The encoded message Auriel left Brandywine on her computer was urgent. "Come to Kingston now. Take a land flyer as soon as conveniently possible. Something interesting ishappening." Brandywine obeyed. Auriel was an information nexus and a friend. She packed nothing but her signal augmentor and went immediately to the depot and caught the next train.
Since she wanted to focus so she splurged on a privacy cell. Brandywine leaned back into the comfortable seat. She wriggled her feet soundlessly in time to the music of her radio implant. She was tuned into WICA, the all Pagan station. Candlewick, her favourite grove group, was harmonizing on 'Heart of Stone'.
'This white rock will be my bone,
A cage to hold my heart of stone..'
Music was a window on reality. Music was good.
Brandy’s thoughts were not bright thoughts when she let them drift back to Auriel's message. Something was very wrong. Brandy tended to let 'evil' follow its own course, as the very necessary shadow of good. Auriel was one to intervene as if he were, somehow, the conscience of mankind. Still, he was a nexus and a guardian and something was troubling him enough to call for reinforcements.
Brandywine pulled out a touchboard from her chair arm and keyed a shade on the southern windows, darkening the car. She then programmed in a wakeup call for five miles before Kingston Station. She clicked the train seat into a coffin bed, slanted upward at a slight angle and just as long and wide as she was. Sleep came quickly and she woke refreshed to see the blue water and white rock outcropping of the limestone city of Kingston. She stretched like a cat and then, as fluid as water, Brandy jumped off with agility just one second after the train stopped. The almost too sweet flower tangle of her perfume trailed invisibly behind her like a tattered veil brushing against all in her wake. She spotted a 21st century jogger with a straggle of grey beard, red running shoes, and an external radio with antique headphones. He was getting his primitive endomorphin fix though one of the more enduring 20th century religious forms.
Unlike the highly visible runner, magic users were treated as invisible in these times. The needs and desires of secretive magic fitted quietly between the threads of mundane life. Their presence was either not noticed or willed away as improbable, allowing them to pass through the weave of society like gossamer insects threading their way though an overgrown garden.
Brandy was such a gossamer creature. She practiced her art quietly and garnered wisdom as a butterfly takes the sweet dew of flowers. Although, truth be told, the paths of magick were not always sweet for all things must have their balance and true knowledge is not won except by hard questing on sometimes perilous paths.
Authentic old buildings built with blocks and facades of limestone were everywhere downtown in downtown Kingston. The air was clean now but some shadowy acid etching remained from the times before the pollution code. Ancient slab sidewalks underfoot were powdered with the ubiquitous whitelimestone dust. Old buildings sat here with a solid presence, as if they had grown here in cool and quiet, which, in some sense, they
had. Kingston rested on limestone bedrock.
Brandywine placed her palm against the shaded stone front of an old Bank and felt
generations passing beneath her palm. She found ghostly traces of a witch from the 20th century new Biblical persecution times. The ghostly witch essence was furtive and constrained. Gently, Brandy sent her own spirit out to touch the trembling, ghostly fragment and set it free. Gratitude followed her like the scent of sweet bergamot in sunshine.
