The Hall of Portraits

[Butler]

His fingers communed with the scars in the stone, gliding over splotched stains and chipped cracks in search of every tale this wall had to offer. And its dust clung to the circles in his skin, kissing their lifelong wounds as would a mother for its child. He felt so warm against its cold age. Perhaps it was simply the orange glow of purple night, subsiding from the cursed darkness with a calming rise like a blanket lifting over his back.

He'd returned to this spot outside the government house of parliament every morning since he'd been stranded here on Darkknell days ago, viscerally pulled to these spanning glyphs so saturated by a palpable history. It's culture was depicted like a memory, familiar to him even as he ignored the bustle of the present bodies shuffling about behind him. If he could breath in all the sights and sounds this wall had seen, sniff at the spoiling sand, his heart would be fulfilled.

A beggar child, setting up his bass violin along the gutter-bank to express his mourning soul, had come to expect the sight of Lucifer each day. There is the white colored man, he'd say as he unclipped the brass latches over the gray worn leather case. There he goes, letting his torn white woolen sleeves sweep off the dust from the ancient murals dragging his fingers up and down each pictorial from the wars to those who caused them. Each day the same tacky clothes, string unraveled down the stitching of his neck and shoulder; leaving a common empathy in the boy's sad eyes as he glanced over to Lucifer, as if checking the time. When his hand reaches the 'blood mother', I should be almost ready to play - he'd tell himself.

Lucifer had forgotten how long it had been since he'd pressed the personal signal beacon, pinging his location to one person whom had found him when he was lost not too long ago; a mess. Now he was less so. More was he right where he needed to be than anything else. And there was the reason. His fingers stopped just underneath that picture. There wasn't a name. There wasn't a title nor crown. Yet there was something that he could not get past. The woman's face. This mural had to have been centuries old. At least it seemed so. And yet, there was his mother's face imprinted onto the wall. Right there. As clear as day. There was no mistaking it. As hard as he had tried to forget her disinterested longing, that glazed stare that saw straight over him and into the distant beyond, there it was leering out from the stone. Yet now he was tall enough. He could lift his eyes into her view, into the painted dots of her pupils that stopped right at his. It scared him to know absolutely that it was her, somehow, some way.

A woman strolled up beside him.

"Beautiful. Isn't she?"

Lucifer tore his stare away from the tiny depiction of a white haired woman, drawing a curious creep of innocence to his side where he found a formally dressed young lady studying the white haired portrait next to him. His soft, cold blue eyes swept back to the image of his mother then back to the woman who seemed so unafraid to stand so close; to address him without formally addressing him.

"Alright everyone," she addressed three stragglers of varying insignificance with a pivoting rotation away from Lucifer. "Have a look around. I'll be right back. We'll begin the tour in five minutes."

 

[Ben]

It was a charming mural, at least, in the opinion of the scruffy artist hanging at the back of the group. The man scratched idly at his shaggy beard, eyes tracking the swinging hips of the pretty tour guide in earnest. The violet orbs traced their way back up out of shaded sockets to the face of the mother once more. They moved lazily back down to the tussle of white hair tumbling over the back of the frilled collar, and the man that hair sat on; a stark image of a scruffy young boy in tattered garments stood superimposed in some kind of blur. The frown that wanted to express itself never found it's way up to knit the diminutive artists brow together, only a cool regard stood in place as he moved to the side of the marble statue of a man.

"Admire the local art?"

Cocking an eyebrow with a slight inclination of the neck towards the silent member of the conversation, the scrubby man folded his arms behind his back and rocked back and forth onto the balls of his feet for a few moments. Apparently too insignificant for the pretty young chap at his side; a good deal more beautiful than the art he studied.

"I never had much time for art."

The line should have been enough: an artist not having time for art? Lucifer had been to abject and distant to recognise Joshua thus far, but he was no idiot. Or, at least, Joshua hoped not. Hrass had received the ping a few days ago from the transponder he had given Lucifer, his new prize. It was not like Hrass to chase around after people or things; but this one was particularly precious to him, he did not want it... lost. That being said, there was little point having such a treasure if it was not allowed to go its own way, so rather than keeping Lucifer under lock and key, Joshua had chosen to simply give him means to call for help.

"I will not deny it's appeal, however."

 

[Butler]

His examination fell from the mural, objecting ogle refocusing on the feet that offensively encroached on his precious space. These eyes were enflamed, transforming from tender innocence into now aggrieved irritation. But then more than just eyes comprehended this person next to him, ears sampling that familiar sound and heart feeling that familiar affliction. Lucifer's cheek slid up against his shoulder, eyes brightening to some distinction.

Eyelashes fluttered. They stared.

'Joshua', he might've uttered if not for intuition of discretion. Names were best left unsaid out in the open, such as it this. Though it was spoken in the explosion of his stare. Suddenly an instinctual fear settled in, and those eyes searched for others. But no one paid them any attention. Perhaps it was something instilled in him from when he first met this man, this man having seen him at his weakest though also his strongest. Yet fear inscribed in but a sliver of time seemed all the more impactful than a decade of uninterrupted power. He was this by definition, Lucifer; ups and downs on the turn of the weather. Extreme by nature, he could not help but experience so much more in life in a single moment of sight than many could say for an entire lifetime. It was emotional freedom, thrown from control.

"There is a certain beauty in becoming lost." He looked back up to the eroded painting, eluding to its vast obscurity; as to himself. "...A purpose."

Lucifer held onto that feeling of separation, a falsehood of distance from any faction; even if just for another second. For he knew now he had rejoined preordained position, the Force's rendering of his life; a dramatic satire. There was no escaping the destiny of his power and all it presented. He understood this. Lucifer's mind could only wander so far, regardless.

 

[Ben]

"There is indeed."

Joshua watched with a bitter-sweet tinge as his little doves wings were clipped, falling down from the lofty and distant perch it had been lost upon. That was the state were he was purest, alone; some semblance then burnt in his eyes of the bold and fearless beacon that had burnt in the muggy night on the fringes of a forest, not too long ago.

"If only it was a plane on which we could tarry, perhaps, just a little longer." If not indefinitely.

No. That was an impracticable thought. Dreams could be pleasant realms of our own ideal lives, but they did not last. One could not simply turn their backs on the dull and oblique terrors of real life. Eyes burning into the turned face of Lucifer, Joshua sought out the 'something else' that lingered behind the mans expression; something beyond the regret of his forced return to the galaxy.

"Unfortunately not. You have remained lost for a moment too long."

Joshua noted the return of the tour guide, she was fiddling with a datapad, not yet ready to continue.

"Need we stay here longer."

The sentence, a question on its surface, was betrayed by the fact that Hrass already had his answer. He found it in the dim resolve burning in countenance to the vague obscurity that left his eyes wandering languidly over to the curvaceous frame of the tanned tour guide. Something more than pretty shapes held Lucifer there however, something... inside? Joshua looked between the building the wall stood a part of and Lucifer himself; both cut of the same perfect, white stone.

 

[Butler]

Lucifer's hopefulness trembled into timidity, a fear that fed the fires of forethought and blazed into freedom's ferocity. It was there he dared to dream, desperation drawing out the dreamer in him. Gabriel, the most creative of all his demons. Like dominion worn in a crown, his ears opened, temples freed from stress, and his sight blurred straight ahead of him into the wall with ease.

"The abyss is not the end, but the beginning," he answered in lowered tone and smooth clarity of confidence in context.

His feet shuffled his shoulders square in facing Joshua, full frontal gaze unabashedly unbending; giving his answer with a wave of the hand to the woman behind him, completely ignorant to their presence.

"May we join you?" he politely shouted.

The tanned tour guide lifted from her concentrated study of her clipboard, blinked the confusion from her unsuspecting mind, and smiled appreciation in light of the underappreciated history in her care.

"Aha. Of course. Please. We were just about to begin."

His arm lowered to his side, expecting Joshua to be at least a bit put off by the suggested delay.

"I've never been inside," he all but whispered for Joshua's ears only. "...I have... questions. Some things I'd like to discuss with you?"

Lucifer's head tilted, as though coercing a parent to play a little bit longer; all while inserting subtleties alluding to the conversation Joshua had to know they'd eventually have before Lucifer was fully assimilated into this association. Though, in truth, Lucifer had been too afraid to enter this place alone. He still was. Yet he feared to expose his current internal conflict anywhere else. A place of great affliction, peeling himself open into vulnerability, he anticipated a rebirth; as he often did in moments like these. And he inexplicably desired this, just as he could not explain the pull he felt towards this structure's inner story. It was familiar, on both accounts.

His left palm turned open to his side, offering Joshua lead the way.

 

[Ben]

Joshua tilted his head in kind, regarding Lucifer with a steady gaze. The setting of his jaw and hardening of his eyes from starlight to flecks of ice; the young man was squaring up to something more than just Joshua. Some abstract, but anchored to his being. Hrass' eyes moved slowly between the faux-innocence the marble skin wore before him, and the cold pillars either side of the doorway into the hallowed building.

"Indeed."

Placing his hand on the small of Lucifers back, Joshua guided him forwards towards the opening doors of the foyer; the dim lighting inside contrasting so sharply with the pale morning shine outside that everything beyond the threshold was too dim to see. 'The abyss is not the end, but the beginning.' Joshua's mouth twitched at the aptness of those portending words. Into the abyss indeed. He could tangibly feel the resonance of Lucifer's piqued interest with his own; their two beings thrumming in joined anticipation. Likely for quite different reasons.

"The abyss is more than you know. Most of what we do is in vain, but we cannot excuse ourselves from the duties we must carry out regardless."

He doubted what he said made much sense to Lucifer. Not because he lacked the ability to understand the words, but because he was in too removed a place to see their context. These were words of immediacy, of pragmatism merging with the same abyss Lucifer so pined over. Whereas Lucifer was clinging to a thin rope, so far down into the abyss that any light by which he could glean the reasoning behind Joshua's prattle was too bent and distorted to make sense of.

They trailed behind the small touring group - Darkness was not famed for its natural history tourism - a pale demigod and a scruffy, stunted man. Nevertheless, a man so blurred in any sense of perception as to be a smearing shadow rather than anything solid; less tangible even than the resonance the two felt as the walked the dimmed halls and the carefully treated murals and tapestries.

'Yes. Things to discuss. Many things.'

 

[Butler]

Lucifer traded between the man who guided him at his back, strange feelings of confusion to the meaning of "touch", and the history above and around them; turning a frown of study at Joshua's words but arcing astounded amazement up at the darkened beginnings of a gothic world he desired connection with. The abyss, as they entered a symbolic form of shadow, opened up to ages of worlds gone by; just their steps alone echoing in the grand gala of regaling stone. Architecture was its body, massive statues framing the dark cloth draped down around important portraits and landscape paintings of an extinct empire. Yet, in his wonder, his imaginings expanded into the surreal.

The woman finally began oration, garnering her few followers' attention.

"Yes," he answered softly, assuming he understood. "But, that is what, that is, I don't..." He tried once more. "What are...'we' Why...are 'we'?"

Lucifer struggled to express himself under the quiet sounds of his whispering frustration, the tour guide's words echoing over his as she continued on about a barbarous age in prelude to a ruling family in chaos. Lucifer couldn't, he wouldn't, say their name outloud; the Bogan. But he had to know, to understand what it was he was now a part of. At least for his part, he needed vision, focus. He sought after reason, clarity that could keep his shakiness at bay; otherwise squirming in a formless pool of mud, with no ambition nor desire.

His hands clawing at confusion in the air, expression contorting a collapse of control, Lucifer was losing himself to his fear of the unknown. Without the illusion of control that his ambitions gave him, Lucifer felt devoid of solidity by his very fabric in tissue; an afflicted mind. There was nothing more settling than momentum for him. No matter how fast, he could control it - guide it. His was the eye of an aiming sight. Without something to spy, off in the distance, he was undone.

'Who am I', he wished to cry; but for fear to do so.

 

[Ben]

Joshua watched with rapt attention for a moment - perhaps a moment too long - at the marvellous performance before him. Not the tour guides mediocre oration, no; he was enthralled by the rich, pure and desperate despair roaring like a canyon-wind through young Lucifer’s soul. He was drowning, and Hrass was lost in the slow-motion beauty of it; just like a glorious dancer framed by the suspending embrace of water. But Lucifer was drowning in a far more fatal grasp, that of his own mind. Joshua began with the superficial.

"We, as a whole, are not much of anything yet. I suppose if we can be one thing, we can be seen as promise. That is what you should look at us as."

This was a sensitive topic, but Joshua spoke aloud. Lucifer was too fragile as of yet to confront Hrass directly in a telepathic medium.

"We are too fractured and divergent to be much on anything yet. Too many keen hands grasp for the yoke of control; too many weak minds propose their own concepts of what we are to be. We are weak in short. An embryo, still taking form. We need a strong hand, but we shall soon be corralled under a worthy mast. Mark my words. But, alas... whilst that was certainly the question you were asking, I don't think it was the answer you were looking for. Was it?"

Joshua moved on to the next exhibit: a lamenting figure swathed in luxuriated white gowns preparing to throw herself into from a cliff into steely grey waters below, captured in gorgeous oil paints.

"Who we are is a much harder question for me to answer..."

Just as Lucifer’s attention was flitting between Joshua and the macabre world around him, so too was Joshua's; only in an attempt to try and see what his prodigy saw. His prodigy and his teacher.

"I suppose that I can afford to give you - and that you deserve - the truth in this matter. I haven't the foggiest. Time and time again I have forayed into existentialism and worth and purpose; I never get closer to the answer. All I can say is that this," he gave the marble-flesh of Lucifer’s exposed upper-arm a sharp pinch "this is as real as we can truthfully say we have experienced. This is as close to a divine calling as we can get. At least... for now. So I say capitalise on it; make it your own. Our efforts my ultimately be in vain, but they are ones we must make regardless."

 

[Butler]

Lucifer's head lowered, disappointed in the shadow of what he had wed; embryonic in its nubile form, and just as cryptic in its definition as what he had abandoned all those years ago. Albeit, perhaps its antithesis, perhaps more true in its lack of shape than the other, yet still not what he had hoped for here by the master's side. At least he seemed the practice's principle figure, at least in Lucifer's eyes. He sighed, his confirmation to Joshua's correct assumption.

Then, somehow, the pinch of his arm sent his thoughts sparking along a completely different tangent; his attention seized with the raise of his head and twist of his defensively challenging shoulders squared towards Joshua and his kind philosophy.

"I am not forsaken!" he shouted angrily. "cast aside, forlorn!" He beat his breast with pointed, pressed fingertips, while waving the others out wildly; snarling a fanged overbite. "I have seen beyond! The divine calls to ME!"

His vibrant voice echoed in the silence, alive against ancient antiquities. The fire in his eyes was fleeting, retreating from the realization that others had heard him and were looking this way. His arms lowered, breath slowing, sight shifting timidly over his shoulder. They were all staring at him. Yet this countenance could not decide on just one expression, falling through a plethora of subtly congruent conditions until landing into artless retreat. His chin slinked into the cradle of his shoulder, alter ego almost asking for forgiveness of Joshua in the shyness of a sinful stare. Lucifer swallowed, scattered over a splintered cell of selfish aspirations in promise of spiritual ascension. He just knew there was more to this existence, just his, than meaningless regularity.

"My efforts will see me through," he whispered, leaning into Joshua with a hand propping onto the leg of the statue.

"Um. If you could, please, don't touch that. Please?" the guide asked, clutching her clipboard close to chest.

Lucifer's confidence weaned, his hand immediately lifting from the statue in responsive obedience; oddly enough reverting into outright hypocrisy. But his soul still stung, his conflictions still set on a glorified meaning; all meeting at the focus of his conviction. It reminded him of something he felt he needed to share. And he prepared himself as the party warily moved on to the next set of exhibits, a darkened hallway splitting around a corner that leads into a light sensitive room. There before them was a distorted trunk, a thick stem constructed of a single deformed abdomen sprouting three disfigured creatures in outward agony of each other; each pulling away from the other hopelessly. Lucifer and Joshua held back behind the others, just as before.

"There's something I should...I mean I want to tell you, I, that I would like to...confide in you," he began quietly. "I've...expanded my influence. Within the Cartel," he whispered, expecting Joshua to understand which cartel he referred to now.

 

[Ben]

Joshua watched the cold marble in all of its glorious animation. He watched it calmly, he observed, he took his notes for later. Remembering to keep an eye out for the split personality disorder, to watch for wild swings of mood; but for Joshua, at that moment, it was all part of the grand facade. All a piece to the puzzle of his crippling obsession that was quickly proving to defy all logic.

"This sounds like a conversation for another time, dear friend."

Hrass merely folded his hands around one of Lucifers as he seemed to be shellshocked out of his bubble of crisis by the tour guide, mercifully leading him to the next display. They would indeed poke into Lucifers brain at a later date, but for now, they were too public. This clearly evoked a reaction from the boy, and Joshua wanted to push that without fear of exposure. The next point brought up came from the shyer, more level-headed Lucifer however, so Hrass eagerly pressed ahead.

"The Cartel, eh?"

He of course knew Lucifer dabbled, he wasn't going to let him carry on with the Bogan Order if he didn't know about the young man. It was also one of the fear-mongering organisations built on deceit and corruption whose very fall was Joshua's aim; so he was contemptuous to get involved with them. It would take a fool to not want all the information one could get on ones prey however, and except for a few, very choice times, Joshua was certainly no fool.

"This sounds like a topic of more... immediate suitability. Why don't you tell me a little of your escapades with our friends then? I assume you raised this topic for a point?"

Hrass did not speak aloud the second edge of meaning to his pointed comment: I want to know what the reason you have come here is, to this building, hurry up and get on with it. After all, the show was half the reward, as was quickly proving to be the point with Lucifer. The path to the reason behind coming to this old vault of history was just as intriguing to Joshua as the reason itself would likely prove itself to be.