One hundred fifty nine dollars.

Two days. Nine hours.

That was the cost of traveling traveling one thousand seventy five and a half miles across the country.

Or, at least, that was the superficial cost. Who knew what it actually took for the bus to have been made. All the parts forged, and stamped, and bolted into place. And then filled with gas. The remains of prehistorical plant and animal manner, taken from beneath the skin of the earth, sucked out and then shipped and refined, and then shipped again. Who knew what actual cost that wreaked within the Lie?

Someone probably did. Or could assemble all the pieces of the equation and stitch them together into some cadaverous effigy of meaning. Likely it was possible, even within the scope of the Lie, but Avis doubted that it really mattered. At least...to her.

It didn't matter to her.

Though, the trouble was, she wasn't sure what did matter to her. She felt anesthetized, as though her body were made of wax, or as though her flesh had gone dead but was just too stubborn to quite moving. Or maybe that was the alcohol. Avis looked down at the thermos in her hand. Sloshing half full with...something shitty, and cheap. She didn't even remember what it was.

So she kept walking. Scuffed tennis shoes shuffling across the cobble stones that paved Gore Creek Drive in downtown Vail, Colorado. The temperature had dropped markedly since she'd stepped off the bus. Just a few hours later and it had fallen into the upper 40s. Cold enough to kill, though Avis didn't care. The wind was mild, and her penchant for thick cotton helped. Or, she thought it did. She wasn't moving as well as she should have been. Though, again, that might have been the alcohol.

Stumbled once over an uneven cobbled stone and swore, the cigarette falling from her lips to impact the ground with a small burst of sparks. She swayed, and stomped it out, then shuffled over to a bench and collapsed onto the seat, the fingers on her left hand fumbling for the pack of cancer that was sitting in her hoody's pocket. Eventually she got it out, and shook a cig out. The flame from her cheap, gas station lighter was bright, even against the town's electric glare, and she sat, half mesmerized by the dance of the flame before she set it to paper and breathed in smoke.

In the thin mountain air, it felt like she'd inhaled the ghost from a forest consumed by flame. There was a moment where it caught in her throat, and then she let her breath out in a sigh and a billow of white and grey swirled out from between her teeth, swirling upwards, a cascade inverted, to disappear into the night and leave her with only the stink of burnt chemicals and tobacco.

She savored it. Savored the way it coated her mouth, the way that acrid stench filled her nose. It was like breathing in a holocaust. Tasting the destruction, and the despair, and wreathing herself in its ashes.

It was a perverse thought, but in the depths of her mood, it felt soothing to sense a desolation around her that mirrored what she felt inside. Because her mood felt perverse, too. She was alive. She had the luxury to waste days traveling in the cramped seats of a greyhound bus, and to waste money on alcohol and smokes, and a hotel room. And then there was the ring. That symbol, forged from a metal literally beyond this world, and beyond even that, all that the ring meant. She considered it, her thumb rubbing against the miniature lattices worked into the ring, and drew in another breath of smoke.

She'd been feeling like this for too long. Before she'd even gotten the ring, but it had taken some time for that desolation to seep out. For the embers to finish consuming what was left and to slowly die in the absence they'd created. That was what had inspired the question...what had inspired, even, the pursuit of Varyx. There was a part of her that didn't want to become a husk of ashes. A piece that was trying to cling to life, and like the confused lust of the bereaved in the wake of a funeral, that piece of her psyche had reached out. It had latched onto the closest thing it had, and in the wake of being rebuffed, that piece had burnt out.

And it would have, if she had indulged, because then she would have lost Star, and that would have laid to waste everything that she'd thought she had. Even now, desiccated and leaking smoke, she was still trying to reach out. To claw her way back to where they had been. That's why she'd come to Vail. To get a sense of what he'd seen. What he'd experienced, as though that could somehow bridge what lay between them better being near him could...

There wasn't logic in it. This had been a journey of desperation. An impulse, an instinct that had dragged her onward. And perhaps it was working. Her face felt wet, even though the sky was clear.

The cigarette was brought to her lips again, and she inhaled until she felt dizzy and her hand dropped away.

She'd heard somewhere that ash actually made fertile ground. That a forest, after a fire, regrew even fuller than before flame had caught. Perhaps that was another lie, but somehow, when she returned to Sacramento, she'd a way find to replant. She'd find a way to regrow...