The #Broken_Dagger Forum

[INDENT]"What do you swear on, Ariane, when you swear?"
"On myself, Ser. But ... not that which I love." This fragment of glass, this thin twist of silver... "I do not give Circumstance such sway over that." [/INDENT]

When the hour had grown late and the conversation quiet, Michael Renne made his return to the Broken Dagger. They might have made a strange sight, this pair: alike of height and long, lean build; alike from the black of their hair to the grey of their eyes. Perhaps Sonoriel had taken the man for her brother, for he'd been there to witness his arrival; pretty DeMarshay might easily have done the same.

More than any other organ save one, the eye is prone to such grievous error.

When the hour had grown late and the skies become gloomy grey, Michael Renne made his return to the tavern, with a gift in his hands and a glitter to his eyes. Two men spoke, when he moved his lips; with a single pair of hands, two men pressed a wooden box into Ariane's grasp. Wise to his ways, she knew better than to open it, except that he had insisted that this task was his, that this gift was hers, that he wished no further part of it --

The letter folded within it had quieted her.
Crimson as new blood, the accompanying gift had curdled hers.

That Renne provided vagaries, in place of the explanation she demanded, did not surprise the woman. That he proved forthcoming at all did... and perhaps should not have, for on this very bad evening, the man was rife with conflict; it seemed sometimes that his hands trembled as fiercely as her own.

Their encounter ended with a single, simple question. So simple, in fact, that he could not bear the speaking of it, not until she put it to him with a sword at his gut and a mouthful of molten iron. The answer would do Ariane no good, Renne warned her. What she intended would not be permitted, Renne insisted, in tones of loving, hateful certainty. But time is to be the judge of that, for on receiving the single word for which she'd waited, Ariane had taken herself to her room, and to the stables directly after. With her heart in her throat, and shining bright in her eyes, it was towards a horizon of lengthening shadows that she spurred her warbeast, and they rode as if they meant to beat the daylight's descent.

Behind her though, a slip of folded paper was left, slid beneath her sister's door as she passed it. Its words read very simply:

[INDENT]
Gone to mountans, back soonest. Tell who you must.

Love Every Day.[/INDENT]

[INDENT]"People serve ideas, as well as men. ... And if you choose neither king, you remain alone in the middle of the board, at the mercy of both."
"At their mercy, ser? You say this to me? I say let them come. They've nothing that I fear."
"Then you've nothing you fear losing? I'm not sure if that is a blessing or a curse..."
"But I do. And I know the taste of that loss very well."[/INDENT]

Knowing such things very well, a woman embarks on such reckless pursuits as these. Being so very well aquainted with such things, she takes herself to the mountains with cloaks and sword, and the armour that is her tainted blood; with more hope than certainty, she rides into the blizzard, which treats her as kindly as one would expect.

Born to the glacial winters of northern Dauntless, Ariane Emory recognises the storm's potency almost immediately, and regrets her haste. And does not regret that haste at all, and does not by any means let her pace slacken, that being the importance of what she pursues. The warhorse tears its way through the winds with its great head bowed, with heavy hooves churning the snow into a torment, and she must leak iron across her face to keep the biting worst of it from her eyes. One learns to respect such weather as this: the swordswoman is paying careful attention to their footing, when it grows bad enough that she must dismount entirely; is striding with her shoulder into the wind, and when she spots Bromn's dark silhouette, she does not immediately hasten.

Except that he does not pause at her shouted hails.
And he almost certainly has heard them.
And aren't such volatile moments ripe breeding-grounds for mishap?

A slip of the heel is enough to send her sliding from the edge of what they climb. With a gasp that's lost to the tearing winds, she drops; with hands that fight for purchase against the rock -- and one of them finds it, stopping the sharp descent with an abruptness that drives blistering pain through its shoulder. Not unfamiliar with such falls, she hangs quite motionless for a time: dares reach upwards only slowly, dares shift a booted toe for an outcrop of rock, and very gently...

If it had been only rock, she might actually have succeeded. But treacherous ice betrays her with a crack like splintering timber, and a second follows it moments after, when she hits the stony ground with force enough to knock her thigh free of its hip.

Unconsciousness is mercifully immediate, lasting through Bromn's discovery of her body and its sickening contortions; lasting through the long journey he makes to carry her back to Myrkentown. It doesn't endure through the moment in which he and the doctor force the femur back into its place, but that was why they'd boiled poppy petals. The sleep which follows is a lasting one, so that when she wakes again, it is beneath the vigilant gaze of Altias Bromn, and in the silk and velvet warmth of his bakery loft. It is with broken fingers splinted and grazes scabbed across her cheek; with a body whose piercing pain is rivalled only by the discovery that so much time has passed...


And with questions.
Oh, a great, great many of those.