The #Broken_Dagger Forum

The council meeting had gone well, for a time. They had decided on a course of action against the dragons, the Monkey-cats too. The payment of Straka's guard was apparently also remedied. And then there was Suede.

Altias hurled an emtpy bottle against the wall, the wall which was common between his own room and Ariane's. It shattered with a lovely sound of release, bits of glass and drops of Freshia dripping down the wall.

"I suppose it would have been bad form to try and kill him and be done with it."

Words meant only for his own ears. The tailor had forced his hand, and he was angry about it. Very angry. It had not been time to tell anyone of what had happened with Avel. They needed more time before people began trying to hunt her down on their own.

"What was he thinking? What was he trying to prove? Surely he could not have done this out of the goodness of his heart, there had to be another reason. Damn it!"

Was he drunk? Not really, he'd only finished the last inch or so of the bottle this morning. The rest he had drunk the night before, desperately seeking the solace of sleep. The oblivion of a dreamless night. Of course it had not been so.

Quickly he was trying to reverse the pattern of his thinking, he did not want to remember what he had dreamed. Instead he tried to busy himself with his new attire, settling on the edge of the bed to polish his bracers.

He had not bothered to rebraid his hair, it was left loose, wild waves of fire surrounding him in a surreal halo of flame. If someone wanted to come get him, right here in his room, he supposed it really wouldn't matter what shape his hair was in.

A soft cloth was pulled from beneath his pillow, gentle hands worrying over the surface of the bracers with the patch of fabric. Despite his efforts, his mind began to wander again. Words were clear in his mind's eye, written in crimson across the burnt forest floor.

~For you, daddy.~

The night had concluded like any other, and the morning had begun similarly; she was, after all, no longer privy to the Judiciary's meetings, and was hardly about to present herself at one uninvited. There'd been trouble enough already.

One learns this trick, after enough years, enough fights, enough long and puzzling nights: to exercise the body and leave the mind free to reflect, unhindered by physical concerns. The limbs follow patterns so well-practiced that they may as well have been engraved into the bone. The eyes see nothing, sight being almost an irrelevancy for such a ritual. The mind... is free.

This is precisely how she's spent the first few hours of her morning: a whispering progress back-and-forth between the walls of her narrow room, bare feet quiet upon the worn floorboards. These are the motions that she's spent most of her young life learning, the balance that she's devoted years to perfecting.

If only she'd shown a similar devotion to the balance of heart and mind...

Half-pace, traverse, and lunge, that desperate hurtling forward which, to an observer, must seem to be the antithesis of balance -- and is. The trick is in the recovery which follows, the twist of body, the shift of weight, which sees her back on the balls of her toes in the fencer's elegant slouch. Pace, half-pace, thwart and then the lunge, the slender blade held even with her features.

Three feet of fine steel gleam like bloody death, in the lantern-light.

A twist of the wrist, to parry an invisible combatant; a twist of the ankles, to send her twirling about -- oh, a 'dance', Burel had called it, and there's some truth to that. Down to low ward now, to spare her a crippling slash to the thigh, back about to --

Something shatters, not quite muffled by the thin wall which separates her room from Bromn's. The space of three heartbeats see the woman closing her door, and moving to knock upon his.

With a clenched and heavy fist.

Time to talk to that blacksmith friend of Ariane's. Altias tired of the daggers he had gotten from Garrison so many years ago. Weapons for someone who was not...worthy of a sword. Frankly, he wasn't even sure why he had kept them. They were a constant reminder of his brother's neverending ridicule of him. The blatant distaste on Garrison's face each time they faced each other to spar.

~"Do not underestimate him, Garri. He is much faster then you, more flexible too. Your reach is longer, your strike more powerful. Use these things, not your imagined superiority, to defeat Tias."~

Even when they were young, Nathaniel had been an amazing swordsman. He had taught them so much, how to utilize their strengths, minimize their weaknesses. And he had been so very beautiful.

~ "You are the better of the brothers, Tais. Garri is too angry, it will always be his greatest weakness, his own worst enemy. You are fast, by the Goddess, almost too fast for me most times. Since you began training with the Shamshir even your reach has improved."

"You say the sweetest things, Nathan. I'd almost believe them if I didn't Think it was just more pillow talk"~

Despite the fact that eventually they had become lovers, Nathan was alway, foremost, his best friend. No one ever knew of their affairs, save for Lamai. Which is what had made her words so very painful for him.

Nathan had been his greatest teacher, and Altias had been a more than adequate swordsman. He had in fact defeated the great and powerful Garrison Bromn during most of their sparring sessions. He had not become the general his father had wanted, because he was not a man who enjoyed kiling. But he was begininng to think he could learn that skill as well.

~"Speak to me of this, Ivory Prince. What troubles you?"~

Nathan had always known just what to say. His timing had always been perfect, both on the battlefield and off. And then..the Baie had come.

Images of the torn and mutilated body of his mentor flashed in his mind. Tears ran hot from his eyes, the reaction almost instantaneous. He remembered every detail of that room, even the imprints of his own boots in the blood of his dearest friend. Mostly he remembered Nathan's face, devoid of his beautiful eyes.

~"For you, daddy"~

"No!"

His scream cut short as the knock came at the door.

"What! What is it?"

Altias fairly screamed the words, each edged in a combination of rage and sorrow.

She'd been ready to knock the door down, if it had proved necessary. If it had proved possible for that matter, for she knows her own strength very well, and it's far from being an asset.

Her one reassurance in this moment was that her alarm might easily have been misplaced. Anything could have caused that sound: an accident, violent frustration, a body rolling into bottles left empty from the night before. Or terror, desperation, violence --

Hah! It would surely prove to be an error, another alarmist mistake in a long succession of just that. There'd been 'Flame, after all, whose assault upon Sawyer hadn't been an assault at all. There'd been Jirai, who'd proven that a drow is no different from any other human being, with Audmathus as the exception, rather than the rule. There'd been Heldenbrand and his startling reluctance to tear Bromn's spine from his back -- oh, any number of misjudgements, each more embarassing by the first, and so alarm must be tempered with a little caution here.

But still, there's that pounding on his door, and while his first cry has her turning a shoulder towards the work, the better to knock the obstacle out of her path, the second pauses her where she stands.

There is an edge to his voice that she scarcely recognises, an edge that is quite unlike the Bromn she'd known of old. A hint of desperate anguish...

"Ariane." Clearly spoken, in case the door should muffle her voice beyond recognition. The schiavona is returned to its sheath with scarcely a whisper of sound; he'll never hear that. A woman can be thankful for such small mercies.

"I thought you set upon." Wrongly so. "Be well." Which is entirely too optimistic a farewell; the small humour in this does not escape her. But it's all that occurs to her meagre imagination, and about she turns now. Idiocy, all of this. Of course Avel would not make her move upon the man, not so soon. Not while she yet remains a child.