ph_logs | [Lore Mingle] Singing Songs to the Secrets Behind My Eye, Oh My

[Lore Mingle] Singing Songs to the Secrets Behind My Eye, Oh My

Who: Dahlia Leeds & the former members of the Ocularum
What: Q&A
When: Post-Kadath
Where: The Oak & Iron
Warning(s): None

code

An Invitation from Dahlia

Those who aligned themselves with Neil West will find his house empty when next they go. All his furniture is gone, leaving a barren building, with the door to his basement locked. The meeting space, where all his esoterica and research were kept. Those who are stubborn enough to see what remains of his work can break down the door, but all that remains are cleared out shelves and a single table in the dark. A note sits on top of it, written in red ink.

However, a few days after all the dreamers have awakened, former Ocularum members will find that they've received a letter. Though it is anonymous on the outside, the contents will reveal the sender.

Hello,

I'm sure that you have questions. Now that Nyarlathotep has revealed himself, the magic preventing me from speaking on this is lifted. I am at liberty to give you answers now.

Meet me at the Oak and Iron at 2pm. A neutral space, during the day. I have rented out the private room in the bar so that we can speak.

For what it's worth, I am so, so sorry.

Regards,
D.A. Leeds

You'll find her sitting in the back of the bar, drinks and food already set out, her treat. She looks... stiff, and grim. But not afraid. Just sad.

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If one thing came from all this, it was that Valdis' fury overrode her great loss of Max, Erik and Crichton. It felt as if everyone left had been distant, even before her meltdown, and now even those she loves and trusts most shy away from her. She doesn't blame them, Neil had her completely fooled; no worthy leader falls prey to someone like that. It's a pattern than gives her nothing but pain, time and time again. She hasn't come as far from Meira's mistakes as she thought.

Once again, she resists the urge to destroy a dwelling, but she refuses to give him the satisfaction. In this, Dahlia's letter is a source of peace, that she hasn't screwed up so badly that the woman she had wronged by association wasn't going to abandon those who had been fooled.

"I appreciate the invitation," she says as she approaches. "I've lost so much, I feared I would have nothing left."

The remark surprises Dahlia, admittedly. Valdis aligned with Neil quickly and never looked back, even helping to invade her home. After Dahlia's true nature was revealed, tensions simmered, but contact between the two remained quite limited. Valdis was Neil's friend. One of his closest, in fact. Dahlia had never expected to be anything to her.

She shifts a little, long fingers arching over the rim of her glass as if she's idly toying with the idea of picking it up. Mostly, though, she's just thinking. "Well, I... know he's not planning to answer any questions."

"Even if he did, I wouldn't trust his answers."

Valdis takes a seat next to her, wondering just how badly she had ruined her own life again. Seeking friends always seemed to backfire in the most spectacular ways.

"I don't dare assume what you think of me, but I never really thought badly of you. In fact, I was confused by Neil's continued hostility, and he made it clear that I couldn't reach out to you without abandoning him, but I suppose that all makes sense now."

While she can't begin to assume what he was thinking either, she can make educated guesses. Collect people who might be useful, use their disillusions with the Mothers and religion to convince them to follow, eventually isolate them from the rest.

"I lost four people I love, but I suppose I never really loved one of them at all, because that person never existed."

None of these are questions, because she's not certain she has many.

"How did it feel, knowing what he was and watching us consider him our friend?"

Dahlia can't help a scowl. "Frustrating," she says earnestly. "I hated it. It felt slimy. But I couldn't give him too much information on myself or my people. I couldn't risk it getting too public, especially while Aster was still broadly in control of me."

A beat.

"...I did like punching him in the face, that once. Back during the heavy floods, while we were still waiting to get picked up by the Stag Beetle."

Valdis releases a bitter laugh as she recalls their skirmish, almost wishing she had known then what she knew now. Yet as she had told Gideon, what she had been through helped her become who she is now.

"I would love to punch him now."

More than that, she would like to tear his chest open and devour his heart and entrails, if he even has such. Based on the nightmare, she can't say he does.

"Part of me would like to withdraw from it all, but I know that there are still people here that I love and who love me, so I can't run off and lick my wounds the way I wish I could."

Goddess she wishes she could get drunk.

"So I suppose I have to ask; What happens next?"

"That, I'm not entirely sure of. I don't know what his angle is, but his entire persona is gone from the island now, and things are stirring on my family's end." Dahlia drums her nails on the table thoughtfully, casting her gaze to the side. "For now, we should focus on preparing for March. But it might be worth speaking with Elias Coldwood."

We. That little word gives her more hope than she's had since Max left.

"Elias and I are still on good terms, and I haven't visited Glory since before the Fears, so I would be happy to reach out." The other part of Dahlia's reply still begs some comment or question, so Valdis pauses to gather her thoughts on that. "Aster has been using us to kill the other princes, so I assume he will use one of us to kill Eligos. I have long thought that this is because he cannot kill them himself, is that true?"

Gaeta hasn't left the house since he woke up. Hasn't touched his sending stone. Has barely gotten out of bed, to be frank. The letter arrives, and he seriously considers throwing it straight into the fireplace. Why would Dahlia bother with any of them? After everything --

But what convinces him in the end is the same thing that drew him to the Ocularum in the first place: I will give you the answers you seek.

So he makes himself marginally presentable and heads to the Oak & Iron. Even by Gaeta's standards, he looks absolutely frakking exhausted; ragged around the edges to the point of pushing unkempt. He settles in at Dahlia's table and just kind of... stares bleakly for a moment.

Then, quietly: "You knew the whole time."

Dahlia stares back, her face placid and empty.

"Yes," she answers plainly, hands folded on the table in front of her.

His gut churns. (It hasn't really stopped since he left Kadath.) Gaeta rubs a hand over his mouth, looking down at her clasped hands.

How did he hide for so long? A stupid question. He's a god. Why couldn't anyone say anything? Equally ridiculous; Dahlia herself said it was magic, and clearly Nyarlathotep's stronger than either the demons or goddesses if he could bind all of them to silence. So many of his questions are still just disbelieved railing at the -- at everything, not actually anything useful. Gods.

Maybe he shouldn't have come here after all.

"What's he getting out of this?" He swallows. "The, the demons -- I guess they needed his power to seal the barrier, right? But why did Ny... why did he bother with any of this in the first place?"

"Fun." The way Dahlia utters this single word is so thick with grim disgust and ire that you could mistake the lone syllable for a twenty minute rant. "He is a child with a magnifying glass. And we are ants. All of us, even Aster. An afternoon diversion. Nothing more."

"Fun," he echoes, and by contrast, it is blank and empty: the dazed calm of the walking wounded after a car crash. "That's all it was. Is. A game. There's not even..."

It would almost be better if there was real malice behind Nyarlathotep's havoc. Hell, any strong emotion would be better than this. All their lives and pain are just a passing diversion, too insignificant to be worth any care at all.

It's a bad idea when he's already this nauseous, but Gaeta grabs one of the whiskey bottles, the movement almost convulsive, and fills the closest glass nearly to the top. "Gods," he whispers brokenly before pushing the bottle back toward Dahlia.

Dahlia gladly accepts it, doing the same.

"...I'm sorry," she says softly. "Truly. I... He had a good story, for being wary of me. My familial connections didn't improve the optics even a little bit. I just had to hope people would take a chance on me, and I couldn't exactly reach out across enemy lines without the information I was forced to keep silent. So I just had to... hope I could do some kind of damage control when it all blew over."

Gaeta nods -- mostly because that seems like the thing to do, rather than any serious agreement with what Dahlia's saying. He tosses back almost half of his drink in one go and grimaces at the burn.

"I never questioned it." The bleakness is back. "Maybe I should have. But I know how hard it is to let go when someone fraks you over. I always figured that's what it was, and then when he told us what you really were -- " He gestures absently. "That seemed like a good enough reason on its own."

He felt a bit sorry for Dahlia, when more of the details came out, but -- unlike other people in town -- Gaeta could never get over the fact that she was eating people, no matter how obligate it might've been. Neil's attitude toward the whole situation only reinforced his feelings.

(Not Neil. Nyarlathotep. Gods, why can he still not -- )

"Maybe if you'd gotten to me first, it would've been different." He turns the glass between his hands, eyes on the liquor as it swirls gently. "...Do you have any idea how the magic worked? That he used to silence all of you?"

Now that it's broken, Gaeta can't exactly go examining the threads.

Cassandra gets her own invitation separately, by word of mouth: you might want to be here, I don't want to have to repeat it too many times.

So here she is, at about ten minutes to two, dressed-armored in a gray walking suit of simple and unexceptionable correctness, with no ornament but a very plain pin holding a blue neck ribbon. (Rather than the sky blue or slate blue she usually favors, it's a deep royal blue -- the Leeds hue and not the de Rolo, this once.)

"Well," she says to Dahlia, approaching the table, and for a moment that's all.

"Well," Dahlia echoes, sighing and throwing up her hands. "Hopefully it all makes some more sense now."

"I believe so. Is there ... anything further you're not at liberty to share, at this point? You needn't answer, if there's more you can't say."

As far as she's been able to determine, the constraints on Dahlia have never compelled her to lie -- but just in case.

"No, I believe I am, at last, fully and completely out of obligatory secrets," Dahlia says with no small degree of relief. "Everything about my family and their arrangements with the Crawling Chaos is now completely on the table."

"I'm glad to hear it. For your own peace of mind as much as anything else."

She takes the seat to Dahlia's left, settling into it with a small sigh.

"You gave me enough hints that you knew something about Dr. West that you couldn't say. I'll admit, I didn't guess anything like this."

"I'm very relieved you believed me. I know that 'just trust me' isn't a lot to go on." Dahlia sighs with the kind of exhaustion unique to someone whose entire life is built upon other people's drama and secrets. "I don't even think he ever even wanted to keep people away from me or make them hate me, I think the false dynamic just amused him, and he's getting some sick satisfaction out of having made a fool of all of them."

Cassandra shakes her head. "I encountered him briefly at Celestine's Dance, back in the fall, and did my best to be no more than civil to him. I told him I'd given my word, and he seemed ..." A sigh. "He didn't break character once. I'm reminded of ... I don't think I ever told you about the Chroma Conclave? The dragons who banded together to try to conquer the continent, a few years back?"

He fell for it. Again. Wilson thought he'd found a kindred spirit who sought knowledge through the scientific method and wasn't afraid of suppression from the authorities or rejection from polite society, but no, it was just another eldritch monstrosity. Or, no, not just another eldritch monstrosity; if it had been some vast otherworldly entity that didn't care one way or the other about humans or didn't really understand them, that'd be one thing. Instead he had to get the one cosmic horrorterror that was good enough at pretending to be a person to laugh at them all behind their backs.

Wilson makes his way to the Oak and Iron, more or less on time, and slips into a seat. Starts in on a plate of bar food.

"Now I know where he really learned all that stuff about the demons," he says, sounding drained and downtrodden, after he's got a few bites in. "I'll never know what he was lying about and what was actually true and he thought it was funny to see what we'd do with it. Have you got any more important secrets you can't tell us because of magic?"

Edited (got my lore wires crossed!) 2026-02-05 04:50 (UTC)

Dahlia lets out a sigh, her eyebrows raising briefly in that commiserating way. "No, this time I do believe I am completely relieved of all metaphysically-enforced non-disclosure orders," she says with no small degree of relief. "If there's any eldritch or infernal gossip you're dying for, I'm an open book."

It's not easy, to draw CT back up from the pit that consumes her in the hours and days after the truth comes out. Paranoia and guilt and a distinct feeling of stupidity, complicated by the holes in her memory she probes around like a tongue at the gap where a tooth used to be. Like if she can turn her own Sight inwards, maybe she'll find evidence of more (how is she ever meant to be sure that there isn't more, when he can do something like that so effortlessly?). Trusting anyone, but the man who stood there with her as this revelation bore down and the woman that sleeps in bed beside her, is damn near impossible. Dahlia Leeds should be at the bottom rung.

And yet, the call of the letter is hard to resist.

So CT pulls herself together. Bundles in a winter coat with the hood up and comes to the Oak & Iron right on time, but then hovers. Lets other faces come through, ask questions, as she stands and Watches for a time, passively absorbing. Until, finally, she makes her own approach.

"...I'll know if you lie," she says, eyes gold beneath her hood, and it's not a threat, or posturing, or anything like that. It's a statement of fact and a statement of fear from someone who can't even trust her own damn brain, right now.

The gold is new. Not green, like Jon or Gerry. How interesting. Perhaps it's something to do with it happening here, or unique to her. Still, it's the first time they've spoken since CT helped invade Dahlia's home, and while Dahlia can empathize, that is... an interesting way to lead.

"Good for you," she remarks, then catches herself. "...I don't mean to be snide. It's him I dislike. It's... not your fault."

CT eyes her for a moment longer, then sighs and slides into a seat, pulling her hood down around her neck. "...well, me not believing that's true isn't unique to you saying it, at least."

Every attempt she's made to tell herself she couldn't have known, every attempt Ellen has made to assure the same, she can't quite believe it. She should have known better. Especially in these last few months.

"...I've been lied to a lot, in the last seven years of my life. I have a bad habit of trusting the wrong people. I'm, obviously, now realising I've been looking at everything all wrong for the past two years, and I don't want to do it again. So forgive me for the lie detector. I just... need to be sure."

Just because Neil wasn't who she thought he was, doesn't mean she doesn't have lingering hesitations about the Leeds and her demonic connections.

"I'm hope you can understand that."

After a defensive beat, Dahlia sighs. It would be nice, wouldn't it? To skip all the damn mind games for once, especially when Dahlia herself is so exposed, so open and vulnerable, offering to do what she can to help.

But it does make sense.

"I can. But I feel a little credit is earned, no? I've been as honest as I'm able, since everything. I even gave your nosy Archivist a statement."

"You did," CT concedes. "I won't deny that. I also won't deny that it would be awfully bold and stupid in a way I don't think you are to invite us all here only to lie. It's... security, not expectation. See, I can't even trust my own memory, right now. He..."

She bites the inside of her cheek, fingers curling against her palm where an old scar stretches across the skin.

"Apparently, I must have gotten too close to the truth. And so he excised entire pieces of my memory to make sure I stayed ignorant. I assume the fact he can do this won't come as a surprise?"

"Not remotely. You aren't even the only one. Coldwood's definitely missing some pieces, though how much, I can't be sure. Lysander, the arsonist, was mind controlled by him and had the whole incident omitted. And my friend, Shen Qingqiu, had his mind utterly scrambled," Dahlia rattles off, clearly escalated. She hates this as much as CT does.

CT's nails dig into the skin of that scar and she takes a breath. "That... explains a lot. I probably would've got there on my own with Lysander, based on his story, but Coldwood's always been a tricky case and Shen Qingqiu... we haven't talked in a while."

Well, they've worked together, on and off, and she's technically been his superior for a while, but they're both finding this out at the same time. Maybe she'll have to find and talk to him, later.

She shakes her head. "Is it possible there's other people we don't know about?"

"I didn't think there were, but I wouldn't want to rule it out." Dahlia chews her thumbnail thoughtfully, wracking her brain for any other strange incidents involving Neil's people. "There were a few instances of unrelated memory wipes, but most of them were fairies, and one was a member of Mendel's court. But it can't hurt to ask around."

"Another thing for the list of clean-up to do," CT exhales, rubbing her temple with her other hand. God, it's humiliating, to be given the position as head of the DSA and then not see this. And now she has to run damage control, for whatever degree that's even possible, whilst feeling utterly fucking inadequate. "It's so... seamless in the moment that even if there are others, we might never find out. I still can't quite fill the holes even knowing they're there. I have been used in a lot of ways in my life but I have never been so... so..."

It feels so violating. Her own mind is the one thing that's always been relatively safe from outside interference, and now... this.

But she can't be getting emotional in front of Dahlia, so she bites that thought down, squeezes her eyes shut, and takes a second before looking back at her, steadied.

"I know that this is all a game to him. Do you think this is all going to be interesting enough to keep him playing along instead of just popping the bubble like a grape with us all inside?"

"That all depends on what he's doing now. I suppose that's our next mystery to solve." Dahlia sighs anxiously, her nail still between her teeth. Chew, chew, chew. "I know that he's interested to see how things with my family play out. Nothing for it except to put on a show while we figure out how to block Aster's power grab, and try to figure out what new pitfalls he's hidden for us."

It's not exactly an unexpected answer, but she wishes there could've been a better one. "You know, there's nothing in this universe I hate more than unknown variables like this."

And yet there is no choice but to deal with them as they come. Trying to pry into what he's doing, wherever he now is, will only give her a headache as the Eye either tries and fails or outright resists her attempts, she's sure. Maybe another day. Maybe if it feels desperate.

She should ask more about Aster's plans for Eligos. That's the important thing, here. They have to be prepared for wherever this leads. And yet.

"...why choose the role he did? Why— what do you think he was even planning to use me— us, the Ocularum, to do? Was it all just about the pure entertainment or— what?"

Frankly she's not sure what answer would feel worse.

Dahlia purses her lips, thinking. "It seemed like he wanted a cult. He had one, once. I believe you're one of the ones who got to meet them. Some vision of the past Olwylder orchestrated?"

She's heard about pieces of it here and there, either from people who went or secondhand from their friends.

"He killed them all for knowing too much. I think his desire was to establish a new, more ignorant cult. But it never quite panned out that way. Wrong crowd. So I think it ended up being for information, and to dig into insecurities. When you see him again, he will deliberately say things intended to make you feel like a fool. Don't flinch. You're not an idiot for getting duped by an interdimensional entity of cosmic chaos."

Oh, great, I can add 'almost got recruited to a cult' to my resume, CT thinks but bites down on, rather than say something so petty and useless.

"It's a lot easier said than done, not flinching in the face of something like that," she says, instead, unclear if she means the insults or the interdimensional entity of cosmic chaos himself. "You know, he even let himself get put in one of those damned operas with me. Playing the role of one of the last assholes to lie to me and get me killed. I'm sure he's very proud of that."

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[Lore Mingle] Singing Songs to the Secrets Behind My Eye, Oh My

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