome any suggestions." Suddenly she felt something move behind her and a strange armoured thing joined the man in front of her. And suddenly a surge of energy pulsed through... it was far weaker than the one a month ago, but the 'feel' of it was unmistakable.
"Mr. Haller..." She whispered softly.
The armored thing lumbered to a halt. Easily nine feet tall, it had the lumpy abstraction as a figure made from play doh. Its face, if it had one, was covered by a bronze plate. Like the hunter it appeared to have taken heavy damage. Its steel body was blackened and dented in places, and liquid that might have been oil leaked from between the plates. It turned the glass lenses of its face on her. Around its neck had been engraved the words "TERMINUS EST".
The hunter's expression didn't change. It wasn't a simple lack of recognition, it was as if the words hadn't registered at all. "Suggestions she says," he muttered, slicing his eyes towards the armored thing. "What about you? You got an endgame in mind?"
The behemoth turned from the hunter back to Hope, as if considering this. When it spoke its voice sounded strangely young.
"I remember . . . a sword."
"Yes, we created a sword together before." Hope easily confirmed. "You want to do the same again? We can certainly try.." Hope held out her hand, though something niggled in the back of her head.
The hunter gave the creature a dubious look. "You want to put yourself in her hands?" he asked.
"You keep shooting blanks if you want. But they'll keep coming for her." Unperturbed, the creature reached out to Hope with a limb that terminated in something like a mace. As it drew close to her fingertips the steel seemed to flow into her hand, reforming itself into a hilt and the merest stub of a blade, snapped off almost to the pommel.
The hunter spat a curse. "Not even half a blade," he muttered. "You want something done right . . . fine."
He, too, extended a hand, and sublimated himself into the weapon. His addition did not complete the sword: the blade it formed was only half the length it should have been, its edge chipped and ragged, but better than an empty hilt.
Eyeing the weapon, Hope hefted it carefully. Something still felt off and the sword glowed with a faint aura, patterns of red, yellow and orange in many different shades playing over it... that hadn't been there before. It was more clear than ever that this sword was a part of Mr. Haller. Letting out a slow sigh, she turned around. What she needed to do, she couldn't do by running away.
Turning around, she held the slender rapier, even only half completed, at the ready and sped back towards the water, her silk skirts billowing after her.
Roots erupted from the surface of the water to grasp at her skirts, but they were clumsy with confusion, and she more agile. She dodged a gull that flew with the hands of a woman instead of wings only for a dolphin, burdened by a humanoid shape with outstretched arms fused to its spine, to leap into the air before her.
They were fragments, personalities born to hold slivers of trauma David hadn't been able to process. Packing the belongings of the fellow patient lost to suicide. The sizzle of his own flesh as a club burned around him. A nurse's screams at the bone jutting through the skin of her arm. The crunch as he broke his father's wheelchair.
A broken heart.
They lacked definition because it wasn't necessary. These undeveloped selves had been formed to carry specific experiences until they could be either folded into another aspect or carefully compartmentalized where they could do no harm. Now, torn free, they groped for completion. Their questing flesh adhered to whatever they could find: pieces of the astral plane, stronger alters, even each other. Back in the trees a figure that seemed hewn of salt screamed as a pair swarmed from the water to bear it down with greedy arms.
And now came Hope, glowing like the sun against the lids of their sightless eyes.
The world looked different with the sword in her hand. Not only did the sword shimmer like the sun, despite the turmoil that the colors signified, but the strange creatures as well. These pitiful things were not just the weird things the astral plane occasionally threw out, but they were Mr. Haller himself... or at least fragments of him.
Hope stopped abruptly, staring at the sword as it shivered in her hands. Pain and anxiety bloomed across the colors that kept flickering on the sword and something similar seemed to happen with the creatures surged at her, but then backed off as they became aware of the sword. "This is wrong." Hope spoke softly as she lowered the sword, holding it with two hands gently. Instinctively she carefully drew on the energy it was made of, untangling the energy the sword was made of till long colorful ribbons were draped across her hands. "I cannot help you if I use you to hurt yourself."
The sword resisted. The ribbons shimmered with threads of yellow and orange as the fragments in her hands instinctively fought to retain a cutting edge, confused by what was being asked of them, unable to comprehend a way forward other than violence.
But Hope's hands were familiar. While the pieces she held did not understand, her intent resonated with something deeper than their instincts. Slowly, very slowly, the muddled hues began to soften towards green until finally the fabric went soft and pliant in her hands.
The ribbons gently moved in an invisible breeze as Hope observed all the alters beneath her. If they wanted to pull Mr. Haller back together, they would need every single piece. Glancing back and forward between the ribbons and the alters hovering nearby, she hesitantly separated one ribbon for the others and searched the crowd of strange entities around her.
A flower with eyes, sharp teeth and tiny wings caught her eye, hovering almost on its own to her left. Carefully tucking the other ribbons out of the way, she held the single ribbon like a lasso and tossed it at the strange figure. The ribbon streaked through the air, seemingly moving on its own and wrapped around the stem of the flower, the teeth snarling and snapping at it. The teeth did not sink in ribbon though, but in a thick, colorful guirlande of flowers. Hope raised an eyebrow, the guirlande not anything she had ever seen at the events she planned. "Interesting."
As it sank into the garland the flower's confused anatomy receded, leaving behind only a yellow chrysanthemum. The ribbons in her hands shivered like strands in a spiderweb. Frayed threads of connection, barely visible, trailed from the edges and into the writhing landscape below. Like calling to like.
Slowly Hope scanned the guirlande, a heavy feeling settling in her stomach as identified more and more of the flowers. Tansy, yellow and hostile. The mourning of a deep crimson rose. Jealous clusters of marigolds and a sprig of orange-lily hate. Lavender blooms of distrust nestled between the foolish stars of columbine.
The ribbons kept quivering in her hand though. Slowly Hope raised her hands and loosening her grip, the faint threads of connection growing more clear in her mind. "Go..." She told the ribbons. "... go and find the ones you are meant to bring home." Carefully she shaped the energy as she sent an invitation down the silky thread. Calming chamomile in recognition of their patience in adversity. Fragrant thyme, praising their courage and strength. Soothing aloe, shining with affection.
Armor faded away as Hope floated in the midst of the dancing ribbons and flowers, cream silk billowing freely around her. Flower embroidery drawn in slender silvery, coppery and golden threads kept shifting across the fabric, even the ribbons woven in her hair. Her skin shimmered with golden and silvery glitter.
Even in their mindless state, something within Haller's fragments understood they had been carved from a greater whole -- an existence more than just snapshots of pain. The invitation Hope extended, woven from this greater existence and energized by her own will, attracted them with the gravity of a planet. Threads of connection tightened as unfinished humanoid figures began to separate from astral detritus, drawn towards the garland and the security it offered.
The fragments joined easily, but here and there one of the ribbons would pull taught as a fishing line. Some other, greater personality had been snared in the dragnet, and, like the hunter and armored creature, had an identity clearly enough defined that their first instinct was to resist. In the end, though, the promise of unity was too appealing. One by one they relented, becoming just another link in the chain of flowers.
Except for one.
A ribbon had snaked into a thick clump of mangrove trees. Now it appeared to be snarled on something hidden within.
Long guirlandes of flowers coiled together, creating the impression of abstract human figures, almost like an artist had gone wild with greenery, though they remained connected with the strands Hope still held, even though her gaze focussed on ribbon in the mangrove trees. Narrowing her eyes for a moment, Hope sped down, following the ribbon. The water held no more strange creatures and she was easily able to enter the mangrove trees.
There, slumped against a tangle of roots, was a man. Or what was left of one.
He appeared to be in his early fifties, and might once have been powerfully built. Now, though, his body had been ravaged. The flesh on one half of his face had been torn to expose muscle and teeth, and the meat of one arm had been sheared away to the point it was no longer functional. His simple white t-shirt was dark with blood, and gaped oddly around his abdomen as if something below the fabric was missing. He could have been dead, but at Hope's approach he cracked his sole remaining eye.
"I . . . know you."
"Somehow you also seem familiar." Hope gathered her skirts and knelt down next to him. "What is your name?"
"Name? What was it . . ." He paused to cough, and hacked a glob of blood into the water. There was a pinkish foam at the corner of his mouth.
"Doesn't matter," the man said. His lone grey eye slid back to her face. "Get out of here. Dangerous."
"I am perfectly fine and perfectly safe." Hope soothed as she reached out and untangled her last ribbon from the foliage. "Can you grab hold of this? I am going to take you home."
"Can't leave. Others . . . the others. My responsibility. Until they're safe. I stay." His eye wasn't focusing on her, but the fingers of his working hand tightened against a twisted root. He coughed again, blood flecking his mustache.
"They are already under my care. You did a fine job protecting them." Hope held out the ribbon once more, quickly changing her tactics. "But they will not leave if you are not with them. You now can best protect them by coming with me and joining them."
"You?" The man's eye rolled again, but this time found the garlands in her hands. Slowly, his gaze traveled up to find her face.
"We hung light around your neck," he said, in a voice that came from far away. "You took us. And you flew."
"I took everyone where they needed to go. I managed to bring them home." Hope confirmed. Slowly she reached out and took his hand, wrapping the ribbon around it. "And now I need to bring you home and help to make you whole." She focused, her mind spinning as she quickly considered which flowers might work. Buoying the man up in front of her with the pride of amaryllis, the hidden worth that so often went unseen symbolized by coriander, the so-very-fitting name of gladiolus for determination and finally malva for protection, but also of rest.
The ravaged man looked at her for a long time, disorientation and instinctual distrust playing across what remained of his face. He studied her, who had come not armed and armored, but in light silk with arms full of blossoms, and hesitated.
At last he raised a shaking hand.
"All right," Jack said. "You take us where we need to go."
He brushed the tips of his fingers to the ribbon.
Hope watched as he too became a guirlande and she carefully picked it up, draping it across her neck and shoulders before lifting off. Once she broke through the foliage she paused and carefully scanned the mangrove and the water... No more alters were to be found and she sped towards the abstract humanlike figure. She pulled the guirlande from the shoulders and draped it across the figure.
The final strand wove itself between the others as it settled onto the figure. The facsimile was still incomplete; in some places a wire form was exposed, as if waiting for more material. But no more hands reached from the trees, no more faces appeared on the creatures that swam beneath the water. This patch of the astral plane was clear.
Slowly Hope floated herself in front of the figure, remembering the first steps she had taken when they had rescued everyone. She laid her hands on the hands of the figures and ivy and holly quickly wrapped around joined hands, linking them together. Releasing Haller's energy Hope shifted directions. Sinking back into herself she focused on Quentin and when she opened her eyes again a firm line of shimmering colors pulsed between herself and something in the distance. "Well... let us go..."
