DISCLAIMER: Mage: the Ascension and the World of Darkness is the property of White Wolf Publishing. All characters in this story are, however, mine.
I was mad yesterday. When I am mad, things like I always live happens. But, admittedly, it's a great deal better than most of my "rant against stupidity" stories tend to be. (shrugs) Hope you like it.
Lenore giggled nervously. She was lying on her knees in front of the small, clear pond in the forest behind Deerheart House, staining her faded blue jeans in the muddy grass.
"I really don't think it's working," she said. "I just see… You know. Pond stuff."
Samara crossed her arms over her chest. She was standing behind Lenore, all hard lines and sharp angles to contrast Lenore's soft curves. Even so, there was a likeness to them, a far-off gaze, a dreamlike quality that marked them as different from other people. For all that they were as night and day in many ways, there was no mistaking that they were mother and daughter.
"Don't think about that it's supposed to be 'working'," she said to Lenore. "Just relax. Let your mind drift."
Lenore turned her head, stroking sun-blonde hair out of her eyes.
"I've already tried this," she pointed out. "Years ago. Remember? Sammy took me out here, and spent days trying to make me see something down there. I couldn't."
"Your cousin Sammy is a clever man, who is very gifted at what he does," Samara said. "But what he does is hedge-magic. He opens himself to the pool, and sometimes it speaks to him. You're Awakened, Lenore. You should be able to force the pool to speak."
Lenore looked back into the pond, her expression dubious.
"That doesn't sound very, well, reverent," she said. "Aren't we supposed to show respect for the Old Powers? And isn't the scrying pool one of them?"
"Yes," Samara said. "And yes."
Lenore wrinkled her brow.
"That doesn't make sense."
"It makes perfect sense," Samara said. "Think about it, and you'll understand. But not right now. Right now, I want you to look into the pool like a good girl."
Lenore sighed, but looked.
"I'm really more focused around hearing," she said. "I mean, seriously. How often have you seen me stumble because I wasn't looking at where I was going?"
Samara gave her daughter's back a sharp look.
"That doesn't stop you from having prophetic dreams all the time," she said. "You clearly have a talent, and as your mentor, I will teach you how to use it. And as your mother, I will ground you for weeks if you don't start applying yourself this very second."
"Yes, mom," Lenore said humbly.
They were silent for a while, Lenore gazing down into the pool, Samara keeping a hawk's eye on her. Though she hated to admit it, perhaps she was going at this the wrong way. The scrying pool was the Deerheart family's way of farseeing and fortune-telling. Samara used it for her own craft, as did most members of the extended family. But Lenore, for all her almost unmixed Deerheart blood, wasn't really a normal member of the family. Perhaps Samara ought to bring in some outside talent for Lenore's schooling…
She became aware that Lenore was humming.
"Okay, that's it," Samara said. "All I ask of you is…"
"Hush," Lenore whispered. "You'll wake her again, and I only just got her to sleep."
Samara hesitated.
"Who?" she said, lowering her voice somewhat.
"My daughter," Lenore said.
Samara's almost permanent scowl broke up somewhat. It wasn't at all impossible that Lenore would have a child at some point. The Deerheart family didn't cater to the 'everyone must breed! Breed, people, breed!' philosophy of most Verbena, working instead on the theory that the most natural way to live your life was to do what you felt was right for you without pressure or expectations, but even so, children frequently appeared. And Lenore had just tapped into some possible future where she had born one.
Bring in outside talent, pah! The Deerheart way was working just fine! Samara administrated a mental pat on her own back.
"What year is it, Lenore?" she said, out of curiosity.
"Year?" Lenore said. "I… I don't… What do you mean?"
Samara blinked.
"How old are you?" she said.
"Counting the winter I was born into," Lenore said immediately, "I have lived through sixteen of them."
Samara scratched her thick, grey hair. That couldn't be right. Lenore was seventeen years old now. Granted, there was such a thing as several possible pasts, in addition to several possible futures, but the past didn't usually branch that much in that short a time. People's memories tended to tie it into place… at least somewhat.
Also, Lenore had been born in May. Samara should know. She had been present for the occasion, after all…
"My mother died when I was born, you know," Lenore said.
Okay. That one Samara was sure she would have remembered. She took a step forward. Lenore was looking into the pool, her face sad but calm, her body unmoving.
"Did she now?" Samara said.
"They didn't manage to keep her warm," Lenore said. "It was so cold that winter… She died. I lived, though." She sighed. "I always live, and everyone else always dies."
"Not everyone, I'm sure…?" Samara mumbled.
Lenore shrugged.
"Tell me about your daughter," Samara said.
Lenore smiled faintly.
"She's seen two winters," she said, "but she was only big enough to walk this second one. She loved it, you know. She likes ice. She likes sliding on it. I have to remember to watch her all the time next winter, or one day she'll walk out on the lake when it's not frozen enough and go through."
"They're a handful at that age," agreed Samara, who was speaking from a six-child experience. "And, come to think of it, at pretty much every other age, too."
"I guess so." Lenore grimaced, suddenly worried. "She's scared."
"Why?"
"Because she knows they're out there."
Samara considered that for a moment.
"They?" she said.
"The hungry things," Lenore said. "They won't come into the settlement, mostly. They're scared of the fires. And of the metal – but not as much, metal's just something sharp we fight them off with, like claws and teeth. They understand claws and teeth. But the fires… the fires frighten them."
"That's something, then," Samara said.
"Yeah… only…" Lenore shuddered. "Sometimes they get so hungry that they remember that they're scared. When there's nothing to eat out there, and they can smell us in there, all that meat, it drives them crazy." Though she didn't abandon her kneeling position, she crept together, trying to make herself small. "We're meat," she said. "To them, we're just meat."
"No doubt," Samara said.
"And… and sometimes we make a mistake, and we run out of firewood before the night is over," Lenore said. "And besides, we can't always stay inside. The men have to go out, hunt." An expression of pain passed through her face. "It's tricky, you know?" she said, talking just a bit too fast, just a bit too eager to move on. "The fewer men who form a hunting party, the less chance they have of catching something. But the fewer men who stay in the settlement, the more dangerous it is for the women and children who're left behind…"
"Your lover," Samara said. "The father of your daughter. He's out hunting right now, isn't he?"
Lenore nodded reluctantly.
"… yes…" she said in a small voice.
"When is he coming back?" Samara said.
"He… He was supposed to have come back before last night." A tear rolled down Lenore's face. "He's dead, isn't he?"
"It's possible," Samara said.
"Everyone always dies," Lenore said. "And I always live. Why can't I save them? Why can't I ever save them?"
"I don't know," Samara said. "Why can't you?"
"Because… because…" Lenore sobbed. "Because it's so hard to reach them. It's so easy, surviving. When I was giving birth to my daughter, something was going wrong, but I just made myself look like I was supposed to look, inside, and it went fine. But there was this other woman, and something was going wrong for her when she was having a baby, and they wanted me to help her, and I tried…"
"But it's harder to heal someone else than it is to heal yourself," Samara said.
"I tried to tell her," Lenore almost pleaded. "That she had to make herself look like she was supposed to look, inside. She didn't understand." She closed her eyes. "They both died."
"It wasn't your fault," Samara said. She didn't say it in any gentle fashion. That wasn't her style. She just said it as a statement of fact. "You're… special, aren't you? Different from the others in your… tribe?"
"Yes," Lenore said, sounding forlorn.
"You can do things that they can't."
"Yes…"
"But you're not all-powerful," Samara said firmly. "And you won't ever be. You can't do everything, protect everyone…"
"I can't protect anyone," Lenore moaned. "Just myself. Everyone else gets sick and dies, but I just make my body right again. When the hungry things come into the settlement, I tell them to stay away from me, and they do, but when I try to tell them to stay away from everyone else, it feels like my head is splitting, it hurts so much. And food, I don't need food, but when there's nothing to hunt everyone else just wastes away…"
"Lenore…" Samara said.
"No…" Lenore whimpered, hiding her face in her hands.
"Lenore, I want you to come back now."
"No…"
"You are Lenore Deerheart. You are my daughter. You are not some proto-Verbena in a Bronze Age tribe. Come back from there."
"I… I…"
"Come BACK!" Samara thundered, putting all she had of mind control skills into the command. And as if she had been hit by a whip, Lenore gasped, fell to the ground… and stared up at Samara with wide eyes.
Samara quietly helped her to her feet. Then she put her hand on Lenore's back and gently guided her back towards the house.
"Was that… real?" Lenore said as they walked.
"For a given value of 'real'," Samara said with a shrug. "It was a past life, I imagine."
"Old Powers." Lenore licked her lips. "She… I was hurting so badly. People were dying and suffering and fearing, and I couldn't do anything but watch…"
"Yes, well." Samara smiled wryly. "That was what the world looked like, pre-Technocracy. The Awakened were a great deal better off, because there weren't six billion people walking around thinking that what we do is impossible. The Sleepers, on the other hand, were very much worse off. You might want to think about that, if you ever run into some hot-headed young mage who wants you to help him bring back the good old days. It's a good idea, but only if you don't give a shit about what happens to the Sleepers."
"I'll say," Lenore mumbled. Then she turned her face towards Samara, confused. "Hey. I thought you hated the Technocracy."
"I do," Samara said. "Because they're overdoing it – trying to make the world too safe, too comfortable. Oh, and because that involves killing or brainwashing us. Make no mistake, though. When the Ascension War first started, the old Order of Reason were the good guys."
"Noted," Lenore mumbled, with feeling. "Hey, who were the 'hungry things'? Were they, like, monsters?" Something occurred to her, making her open her eyes wide. "Vampires…"
"I'm sure they were part of the bunch, yes," Samara said. "But only a small part."
"What about the rest?"
Samara started counting off points on her fingers.
"Well, we have wolves, bears, mountain lions, sabre-toothed tigers, ordinary, garden-variety tigers…"
"But that's just animals!" Lenore said.
Samara grinned at her, darkly amused.
"And do you have any idea," she said, "any idea at all, just how much of an advantage your basic carnivore has over humans, when the humans don't have guns? Hell, don't have bows, even? Back then, anyone who wasn't a mage was walking around with a big sign in her forehead that said 'lunch'. And even mages weren't much better off. Not like a wolf can tell the difference between Awake and Asleep, after all."
"Wow," Lenore said.
They walked in silence for a while.
"Do you know the answer now?" Samara said, when they were walking through the back door into Deerheart House. "Why we respect the Old Powers and force them into submission at the same time?"
"Because… that's the only kind of respect they understand?" Lenore said.
Samara kissed the top of her daughter's head.
"We'll make a Deerheart witch out of you yet, Lenore."