The machine's head didn't tilt. [i][color=82ca9d]My head. Right?[/color][/i] But one eye focused on the Magician as he spoke; another slid to Elegance. Then another. Then a third.

White eyes, shining just enough to cut the hearts out of shadows and keep color in the darkening earth, to mingle with Elegance's own illuminating flame. Like lovers entwining fingers. Or soldiers leveling weapons across a no-man's land. Or things that weren't quite people assessing each other, radiant and choking back Madness. As the Magician turned and vanished into thin air, Tristan slid an eye away from Elegance, leaving two. He hated looking at her.

[color=82ca9d]"Proverbs 23 again."[/color] He wasn't sure who he was talking to. He'd been in his head a long time, it felt like. An ocean of fear and paranoia, cold and clean and welcoming. Easiest to be terrified, to drown in it, to be alone and sinking always further. His relationship with his emotions had become something he wouldn't have understood before the Semblance, but he suspected the strangeness would pass. Already he was beginning to lose track of the despair that had first overwhelmed him, the dissonance associated with inhabiting the blood-slick biomachina of his body. It was too big to be felt, it had become something like panic, and panic was part of the ocean. 

The substance coursing through his vascular system helped, too. Everything was clarified, jitters were impossible, he could map Elegance's face, his natural response to the threat she represented, and he didn't have to second-guess himself. [i]Perfection[/i] wasn't a quality, it was a pattern, and he could fit himself into it - that's what it felt like. It felt like being fresh and cold and clean after a thousand years of squalor, the awful in-between of being dirty and too hot, your own sweat turning grime into fluid slithering filth. Even the thought of that couldn't bother him, because his present state was too pure to allow for feelings like that. Tristan was fine. [i]Perfectly[/i] fine. [color=82ca9d][i]What was Tabitha worrying about, again?[/i][/color] Everyone was upset about something or other, it seemed, except for the man Keahi kept bound. Tristan felt a sympathy there, something that vibrated in a way that should probably have been uncomfortable. [i][color=82ca9d]He's so completely what he is.[/color][/i] 

That was a kind of perfection, too, and likewise it was easy for Tristan to be what he was. What he was was drowning.

The hard part was surfacing again.

With an amount of effort that one of the clean, clear corners of his mind noted should probably have been uncomfortable, he surfaced.

[color=82ca9d]"It's rude, isn't it?"[/color] This to Elegance, their impromptu guide. [color=82ca9d]"Telling us about your obligations. Telling that poor kid he's - "[/color] [i]Her[/i] words were boiling up in him, but he didn't have Koda to distract him now. They burned away before they could echo, his mind like killing starlight. [color=82ca9d]"...and the Magician's not the puppet-master, but he doesn't say anything about who caused the accident. Except that it's [i]unfortunate[/i]. When your enemies do it, it's clumsy, right? It wouldn't be an accident, it'd be a mistake."[/color]

Maybe that was the threat-response subroutines, dividing the world into foe and future-foe. Maybe not, though; his childhood at the preacher's feet was drifting through his head. Old, unhappy thoughts about fire and brimstone, about who in the congregation was faltering and must be corrected, or who outside it was soullessly wicked and must be destroyed. The same behaviors. 

He was following the others, Zino and Stormy in particular. The keep itself caused an unexpected reaction and threatened to plunge him down below the level of conversation again; his eyes fell on Tabitha, Stormy's shoulder, Oedipus among the assortment of oddments, Keahi glaring, and on the Magician's servant. It was the architecture, he realized, once the nanosecond struggle for sanity had concluded. [color=82ca9d][i]I want to...[/i][/color] Inarticulate. Fix it? Destroy it? Rebuild, reform? Something about the lines and angles of the place seemed [i]fertile[/i] to him in a way that was profoundly bizarre. Black earth awaiting its seeds. Blank canvas - [color=82ca9d][i]but it's not blank, but that doesn't matter[/i][/color] - begging for paint. It occurred to him that it was entirely possible he'd never have children, and it took him a minute to understand [i]why[/i] the thought had occurred.

Tristan would have shaken his head to clear it, once upon a time. He didn't. He just kept moving, eyes roaming, waiting for the Magician to reappear. One stayed with Oedipus.[color=82ca9d]"Nobody's his parents, from the sound of it. No one to look after him."[/color] God, had surviving in Lightbridge once seemed daunting? His father had been his anchor, his deity, the boundaries of his world. Leaving home, even on mission, tumbling out into the indefinite void...he'd been such a kid. [color=82ca9d][i]Such a scaredy-cat.[/i][/color] He couldn't smile, and the tone of his voice only changed when he made it change, and he didn't. [color=82ca9d]"All alone in a strange land. Not so different from us, when you think about it. Maybe a dead girl will make him a monster too."[/color] On a whim, Tristan tried to force a laugh. It didn't sound right to him, a brief discordance in his gleaming exalted state, a series of jangling wrong notes. He wasn't sure how it sounded to the others.

He turned to Ellard, holding out a hand of iron and bone for inspection. [color=82ca9d]"Don't let it bother you. We're all fabrications here, I guess. Part of someone else's story. Your experience is still real - if nothing else, if it wasn't, the story would lose its meaning. We're the same that way, we're..."[/color] Tristan hesitated, then withdrew his hand. [color=82ca9d]"...real enough."[/color]