sixthiterationlogs | "What lies beyond? What lay before? Is anything certain in life?"

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"What lies beyond? What lay before? Is anything certain in life?"

WHO: Margaery Tyrell
WHERE: The Specimen Room
WHEN: Aug 16 - 29
OPEN TO: Jude
WARNINGS: None I can think of.

White hot blinding light tore through Margaery's mind, jolting her out of bed and onto the floor. She pressed her hands to her eyes, trying to shut out the pain as flashes of images danced before her. The sweet images she had seen were gone, replaced by confusion and strange sights that turned her stomach. Her body seemed to spasm, the sounds of the forest clear and sharp against her ears. She was there, she could swear it. The warmth of the day surrounded her as the sun licked at her skin. She could feel Gilbert at her side, his barks echoing off the trees.

Flashes of green, brown and blue passed before, racing quickly as she followed a path. The route was obscured, but she felt certain she had seen it before. It was only when she came at the canyon wall that everything became a bit more clear. A quick succession of images passed, still but clearer than before. There was a cave in the wall, standing wide enough for someone to pass through. There was a strange room with glass walls. There was something resting behind them, but it was too bright to tell. As she tried to get a better look, everything disappeared and she was returned to her room, curled on the floor as she clutched her head. Despite the pain, one thought remained fixed in her consciousness:

There was something in the woods.

***

It was a ways to the canyon and there was a chance that she could get lost along the way, knowing how often the forest changed. She packed several supplies she might need, including food that could last her for several days, if rationed right. Gilbert would be at her side, big enough now to protect her against any creatures she might come across.

For extra measure, she left word with Sansa where she was going. Robb would worry and dislike her exploring the woods, but perhaps coming from Sansa, the news would be taken better? She left a note for Ned as well, asking him to tend to the animals and her garden while she was gone. There was no telling how long it would take.

Fear wasn't something she felt until she was much deeper in the woods and sounds seemed to be dulled by the brush. Each twig snap and rustle of the bushes left her unnerved. More than once, she thought there was someone at her heels, but brushed it aside as paranoia. Yet when the sun began to set, she became more than certain there was someone else nearby. Grabbing a fallen branch, she turned, holding herself ready in case something emerged, fangs and claws bared.

"Who's there?" She called out, Gilbert growling at her side. "Come out."

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Little had guided Jude to the northern corner of the canyon but his hand on the wall, keeping him at its edge as he counted steps between landmarks. It's different today--or he'd simply miscounted, misremembered the last time he walked between one cave mouth and the next. He hasn't ventured far inside after the quake, less afraid of being trapped than chased back out, judging from the warnings left at the inn.

Cave-ins he understands; swarms of insects not so much.

The growling of a dog does more to put him at ease than alarm him, letting him answer the sudden voice easily. At the dip of the sun in the sky, he'd abandoned his trek along the wall, pointing himself in from it in hopes of finding either the village or the river. "Don't worry," he says, lifting the fronds of a fern out of his path as he comes into sight, "I'm not a badger, just out for a walk."

She stared in surprise as Jude emerged, letting the branch fall from her hand. Gilbert relaxed beside her, his growling died away as the leaves around them began to rustle from the wind. While she should have expected someone else to be in the woods, it hadn't occurred to her that she would come across them. Her mind had been so focused on the vision that everything else around her had faded away.

"A walk? This close to the canyon?"

Her eyes scanned the wall, searching for the cave that she had seen in her mind. Finally she spied it, a hole big enough for someone to enter. It looked exactly the same, just as she had seen it. She moved away from Jude, staring at the cave in surprise. "There is something in here."

"I was counting steps," he says, and in the light going gold before it dives for the horizon, his eyes hood even as his hair lightens, falling in his face. The guarded posture narrows for curiosity, watching her pick her way immediately away from him.

It isn't strange to be questioned and forgotten, something more interesting than the answer catching someone's eye, but she's standing at a hole in the wall like she's been seeking it.

Jude shares a look with the dog, then checks how much of the sun is still above the trees. He doesn't know about her, but he hasn't brought a light. "If you're keen on going in," he says, following her over like it's a given to accompany her, "best get it done before the sun goes down."

"There are lights inside." She said with certainty. "There is a room of glass cabinets that have something inside them." Vials? Every time she tried to search her mind for the images, her head seemed to scream in return. The ache becoming steadily worse.

There was little reason to wait. Giving him a look of invitation, she disappeared inside the cave, following around until she found a door. Her hand pressed against the wood, unsurprised that it was there, but still amazed to have had seen it in her head.

"They are in here."

"What," is his eloquent reply: there's time for little else before she's going, as dead set as she must have been on the trek out. That she's hardly dressed to explore a cave matches with the ridiculous string of words, reminds him of--mom, honestly.

You can say a crazy thing with all the conviction of it being true. You just have to believe it.

She seems ready to believe it all the way to the back of the tunnel. Jude only spares a final glance back to the trees--measuring the sun lowering behind the canopy, confirming that there is no one else out here. There's only him to follow, and make sure she gets back home when whatever this is winds down.

There's enough ambient light to follow her without running up her back, and he hovers with the dog between their shins. "Why would there be a room back here," he asks. "And why would you know about it?"

"I saw it." She said simply. The room was the same as what had appeared in her vision. The spherical shape and the storage for the vials, though she didn't understand what they were exactly. There was machinery as well, much of it foreign to her, though she suspected Jude might understand what it was. Even if he didn't understand its purpose.

She stared up at the light, feeling that harsh glare burn into the back of her eyes. It was all the same, the humming of fluorescent lighting (though she didn't know the term). There was a chill in the air, given off by the coolers, even through the plexiglass.

"I saw this in my head." Though she couldn't explain why or how it happened. There was still a throb in her head, pulsing as steadily as her heart. Gilbert whined, staying close to the exit, uncertain about the room. "I don't know what it means." She leaned in, reading some of the labels on the vials. 'Wild strawberries', 'pine', 'cow', 'rabbit'. "Have they been collecting these?" The observers...this had to be their room.

It's a lot to be confronted with at once, at the end of a long day in the sun, wandering the edges of the canyon. Already at the wane of his physical strength, the mental fortitude to deal with--visions; courtly, accented ladies; florescent lighting--

It just isn't there. Jude had followed out of rising concern. A woman alone in the woods, dusk approaching, talking about lights and vials in the walls. He'd gone into the dark tunnel expecting to coax her back from a dead end, or cover her escape from a cloud of bats or strange insects, the kinds of things reported on the board at the inn.

There's little on the board that sounds like this.

Reaching a hand up to the glass, for a moment Jude just stares at the harsh silhouette of it. It's been a month or more since he even saw this kind of light, and it's difficult to hold in his gaze. His pinky taps most visibly against the barrier, a matching throb in his throat, at his temple. There's a nauseating moment where the world just blurs white and whines, but he swallows and makes a fist, trying to force it back.

He's just tired. The world is not ending. Neither of them is crazy.

When the room comes into focus through the light, equipment sitting dim at the center and the cabinets holding counsel around it, he parses the color behind all the hard, glassy shines. "The others are full of blood," he says, mouth gone dry.

It was real. It was all real. She had heard of magic in her time in the village and experienced her share of it, but she never imagined she would find such an ability in herself. Her hands ran over the glass, circling around the room as she stared at each of the vials, listing off the names of the villagers. Jude was right, there was blood and hair, taken from each of them. Her stomach lurched when she came to her own. The auburn curl burned red under the harsh light, the same luster she had seen this morning as she brushed her hair.

"What does it mean?" She wanted to beat her hands against the glass, to find her way in and search for the answers that were shrouded and tucked away. It was difficult to think that it would all be so easy to find. The simplest answer had always been the right one in her experience. If she considered the Observers as she would consider Cersei, she would think they were flaunting their actions or stirring a reaction.

But why take the time to categorize and collect all of these samples? It had to serve a purpose.

She looked back at Jude, seeing that same exhaustion on his face and that same uncertainty. "Do you recognize anything?" She quickly added, "I have never seen machines like this before. This is...I don't know what this or what it means."

Her questions aren't just questions--they're requests, needs. She needs him to keep the focus he's found, even as the things he sees beg him to look away, not think about it. She needs him to think, identify, name the world behind the glass, even when his throat is closing.

This isn't the first time this place has been hard, or confusing, but it's the most overwhelmed he's been since the cave fell in on him. Since he came choking up out of the fountain. There's a rushing in his ears like the tunnel is flooding around them, that eventually fades back into the sound of her voice.

"It's," he starts, pausing to suck in a breath through his teeth. He turns toward her, feeling better putting a shoulder to the wall, even as he has to look back inside and inspect it. "I don't know what it means, but it looks like some kind of lab. Like a place they do tests, and that's--blood and hair. From people, and animals." The seeds don't mean much to him, except in the context of everything else. "That's some kind of computer in the middle, I guess, but it looks shut off. I don't get why it has lights when everywhere else here is dead."

Lifting a hand, he has to shield part of his face from them, the glare seeming to increase the longer he looks at it. Instead, he looks to the parts of the cavern wall that the glass disappears into. "It doesn't look like there's any way in, from this side."

Labs and computers. The words were foreign to her, but she felt as if she understood the context. There were experiments, a collection of samples from every villager used for some specific test or purpose. She nodded, numb and wary to what seemed to lurk under the surface.

Each animal was here as well. The pets and creatures she had seen in the village, but it was only seeing the label "sheepdog" that her heart felt like lead in her chest. Poor Gilbert was here as well, just as they were.

Finnick had mentioned before that the runners of the Games could create creatures and hazards. He never went into detail about where and how, but she could easily imagine that it was in a room like this one. What did that mean then? Were they created as well? Or were they being controlled in some way? It wouldn't be difficult to imagine that these visions were planted in her by the Observers. But then what was real?

Her eyes trailed over the wall, lingering on a door in the far corner. "Perhaps it can be reached through there?"

I don't want to go in there.

It's more than a thought: it's in his guts, it's hollowing his breastbone. Looking at that back door feels like staring down a leap from a waterfall, the dark of the lake barely reflecting the sun on the water below. The fear goes so deep he has to assume it means his very survival, maybe both of theirs. But there's no expressing it. Not to a woman, not to a stranger, not at his age. If he wasn't going to show fear at twelve he won't show it now.

"Why's it even here now," he asks instead, but the new line of inquiry doesn't assauge the panic. Looking at the way the glass sits behind the jagged edges of the rock wall, he could guess that the quakes shook it loose--but why the glass at all, if it had stone, if the rest of the walls are white and molded like something constructed? When he looks at the floor, the harsh light spilling out and casting long shadows back from their feet, there isn't enough rubble to imply some kind of shed-skin, some kind of accident. This is active, this has intent. All of this place has intent.

For a moment, the sharpness of that admission meets the sharpness of the light, and the moment Jude has been avoiding is upon him. They cut his strings: his nose fills with the smell of old coins and is replaced with damp stone, as every muscle in his body goes slack and there isn't time to make a noise before he pitches over. He hits the glass once and doesn't even bounce off, can't even put up a hand to stop it as he slides noisily against it, the whole thing taking his weight and making an ugly warble as it deposits him neatly on the ground.

There are long moments where the warble is all he can hear, the whine of lights that may or may not be audible to his ears. His vision is bright, then dark, the bright again, and his body is exactly where it was dumped. When control of it is returned, he uses it to find Margaery, giving her a look more stricken than any before.

He'd rather go through a hundred mysterious doors in a hundred caves, than be seen in a fit.

The look on his face, that awe, horror and realization had taken root in her head. Whatever assurances she had after finding the room was depleted by the uncertainty at what it all meant. This was meant to be found. What happened to her wasn't a coincidence. The observers had to be behind this...and if they were behind that, they wanted her to see this room

Jude's sudden collapse shook her from her worries, focusing her mind on the here and now. She reacted instinctively, falling to her knees as she reached out for him. Her hands pulled back, unaware of what she should do or how she could help him. All she was able to do was to watch helplessly, waiting for the fit to pass.

When finally he seemed to regain control of his body, she reached out to touch his shoulder. "What happened?"

For a moment he tries to flinch out of her grasp, but that's as telling as the look, as pitching over in the first place. Taking a breath, he gets his hands on the cave floor, gently shaking his head in the face of her worry, and hides behind the fall of his hair.

His mouth tastes like pennies, and he scrapes the roof once with his tongue before answering. "It's not--I'm fine. It wasn't them." That he can be sure of: he's fallen like that several times over the last eight years, but he can't imagine telling her that. Embarrassing as the lie is, it's easier for both of them if he just says, "I fainted, a little. Got light-headed, the harsh lights bother me."

Looking to the side, they're knelt right at the glass. It isn't what he wants to focus on to ground himself, so he looks back down at their knees, hands flat to the stone, Margaery's hand on his shoulder. When he feels closer to even, he asks: "You saw this, before coming here?"

That is a relief. A part of her had feared that they had stepped into a trap. It wouldn't be a shock if there was someone else in here, someone capable of harming them from the shadows. After so long in the village, she knew anything was possible.

"Sit for a moment and catch your breath." She pulled a flask of water from her bag, holding it out for him to take. "Drink slowly." Her eyes scanned the room once more, instinctively searching for signs of anyone else that might be here. Seeing Jude collapsed raised her paranoia and made her aware of how far she was from the village. "Do you feel better?"

She nodded, frightened by what she had seen and what had proved to be true. "I don't know what has happened. I never could do this before."

People faint for lack of water or food, for a rush of blood from the head--Jude takes the flask and drinks, but it's only another thing to ground himself with. He'd prefer passing out, to what it really is--still in his body, still awake, but completely out of control.

He is fine, though: his hand grips the flask, his mouth swallows the water. Once control returns, it returns in full, and it stays for weeks or months at a time before it happens again.

All he can do is keep his gaze low, avoiding the lights. Minimizing stress is beyond him, sitting in their glare, trying to understand how this woman could see a thing before it happens, and have it be something this ugly and strange. "What exactly did you see," he asks, wondering if there's more besides. Wondering if there really is a way to the door, and what they might find behind it. "Anything that we don't see here, now? Anything more?"

She wished she could explain what had happened to her. The earth had rumbled beneath her feet, a single touch from someone she loved and the visions appeared. Perhaps if it had happened once, it could be easy to forget. What she had seen had not yet come to pass, they could be dismissed as idle fancies for the future. But this was real, this was tangible and she couldn't ignore what it meant...even if she didn't fully understand it.

"I saw flashes of this room." She said, leaning back on her heels. "The lights, the vials, and these." She waved her hand at the lab equipment. "It all went by so fast, I didn't have time to think of what this was or what it meant. I only knew I had to find this room."

Whatever else might be inside, she would leave to the others. She didn't want to know. This was enough to shake her confidence and earlier happiness, what she had celebrated not long ago. "We should return." He didn't look anymore pleased to be here. Now that they knew where it was, others could inspect it. Neither of them would find answers alone. "You should rest and recover. I don't wish you to collapse again and we have a long walk ahead of us."

She wants to go--he wants to go, he's glad of the darkening woods as an excuse, less glad of his infirmity held alongside it. "I won't collapse again," he promises, though it's never been one he could keep. It also doesn't tend to happen multiple times a day--at worst, he might catch sight of something that isn't really there, and it's a relief to hear her list the things in the room. They're real. He doesn't want them to be, but--they're real.

Putting a hand to the glass, he stands up, and he makes himself look through it one last time. Beyond the glare of the lights. He takes in the number of coolers, counting them from one side of the door, then the other. The shape of the door, the placement of the equipment.

People will want to know, and if he can't tell them enough, they'll want to be shown. The more he looks now, the less he'll have to look later. "Tomorrow," he says, "when it's light again--we can put together a picture. From this and your vision. We can show the others."

She glanced around the room one last time. The proof that she wasn't mad and there was something to the images she saw in her mind. At such a cost though, the loss of innocence and naivety about the purpose of this world. Was it real or was this some sort of game? The room's equipment and function went beyond her knowledge, but others might know and tell her what exactly this place was.

"It will take us a day to get back at least." Gilbert at least could alert them if there was some threat in the woods. "We will want to stop and rest when the sun sets. It's better not to be walking in the dark. The forest sometimes changes and we should have light to see." She didn't want to be lost, not again.

"They might wish to see this place. Do you think you can remember the way back?"

She had a point: they would have to wait out the dark to make it all the way back. Alone he might press on, ignoring or ignorant of the changing trees, stubborn and uncaring of how long it took, or where he had to go before the world would let him find the lights of the village again. But if she wanted to stop, he wouldn't leave her to fend for herself.

"I was just following the western wall," he says, shrugging off the simple solution. Anyone would think of that. "If this doesn't change, it'll still be along it tomorrow."

He hopes it doesn't change: if there's no proof of it when they return, no proof of her vision, they'll both look crazy. Jude will feel crazy, if this is the kind of thing he sees once and can never explain to anyone else.

When he steps away from the glass, his feet are steady beneath him, and he sighs once. One more look back at the room, just in case. "If we're needing daylight to set up a camp, we better go while we still have some."

She wishes that she could have that same faith in the wall, but she had been lost in the woods all night once before without sign of the canyon or wall. Everything looking the same. It would be better to wait out the night, if only to ensure they reached home safely.

"All right." She scanned the room once more before whistling Gilbert to follow her. He was all to happy to leave, whining at her side. "I have some supplies for us as well as a blanket. It should keep us comfortable until morning."

She took his arm, ready to face the village and the questions they all would have.

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"What lies beyond? What lay before? Is anything certain in life?"

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end scene?