Thank you for your patience and kind words, and sorry again for the wait (just barely managed to make it under a month!). Things are about to pick up in a big way. Get excited.
Also, I am no gunsmith by any stretch of the imagination, so if I got anything wrong, which I probably did, please let me know so I can correct it.
Five days after getting the book from Livia, Arashk is starting to get exhausted.
He's never psychically stalked another person so constantly before. Not that he's a veteran of psychic stalking, but he's been inside other people's heads before, and two minutes is a lot more manageable than up to an hour at a time, multiple times a day. By the time the sun's setting he feels worn out and used up.
Oh, cry me a river, Ronaldo. You know how your dad feels? Like there's a goddamn bullet in his shoulder.
He has to remind himself that even now that bullet might not have left that gun, or even been loaded into it. But if it hasn't happened, it's coming soon. Very soon. All he can do is pay very close attention to Loriss and hope the guy not only knows something, but unknowingly communicates that information to Arashk via his little red book.
It's not looking good.
He knows this full well, and he allows the words to flow through his mind as often as they occur to him, but he is absolutely forbidden from actually considering their meaning. This is all he's got right now. It has to get him somewhere. It just has to.
He's sitting in his tent between readings on one such occasion, keenly aware of the slight bulk of the book underneath his vest—none of his clothes have pockets, something that never really troubled him until he found himself in possession of an object that he could not leave unattended under any circumstances. Normally it's pretty easy to just slide his hand on in there and get an update on his old pal Loriss, but at the moment that hand is weighed down, and not just by the enormous wooden bracelet adorning the adjacent wrist like a shackle. He's tired, very tired, of keeping such close tabs on the mundane, day-to-day activities of an old man on the maintenance and setup team of a traveling circus. He's tired of letting the hope course through him every second he has his hand on that book, constantly putting faith in the notion that if he just gives it a little more time, Loriss is going to strike up a conversation with the Master and give Arashk just the barest sliver of useful information. He's tired of feeling that hope peter out from each morning to each evening, and witnessing the moment Loriss's mind slips into the blissful veil of sleep, marking the end of one more wasted day.
Livia is going to have to give this book back soon. And when she does, Arashk knows, with a certainty that weighs down on his stomach like a stone, that he will have nothing to show for it.
His next client walks in—a thin middle-aged woman who wants to know how her estranged son is doing. Arashk's heart goes out to her, until it hurts too much, and he can just picture his own parents in her place. He retracts it then, and cuts the session slightly short without telling her anything definitive about her son. She looks a bit resentful at first, but as she rises to her feet her expression melts into something more heartbroken. He closes his eyes until he's certain he's alone again.
He can't become idle. There are people back home being affected by his absence. If he's not strong enough to keep this up for himself, he has to do it for them.
It's been about twenty minutes since he checked on Loriss. At that time, he was just getting ready for his break, which is a time that Arashk would usually listen in on more raptly, but he was distracted by the appearance of a client. Loriss is almost definitely still on break, but Arashk is having a hard time motivating himself to tap into the connection the book lends him and experience the disorientation of immersing himself in someone else's mind.
He sighs silently. Every moment he wastes increases the likelihood that another client will walk in and remove the choice from him for another three or four minutes, and then there will always be more. He needs to stop bypassing the opportunities he's given. He lifts his hand, moving with dreamlike slowness, and slips it into his vest.
The instant his fingertips touch the binding of the little book, he knows something's different. It's no lightning strike moment, but when he enters these empath episodes he's pushed headlong into the thick of it, and the sensation of peering through another person's senses remains constant from the start to the end. And there's something going on here he's never felt before.
If he had to put it into words, he'd almost say there's… an extra layer to the vision that shouldn't be there, but is. Like if he were having a vision of someone having a vision. Not that that's something he's ever experienced or expected to experience, but it's how he would describe it. There's something between him and a direct connection to Loriss that's never been there before.
And the focus, the actual content of what he's feeling, is decidedly that of somebody picking up a gun.
Arashk can't see or feel the arms or hands that hold the firearm—he's barely aware of the object itself and he has no idea who's doing the holding, somehow the body must have gotten lost in translation—but the sensation is so achingly familiar, and suddenly he's back at the firing range his dad took him to time and time again when he was a kid, drilling him constantly, teaching him how to field strip a weapon, how to nab a moving target, how to reload quickly and efficiently.
The feeling of a gun weighing in his palm is something he'd never misidentify. Even if he can't exactly feel the palm.
The gun is loaded already, he can tell that much. It's still at the moment. Arashk spends several numb seconds just familiarizing himself with what's going on, putting his endeavors to describe it in words on hold. He keeps his psychic eyes open for any hints towards who's holding the weapon, but all he can tell is that it's being aimed. Carefully. It doesn't even tremble.
This goes on changelessly for a full minute before a sound pierces the relative quiet of the real world around him, and his eyes open, snapping him from the phantom gun and back into his Tent of Days. He looks up, vision failing him for a moment, or maybe showing him too much, he can't be sure, and after a moment his eyes fall on a couple standing a few paces in front of him, watching him curiously, their young faces lit dimly by the candlelight.
Inside two seconds, he slips into his Arashk Ronaldo persona, collects his thoughts, and says in whatever the hell accent he's been using for the past however many months, "I am sorry, but the spirits are not very active right now. Perhaps you could come back in, say, half an hour?"
Normally he'd tell them that he doesn't take more than one client at a time, but on the chance that they insist on a reading, he does not want to risk them both wanting to come in separately and wasting even more time.
They don't leave, saying they don't really want to talk to any spirits anyway and just wondered what he could do. He barrels through the reading, trying desperately not to show his urgency. He tells them he's going to get a slight raise soon, but she'll run into some trouble with an old friend, and they'll have to support each other, blah blah blah, and he feels about as useful to them as a fortune cookie, which is a shame because he's much better than those tasteless cracker things in every way, but something is compelling him to return to Loriss and that gun. This is important. He doesn't have time.
He finishes in just over two minutes, bids them a pointed farewell, and reaches into his vest just as they vanish from his sight.
The gun is being held in the same position. Whatever hand holds it has hardly twitched. For a moment he has the bizarre worry that maybe it's not being held at all, and it's just sitting on a shelf somewhere, but no—more than anything he can feel the intent around it. Somebody is about to shoot this gun. And if the silencer on it is anything to go by, they don't want to be noticed doing so.
In the continued lull, he attempts to identify the gun just by its feel. It's definitely a handgun, and probably a pretty good one too. 9mm? A Glock, maybe? It feels like it might be something Arashk himself has held in his hand at some point in his life, enough that he would remember how it feels even now…
Something tickles at Arashk's mind, something he can't explain. It's a part of the vision, which might make it even weirder. He's still trying to come up with an explanation when just a few seconds later, his attention is drawn to far more important things.
The trigger pulls back. The firing pin drops onto the primer. The gunpowder is ignited, propelling the bullet forward through the barrel, spinning it around and around as it exits the gun, slicing through the air, traveling in a path that is not one hundred percent straight—probably due to the wind—and enters the living flesh of a man. For the briefest moment Arashk can feel around this man's insides, almost as an assessment of the damage done, and indeed nothing vital seems to have been touched. It's an expertly done job, almost surgical in its meticulousness, and Arashk has no idea what the hell is going on.
Suddenly the focus of the vision-on-vision is back on the gun, and where it was perfectly still before, now it's being moved with an urgency Arashk wants desperately to understand, but there's somebody else standing in front of him in this damn tent, an older woman, by all appearances the kind who would definitely go complaining loudly to management if her food were a bit cold, so as discreetly as he can manage he pulls his hand from his vest and invites her to sit down.
Three minutes later he doesn't know what he's just told her. It was probably vague as all getout but he can't recall any overt dissatisfaction, so there's no need to think about it any further. Before any more interruptions can come walking through that door—or entrance, or whatever tents have—he returns his hand to the book.
Loriss is coming back from break.
Arashk sits in the dark tent with his hand resting inside his vest, blinking repeatedly, mind stalling, feeling the warm sun on Loriss' balding head and the slightly recharged energy coursing through his limbs.
His dad has just been shot. And somehow, Loriss saw it happen in real time.
"Holy hell," he breathes.
The guy is definitely still on the fairground, Arashk saw him briefly a matter of hours ago. And the problem isn't that it's not possible to see things happen from hundreds of miles away—the problem is that, as Arashk first found out a matter of months ago, it is.
He's not the only one.
