† monstra evenerunt mihi

[ad_dicendum]

WHO: Gaius Gracchus
WHERE: Outside the Inn
WHEN: During the aurora event, around Jan 6
OPEN TO: Anyone willing to try talking to the guy who knows barely any English
WARNINGS: Slightly squicky injury reference
STATUS: OPEN

---

The gods are speaking.

It is hard to look at the sky at night and not think that. Gaius has never been a man to let omens stand in the way, but twice now, he and his brother had continued their work under ill-favored birds, and it had ended badly for them. Tiberius, he's been told, had split his toe crossing the threshold as he set out for the forum on the day he'd been killed. And the omens in Junonia had been nothing but bad, wolves stealing the boundary markers, winds breaking the standards and scattering the sacrifices, and he's been wondering ever since his return to Rome if those omens weren't for the colony, but for him. Nothing had gone right for him since Junonia. He'd lost his support, he'd lost the elections (or had them rigged against him) and he'd found his enemy elected to the consulship.

And now here the skies are afire at night, blazing in greens and blues and colors he's never known the night sky could have. It can surely bode no good to this strange village he's found himself in that the gods have set their aethereal flame every night for more than a week now. It can bode no good, but that hasn't stopped Gaius from going out to stare up into the dancing light and wonder at it. Wonder, and marvel, too, for all his fear.

"O, Iuppiter," he murmurs, the start of some half-formed evocation to the sky god, king of the gods of Rome: tonight, the skies are brighter than ever.

He's wrapped up in his coat, but the Roman is standing in the middle of the path that runs past the inn and paying no attention to the weather, or to anyone who may approach: instead, he's entirely absorbed in the sky.

Comments

[warriorborn]

The lights are beautiful.

The lights are also mysterious, and Benedict isn't quite sure he trusts them. He's learned, in his time here, that the things he thought he knew about the Surface aren't necessarily true, that there are some things he'd thought were deadly that were, in fact, harmless, and almost everyone in the habble seems to think the lights are one of those things; harmless and pretty, albeit something of a nuisance with how bright they are.

They do have some good qualities, though, and one of them is that they illuminate the paths they keep digging well enough that Benedict doesn't have to squint at all when he darts outside one last time before bed to collect some more wood to burn through the night.

The man standing in the middle of the path is obvious, and he doesn't bump into him, but he is somewhat in the way. Clearing his throat, Benedict stops a few paces away, and lifts his eyebrows when the man doesn't turn his head to look at him immediately.

"Excuse me," he says politely, hoping the newcomer will take the hint and get out of his way so he can get back inside. As soon as the thought forms, however, he feels immediately guilty for it; when he first arrived, everything had seemed new and overwhelming and strange, just because he's been here long enough to grow disenchanted doesn't mean everyone else should. "They're incredible, aren't they?"

[ad_dicendum]

The night near as bright as day is one of the unsettling things about the lights. It's not simply the green ribbons of light twisting through the sky, it's the eerie glow they cast over the night's landscape, leaving the snow layered in green. The light gives the whole word an unearthly tint, enough that Gaius' appeal to the gods seems the only appropriate response.

Yet he is fascinated, staring in awe at the sky, and he's so awed that he's not looking at the people around him, an unusual state for a man who's spent the past several years needing to be aware of his public image and his public following. It's strange to be around so few people here, not to be crowded with clients and petitioners and supporters whenever he's out in public, not to have his wife and mother and children and slaves around him when he's home.

So he's not listening closely enough to parse what the man says first. It's only when he pauses that Gaius is listening, and though one of the words is familiar, it's not familiar enough for him to understand the man's meaning.

"I don't know your language," he says, slowly, in one of the few English phrases he's yet learned, his words heavily accented.

[warriorborn]

Benedict feels even worse now for his unconscious irritation, and he nods, hopefully smoothing his expression out into something much more pleasant and inviting.

"Right." They've been lucky, somewhat, that most everyone who came through the fountain seemed to speak the same language, but there are enough people here who are struggling with language barriers that he's grown used to the idea. "Er..."

Adjusting the wood in his arms, he cautiously greets the man in each language he speaks, not really expecting much to come of it, as it seems that there is little parallel between what Benedict has known in the Spires and what everyone else knows on the Surface. Still, he's been able to muddle through alright with people like Thorfinn and Cougar, who both speak different languages to him, so logic dictates that he should, hopefully, be able to speak to this man as well.

"The lights are beautiful."

[ad_dicendum]

This young man, it seems, is very well-educated, by the number of languages he cycles through, and Gaius appreciates the effort. He appreciates it even more when he says something that Gaius can understand: that the lights are beautiful.

"Truly, they are," he agrees. He's been learning to keep his sentences shirt, his choice of words simple, because there are a handful of people here who can understand some of what he says in Latin, if he doesn't speak with his customary high-flying rhetoric.

"But aren't they also a concern? What might they mean?"

It sounds, perhaps, a little like a rhetorical exercise, a prompt for a child's discourse, but it is, simply, a real concern to him. Why would the gods do this to the sky?

[warriorborn]

Latin? It had been Benedict's last resort, as the man hadn't reacted to Auroran or any of the other languages Benedict had tried, and he's surprised that Latin is the one that struck a chord. But then again, it's possible that Latin isn't the man's first language and he, like Benedict, is making do with the only common denominator they have between them. In any case...

Thinking hard, his words a little stilted as he tries to pull up lessons he'd long ago ceased taking, Benedict responds.

"People say they mean nothing. That they are caused by...science."

Benedict isn't entirely sure he believes that — he, himself, votes for ethereal magic, which automatically makes him distrust them — but as it is the general consensus around those he's heard discussing it, he will allow them their opinions.

[ad_dicendum]

Gaius won't question somebody knowing his language, though everyone he's spoken to here who knows Latin seems to know it as some distant thing that takes them time to recall. Still, he's learned to be grateful, and that gratitude brings with it a patience that is not inherent in Gaius' character. So he listens, his face turned away from the lights for long enough for the man to finish speaking.

Science, he has to pause over. By wisdom, learning, philosophy? The thought of philosophy sparks a memory, of Greek lessons and things read avidly in the period of his retirement from public life after his brother's death.

"Aristotle said crimson lights in the sky are caused by air condensing and taking fire." There is something in the dance of the green threads above them that is like what Aristotle had said: something about the light filtering through the air and the colors appearing different to us.

"What do you believe?"

[warriorborn]

Benedict is grateful for the man's patience, although the more he thinks about what to say, the more he remembers. He speaks with an accent that Benedict is unused to, but that would be logical if he's from a different Spire, so he doesn't comment on that or even lift his eyebrows in surprise.

He doesn't recognize Aristotle, but it's obvious the man is someone Benedict's new friend reveres or at least respects, so he won't ask.

Aristotle's explanation doesn't exactly put Benedict at ease, and it's probably obvious in the cast of his face. He rolls his lips together, thinning them, and glances up. "Magic. Ethereal magic," he adds in Albion, not having the mental fortitude at the moment to try and figure out a way to translate something that he's never learned the Latin word for. "I do not like them much but they have been burning for weeks and nothing evil has happened. So I have learned to accept them."