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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | With their final evening in Pandaria, Oranna and Thalstan head out to enjoy the night, and end up encountering a somewhat uncanny story within their own story. (Canon story from game.) Romance RP. 4k~ words. (Conclusion of the Orastan in Pandaland Story) |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Chain: Orastan
If there is one thing Pandaria has mastered, it is the art of cozy, and Oranna's room is still delightfully so, with the fire still burning steady and soft. The night has grown long, and deep, the stars fully out and Azeroth's two moons showing over the rolling hills of Pandaria, casting gentle shadows of a peaceful night. Downstairs, Den-Den oversees the dinner crowd already past its peak, starting to slow, while outside the Marketplace begins to wind down, lanterns spreading out more and more as neighbors part ways to their own homes.
Within the room at the Lazy Turnip, Befound has taken advantage of the atmosphere to descend into a full cat sleep on her bed, curled up in the darker and slightly cooler part of the room, head on her tail, relaxed enough that her ears don't move at any sound.
It's quiet in the other corner of the room, a tender stillness like a glow of a warm and restful lantern, since the last few touches of verbal assurance that all went well, and the last of the clean up, that has settled into this moment of intimate closeness together in their corner of the world.
Oranna, her pants and boots still shed, rests easily with her legs tangled up with Thalstan's, her head back on his bare chest, hand resting on his beard once more, stroking slowly down the patterned path of the braid, gazing up at him in a peaceful dreamy look that tells him that for once, her thoughts are slow and hazy, her mind relatively hushed for the moment. Her hair is finally completely dry, and a great deal of it is spread out over him, some still wrapped around one of his arms, and some following the curve of her body in an unintentional but possibly effective alluring way.
Thalstan is utterly relaxed, unconcerned by the light confinement of winding hair and twined legs. He has no fear of hair-suffocation right now. His free arm rests on her shoulder, trailing down her skin every so often in a kind of half-awake, half-dreaming haze. He does not seem bothered either by Oranna's state of undress, or his own.
"A beautiful evening," he says in a barely-voiced whisper. "…beautiful."
Oranna definitely agrees with that statement about Thalstan's state of undress, for certain. Beautiful man, much nice. Although it does seem to take her a few seconds to process the words as words, and generate thoughts in more than a wordless happy murmur of agreement in return, until it seems like the word evening finally makes headway somewhere in her mind. Time has passed.
"I… mmm." That's not much of a statement. Please hold, still forming words again. "I don't think I want to go downstairs or even… have anyone come here, and talk to people. That sounds a little… not that I don't like everyone here, or anything. I'm happy with this, us. I…" She shifts her head a little to look over her shoulder towards the remains of the not-finished lunch, and her bags, and turns a partially guilty expression upwards.
"I have some… instant noodles from Den-Den, and that hot cocoa, both of which just need hot water. We could… combine some things, and… also if you wanted to — there's this balcony up here on the second floor. I've never seen anyone on it. It's tucked up on the side, overlooking the marketplace. We could maybe sneak up to it, go out to see the stars for the last night, and you could show me the kraken and the raven, maybe, like your da showed you."
"I know what you mean, I feel as if… I'm half in a dream," Thalstan says, smiling dazedly. "And I'm not quite ready to wake up yet. Not that I don't want to see other people, I do… I just… maybe a little cocooning is not a bad idea. Cocoa and noodles and looking at the stars sounds wonderful."
Thalstan said that, but he doesn't move and he falls silent. It's another long stretch of silence before he says, "We should… maybe dress a little bit. And I still need to… brush out your hair? We could do that… in the starlight?"
Oranna looks down. "Oh, right. Clothes. We can't go out only wrapped up in my hair and a blanket. Well — ah… I — I — we could technically but… that's… I don't think I'm… " She laughs. "I think I'd have to be actually dreaming for that one to sound like a good idea." She snuggles a bit closer, tipping her face up, all bright smile and warm eyes. "But I like how the rest of that sounds. Starlight hair. Then maybe I will end up with star ravens after all."
"That's a thought," Thalstan says dreamily. "Next time you go somewhere fancy, to set your hair with gems in the shape of star pictures. It's hard for me to tell right now if that's a good idea or a fanciful one."
Thalstan shifts down close enough to kiss her upturned face. He seems in no rush for the moving and the dressing.
Oranna kisses him with a soft smile, and the sort of expression that says she thinks that he has other good ideas though (that's one of them). But, then she does say, as she blinks up at him with thoughts again, "I don't, erm, have anything like that to do something like though. Not — not just here, I mean. You've seen about the whole of my hair accessories. I sold off the things that didn't work, like barrettes, decades ago, and the only things I don't have here are a few more ribbons, and that's… it. I don't have gems or anything."
That's called gift giving ideas, Oranna. But, that thought doesn't seem to occur to her. She might not have a long history of having people buy her things, let alone luxury items.
"You don't, aye? I'll keep that in mind," Thalstan says idly, lifting a lock of hair with his fingers. If Oranna doesn't realize that's gift giving ideas, well… she'll find out one day. But then he does, reluctantly start unwinding her hair from his arm. It is time to move. "Clothes, then, and… a blanket."
Oranna's preparation for a trip makes for an easy cocooning, allowing them to make a meal of instant noods with cheese curds and pounded rice cakes and rice in camping bowls with lids, and handy engineered sporks, and two thermoses with hot cocoa. Befound gets another portion of fish, so all has been forgiven (for now).
A quick stop for clean clothes for Thalstan, and a change for Oranna into a warm nightgown that doubles well enough as something a person could see if they did meet another in a hallway, and a good brush down of the nice beaverfur blanket later, and a bit of canoodling that deepens the evening a little further along, and the couple makes their way up to the second floor balcony. Thalstan carries his basket with the food, the thermoses, the brush, and the little container of Oranna's hair oil, and Oranna carries the blanket, with her hair draped over one shoulder, and their arms linked together.
Outside, the air is sharp and clear with a pleasant winter bite for two dwarves from the Dun Morogh mountains, and empty. There is a long, bamboo bench, with dense, red cushions of heavy fabric meant to withstand the elements. Above them, the overhang of the roof provides a shelter, but opens up enough that they have a wide view of the countryside and sky above them. A small lantern gives them enough light to see by, though it's a hushed light, a lover's quiet sort of light, unassuming and unobtrusive.
The stars are bright, stretching out before them in the inky blackness with clouds and mists obscuring parts into dusky navy and gradations of purple, with the glow of the white moon seeming all the brighter for reflecting off of the softening around it. The blue moon has drifted out of sight of one of the mountain ranges in the distance, lending it an ethereal glow, of some mystical place nearly out of sight on the horizon. Yet, they are not on some other world, as with Outland — these are their stars, only in another location than usual, but familiar points of reference are findable out there.
Below, the orange dots of fires and lanterns mark the places of people, some stationary, others moving, all some small, inherent camaraderie contained within them. Little worlds they all are, and Oranna and Thalstan's is here, on this balcony, in their little cocoon.
Oranna takes the seat where she can still sort of see where they would go back down the steps to the hallway that would take them back to the rooms, arranging herself to be able to set a blanket down over her lap, set a thermos somewhere at times, hold a cup of noodles, and make sure she can still canoodle Thalstan (very important).
Thalstan is back in softer, more comfortable clothes as well (no battered armor), warm fleece pants and shirt in a dark grey. They're probably his winter pyjamas, but maybe the pandaren wouldn't judge if they saw him. He settles next to Oranna under the blanket, a warm arm around her shoulders with the brush still in hand, and the food, a thermos of cocoa and container of hair oil set next to him. The other thermos he offers to Oranna after they're settled — dessert first, tonight?
"It's so strange, traveling," Thalstan says in a quiet voice, the stars reflecting in his dark eyes as he looks out at the sparkling night sky and the peaceful farmland. "An offset in the stars you expect of an evening."
Oranna settles the cocoa in, balancing it experimentally on the end on the bench — success — before she unscrews the lid to take a drink, and tilting her head up to follow his line of sight, though not quite able to track the whole of the line of thought. "What do you mean?"
"This time of winter, I'd expect the raven's eye there," Thalstan says, pointing. It is probably not very easy to tell where he's pointing. He slides his hand down towards the horizon. "But it's only just rising. Then again, maybe some of it's my time sense off. It feels a bit like time has slowed to a pleasant crawl tonight."
Oranna doesn't know much about stars beyond pretty light in sky, but she knows a little bit about time magic dragons and the last bit does seem to snag on that thought. "Oh, aye? I — I've been thinking the same. And feeling like, sometimes I look at you and it's like, the whole world sort of slows… down. You don't think it's anything — it's not maybe actual time slowing? Like we're about to be caught in a time loop with Bronze Dragons or something?"
"I don't think so," Thalstan says, dropping his hand to his lap and smiling at her. "I think this might be the sort of thing they write about in romance novels. I look at you, and for a moment the world slows down."
"Oh." Oranna ducks her head and gives a little hehe, and while she might still be keeping a weather eye out for Bronze Dragon shenanigans — just in case — the reassurance that he doesn't suspect it's serious time magic does seem to lower the fashing to a low simmer. She gazes back up where he pointed before, finding her place in the enormous tapestry of the stars with a possibly surprising ease, even if she couldn't tell him even remotely what direction she's looking in. "So, if that's not the Raven's Eye, what is it?"
Thalstan stares at the small collection for a moment, his brow furrowed. "Maybe like… a Snail? If you sort of imagine a coil running through from the center and out… I suppose this is where I confess I'm an amateur astronomer. I know a good dozen constellations, but not that one. Still, we can make our own pictures."
"Oh, aye? Like when people see things in clouds," Oranna says with a laugh, settling her hair better over her shoulder for his access between them, drawing her feet up better onto the bench (since there is no hope of them touching the ground anyway), and leaning on Thalstan's shoulder as she sips at her hot cocoa. She points at a bunch of stars that are already part of several other constellations, including a popular, well known one for its belt. "All right, I'm claiming that's my old gun right there, that's BOOMSTICK, my good lass. You can see her barrel in those really bright ones riiiiight there."
"Looks like the well-known Boomstick Constellation to me," Thalstan says with a firm nod and a grin. He points to another, a cluster of five stars, and says, "Let's call that one the Shield Constellation. If you sort of imagine it filled in, aye?"
"Oh, aye, I can see it," Oranna says with a laugh, squinting as she holds up a hand and literally filling it in with most of her hand. "And next to it, the old Brown Bess Musket Rifle, and the .50 caliber Hawken Plains Rifle with the old style iron trim, and proper blade sight, and classic single trigger tension screw. Oh, that's a Gallager carbine for certain, you can tell because of that wonky jaggedy sort of silhouette, which was the whole point of the new cap lock extractor meant for faster reloading, but until those gnomes fixed the carbines, ach, that gas blowback was a mess. But — aye, the shape, right there."
That's right, everyone, the entire star sky has been filled with guns, all this time.
"Oh, ah, and that's, erm, obviously a snow leopard up there, because of the tail, and that you can't see most of any of the rest of the stars," Oranna adds, pointing to what are some stars, and a patch of sky that is obscured by what is a cloud, actually.
"Aye, the snow leopard moves around the night sky," Thalstan says with a feigned solemn nod. "Leopards are slippery like that. And here I never knew the sky was full of guns and snow leopards."
He reaches over to set down the brush and retrieve his thermos and offers her the basket. "Noodles and cocoa first, shall we? Get us all warmed up inside, and then I can finish up your hair in the starlight."
Oranna laughs again with a touch of a snort to it, as she starts to pull over the basket up to the other side of the bench, scooting up even closer to Thalstan, sliding a thigh over his almost to his lap, and in the process, knocks something over to hit against the wall behind them with a faint, but audible plunk.
"Oh, what was — " She looks over at her thermos, which is fine and balanced, that wasn't it. No, it was something behind them. She reaches back, and tucked against the pillows, which had shifted as she moved, there is something. It takes her a second before she raises it up to peer curiously at what made the noise: a small sheaf of papers, bound on a clipboard that someone's left up there. There's writing on the papers, preserved in some expensive ink, in a very neat, somehow aristocratic seeming handwriting, of someone who was working on a Common translation, it would seem, of a Pandaren scroll. "It's… oh, it's a story! Look, someone was translating something: 'Old Ri and the Million Souls, a Pandaren folk tale of Halfhill.'"
"A story?" Thalstan looks over curiously. "A story about here. We should take care not to spill the cocoa, then, and to leave it where we found it. But first…" he raises his eyebrows. "The million souls, is it? What does it look like it's about?"
Oranna balances the basket carefully, situating her leg over Thalstan's for the extra room and… well, other reasons, none of which have to do with balance, but it does help her keep the board between them in place to tilt it enough to get some light to make it readable.
"'Late one autumn evening, two good friends sat on the deck behind the Lazy Turnip Inn,'" Oranna starts and looks up around them slowly. "Ah…it's… it's about being — here. Like… right here, where we are. That's… oh, this better not be a horror story," she says with a nervous laugh. She nudges it closer to him. "Ah, you read it. I — I'm a terrible reader, unless you want someone to read a book with naughty parts like a water pump instruction manual, because I probably could do that one."
That is fair. Oranna's never had a knack for the theater or dramatic reading.
Thalstan does not seem to mind at all the leg over his, and he listens attentively to Oranna's start, and then chuckles with her. "Ah, if you like. Let me take a peek and make sure it's not a horror story before I do." He takes the clipboard from Oranna and scans over it curiously. "It doesn't look a horror, and… not exactly like an instruction manual either. Here, I'll read us the rest of it." He clears his throat and sits up a little, to better position his breathing.
"Below them slumbered the quiet farming town of Halfhill," Thalstan says in a low, sonorous voice, a little deeper than his usual speaking voice. This must be his Dramatic voice. "The midnight air was cool to the skin. A thin misting fog had begun to coat the rolling green hills of the valley below with dew, and the spire of the Imperial Granary stood out as a dark shadow against the brilliant canvas of stars overhead."
He pauses to look to Oranna with a smile. "This does sound about exactly like what we're doing right now, doesn't it?"
Oranna curls her arm around Thalstan's much larger one, peeking at the story. "All right, but if there turns out to be two characters named Orlivia Stormliker and uh, Falstan Littlestaffer or something, I'm shaking the rafters for a peeper, telling you that right now," she warns, but she's smiling, and mostly joking. And then she nudges him. "Keep going, although I'm also telling you now, I might make you narrate all my books from here on."
Thalstan chuckles. "Thanks for the warning, and I wouldn't mind it a bit."
Then he takes in a breath and puts back on his narrator voice to continue, "An evening of good food and many hours smoking the native herbs had put the two friends in a contemplative mood. Zhi - the — ah, well, there you have it, it's not Orlivia or Falstan," he pauses with another laugh, and then continues, "Zhi - the younger and more tightly wound of the two companions - suddenly asked a very pointed question: 'What if none of this is real?' "
Oranna mutters, "Not that you'd need to, probably, but remind me not to smoke any native herbs."
"I'll try to remember," Thalstan grins, and then returns to the story. "His old friend Ri, who until now had been leaning back with his hat over his eyes, lifted up the straw brim to peer at his friend. 'A serious question?' he said, his brown eyes gleaming intently."
"Zhi swept his arm over the horizon, indicating the whole of the valley. 'What if we are just images, drawn into someone's painting?' he asked. He touched the side of his face, gasping. "What if we are characters in a book!?' " Thalstan blinks at the page, and then looks to Oranna. "Okay, Zhi and Ri, but otherwise…"
Oranna glances up at him with a nervous laugh. "I…uhhh…nnnn…" She sets her mouth on his arm, eyeing the paper warily, as if to maybe avoid doubling the question out loud. But he can still hear her muffled maybe protagonists in a book mutter she didn't quite manage to suppress.
Thalstan chuckles, and then continues, "Old Ri hugged his belly with both hands and bellowed a deep, contemplative laugh. He took the smoking pipe from his friend Zhi and set it aside. 'Behind the eyes sits a person's soul,' Old Ri answered at last. 'Their essence: the thinking, loving, emotional core of being. My soul makes me real, as does yours.' "
He lets that sit in the silence for a moment, and then adds, "That's a good way to look at it, isn't it?"
Oranna makes a soft agreeing sound, and lifts up a bit. "I do like that, actually. The — the soul bit, I mean, about it making a person real, of the thinking, loving, emotional core, and that's us. An essence we can know. That's a good thing. Not — not the eye bit, that's weird. I've — I've known too many eye things, of too many eyes and no eyes. And I've fought floating eyeballs, as just… an eyeball, nothing behind it, and that's… that's bringing into a very weird existential eyeball soul question here that's — " She takes a breath and puts her chin back down on his arm. "I like the soul bit," she repeats.
"Souls, then," Thalstan agrees. "And not floating eyeballs." He shifts back to narrator. "And now Old Ri rose to stand beside his friend. He put his arm around Zhi's shoulder and drew his attention to the valley below. 'See there below us, to our right? The farmer's market?' In the cool autumn darkness, the Halfhill Market was like an island of warm yellow light amongst the dark undulating hills. Colorful flags rippled in the chill breeze, and figures could be seen moving amongst the stalls, buying supplies or bartering the fruits of their labor. The sound of their voices and laughter, indistinguishable from one another but unmistakably alive, could be heard all the way to the inn."
Thalstan smiles softly. "Now that's a nice translation. A lovely image, and whenever it was written, it's just as true today."
Oranna smiles back, and looks out over that exact market, with the same smaller lights, dimmer than in the story, for being later.
Thalstan continues, " 'Those figures moving about, each of them has a soul,' Old Ri continued. 'And together, we share this space. Millions of souls, sharing one place together. Our place! Halfhill is real, so long as you and I are here together to enjoy it.' Satisfied, Old Ri returned to his seat and motioned to the innkeeper for another drink."
"Zhi lingered at the edge of the patio, resting his weight against the rough timber of a pillar. He breathed in the cool air, and watched fireflies dart amongst the waving starlit grasses of the fields below. 'Ri,' he said at last. 'Painting or no… if our souls are to share a place, I would share no other with you,' " Thalstan's expression softens as he reads the words, and he looks over to Oranna, watching her as he recites the rest. "Old Ri tipped his hat back over his eyes and answered with a warm rumble of agreement. The sound of crickets mixed with the lively bustle of the market below lulled the two friends back into a blissful silence."
Oranna's eyes are large, staring back at him, having heard the same line in the same way, gazing back at him. A thought hovers there in those windows to the soul, poignant and warm in the soft light of the lantern, and it takes her a breath to find enough of a voice. "Well, he's no Orlivia Stormliker, but I think in the end, I could see myself identifying with Zhi," she says, setting her cheek against his arm. "Painting or book or some Bronze Dragon time loop romance novel cover, if our souls are to share a place, I would share no other with you, Thalstan."
Thalstan looks back at her, his dark eyes warm, as he sets aside the clipboard carefully, not to disturb the writing. "I feel the same. Whether real or story, there is no place I'd rather be than with you, Oranna."
As Thalstan leans in to kiss her, beneath the brilliant canvas of stars overhead, the two on the balcony fall into a blissful silence.