Chiron Academy

interlude

She stared out the large window down to the city streets below. It was a windy day. The brightly colored autumn leaves were being blown around wildly. She wasn't able to hear the wind blow; it must have been quite loud. A few people struggling against the wind on the streets didn't appear to be enjoying the experience. She was glad she was up here away from the wind.

Still, in her heart of hearts, she wished that her body was capable of feeling the wind. It had been a very long time since she had felt a breeze blow across her face. It was a far off memory now. Today, she felt capable of less. She barely felt the weight or the sensation of contact with the clothes she was wearing. She was becoming less and less aware of the more sensitive sensations.

The spacious room she stood in she knew was cold, but more because of memory than by experience. They kept the thermostat set lower than most people found comfortable. Not because it made any difference to them; they didn't notice much towards either extreme and it was cheaper at the moment to allow the chill from the outside find a hold in the large, drafty room.

The ground she could feel the pressure push against her bones. That was where most of her sensation came from. Her bones. That was her, in most respects. All that remained of her.

"So what are we going to do?" she queried to the man standing behind her.

"I don't know, Vai," the man said with a sigh. His sandy blonde hair whisked back and forth as he shook his head slowly. "I talked to the last few that we hadn't talked to yet. Everyone I can think of. All of them say it's too risky. They've all heard what happened to Druid. The Egyptian's got them all shook up."

"What about that woman, in Marseilles? Surely she'd had a soft spot for an old flame."

"Madame Nostra?" Griff replied sheepishly. "That was a long time ago, Vai. I don't she's in the business anymore. She's got to be eighty or ninety now."

"Besides," he added, "last time we spoke with her, you had some rather strong words for her about what you would do to her if you ever saw her with me again."

Vai thought he might have blushed. If he still could. A lifeless grey palour inhabited his cheeks, one that Vai knew resembled the color of her own face.

Griff was right: it had been a very long time ago. Griff had met the woman back in the '30s. They weren't together at the time. They'd had a large fight which ended with Vai throwing one of the dining room chairs out the window of their Paris apartment and saying that if Griff didn't leave right then he'd be next. By the time she heard anything about him again, several months had passed and she was working been for some time in Salzburg for a local baron. Rumor had reached her that Griff was still in France and that he'd hooked up with some woman, a medium popular at the time for offering seances to the local elite.

It's not that she wasn't hurt, she was. They'd been together a long time. A very long time, to be honest. But they were both passionate people and they had the habit of splitting up from time to time when their tempers got the better of them, but they always found themselves getting back together in the end. Some bonds couldn't be broken so easily.

That's what happened at that time too. After while of working for the baron, she found that she missed Griff too much to be away and made her way Marseilles, slowly circling in on where he was living with Madame Nostra. The relationship there had mostly fizzled; most people couldn't handle large doses of Griff after a while, but Vai had still had a few choice words with the woman in case she got any further ideas.

"There's got to be someone, Griff. I can't believe no one is willing to help us. You'd think that by the time you've been alive for two hundred years, you'd have met enough people that you would never run out of friends. Or least the kind of friends who will exchange your services for very large sums of money."