There is no window into your soul that you don’t open, if you ask me.  I would know, at least on a less-metaphorical level.  Still, looking into someone’s eyes is special.  It can be aggressive, it can be sexy as heck, it can be a shock when unexpected, it can mean different things to the two people who are sharing that look.  That’s why hiding your eyes also means things.

We focus on vision very hard, even though it’s only some twenty percent of our available senses.   That isn’t to say it’s only 20% important.  Vision itself as a word can be cut many different ways.  Sometimes we aren’t looking at what’s in front of us because we’re seeing something else.  Most people don’t smell possibilities.

[A sidenote here: I only get a chance now and again to watch genre TV, and you’ll almost always hear me call it TV, too.  I met a girl with television once; it’s not the most useless and annoying psychic power out there, but it’s pretty close.  Imagine knowing what’s happening somewhere else as it happens and being absolutely unable to do anything about it.  Prophets are an unhappy lot as it is; this is a specific form of misery.]

I can conjecture what I would see if Doloise had taken off her sunglasses.  Maybe it would be a flash of each different pair of eyes belonging to her family.  Maybe it would be an amalgam.  Maybe there’d be too much, all of the eyes trying to look out at once, a monstrous chaos (if that’s not redundant) that would lead me into madness.  Maybe there’d be nothing, something empty I would fall into, caught in the void.  Maybe they included an illusion to complete her image, make it more attractive to me (despite the thin arms and pallor.)

Maybe I didn’t want to know, even if satisfaction brings things back the very next day.

Cats and practitioners have a lot in common, and not just in that, “Brain the size of a walnut,” piece.

I hadn’t pulled my arms away from her when I guessed.  There are complicated names for the skills and rituals involved to do what they did.  I called her a realm; most of the time when this is done, it’s an embodiment of a place.   Sometimes it’s done as a guardian measure.  Sometimes it’s the way to hide something.   This time I smelled politics.

I don’t think anything that lived a mere century at its best could fully understand the politics of  nigh-immortals.  Time is of the essence, and we can make a mess of ourselves and what we represent in less than thirty seconds upon meeting a pretty girl.  I’m a practitioner, though, and if I have anything besides a talent for shutting things up, it’s a little extra in the way of vision.  Sometimes it’s just that we tend to blunder into things those without the practice don’t, but once your eyes are open, it’s up to you to use them.

In this case, it was obvious. She had handed part of it to me.  Someone was going to benefit by this godling being told to shape up or ship out, and it wasn’t necessarily the Gillikins.  They had a tone of desperation to them.  The only question was, would I live to regret it?  Or would events take so long to go to fruition that they’d pass me by?

At least in this lifetime.  I won’t quite say that I am convinced the way my Magster is that there’s a special spark that makes us practitioners, and that that special spark is attracted to certain connections (like bloodlines, or souls) but I was raised in a way that doesn’t rule it out.  I have found that there is a certain fast-acting reaction of fortune on practitioners (I don’t call it Karma; that’s a chameleon of a different colour…wait…) so yes, whether or not it was the right thing to do, I said I would do it.

My thoughts grew heavier as we continued on in the night.  It grew darker, and I lost track of the road.   Certainly, I was going to close a portal, and that’s what I do, so that had to be the right thing.  I took that thought to me as I fell into the rhythm of the ride and tried not to move or fall…asleep.