The Breaking Strain

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Sunbreak bore witness to another day for Myrken Wood. Scattered towns whose residents rose dutifully to tend their fields, stoke their furnaces, and report to school for their lessons. Word would spread of how, but a few nights ago, the Ashfiend had assaulted the Broken Dagger and its denizens once again, that Calomel had been injured and a girl had been slain all over a small thing of no measurable value.

All over a small, empty urn.

That same urn tapped a steady beat against an armored thigh, echoing within its dented, engraved walls of broken promises and basest treachery. That echo carried down the labyrinthine corridors that sprawled back into the dim moments of distant history, personal and hellish, forged in the flames of Vraal's scourging hubris. At the very end, in the light of memory willfully darkened, stood a nervous, trembling young man whose hands had clutched battle-tested steel and whose countenance had suffered injury from inhuman foes. Yet, through his fear, he whispered in words that hissed like cockroaches scuttling through walls: will you marry me? Caught up in that repeating query, the youth's eyes hardened into crimson, burning flame to ward off the surrounding vacuum of loss.

Stricken, in that dark corridor buried within the entombed mind of the Ashfiend, the youth fled into the darkness. And he was afraid.

And alone.

Outside of his terrors Teron approached his destination, clad as always in his blackened armor scarred by age and battle across the ages of men. The grim length of his black cloak cast behind him like a tame banner of stolen shadows. A great mare, in midnight hue, bore him along towards his destination in the streaking sunlight that struggled and bent away from him as much as it might, leaving him surrounded in a narrow band of shadow. His towering steed bore him along tirelessly, its gaping, staring eyes cast with molten green flecks of alien illumination while hooves churned the earth into ruin behind him.

The gentle thunder of hoof beats grew longer, complacent yet tense as the mounted Ashfiend drew his latest servant to a halt and regarded the brooding stone walls of Darkenhold through relentless, probing, and hateful eyes. A final, lingering glance for the emptied urn drew himself from the haunting corridors of his ancient consciousness with a merciless hand that then settled upon the sword at his side. The shadow about him swelled and squatted, leeching into the ground about him in a vaporous circle as the grass began to wither, bowing in defeat as their life stole away to feed his fury, and his voice, that thundered against the gate before him as surely as iron siege craft.

"Ariane Emory."

The syllables hardened into a name shaped by confusion in his mind's eye. Yet even confusion could not stand against the crashing waves of hatred, born by the momentum of six ages of men, into every inflection, every rumbling syllable that grated like stones dashing themselves to pieces against one another.

"Come forward."

[Carnath-Emory]

It is possible to forget that this place is also a stronghold. In the subtle light of early morning it is absolutely possible, for in these hours beauty haunts the place like a gently-clinging ghost.

Is the not-dead Ashfiend capable yet of realising such things as these? Is he able at all to see? That like all of Myrken, the clustered trees which fill Darkenhold's grounds have suffered throughout the winter, but that their limbs are still rich with promise: in coming months they will be a thicket of wild greens; come Autumn, there will be colour in abundance, scarlet and russet and gold, all vivid against blue skies. That the broad, still lake is as glassy as mirrors, reflecting the sky overhead as if clouds and pale dawn were drawn down and set into the earth; it is possible to forget that this water feeds wells, supplies the whole of this place with water in a way that is wholly practical, utterly essential.

It is possible to forget the might of those walls, because morning sunlight strikes such a glitter from their dark stone, teasing at the eyes of an approaching rider. Pale flagstones line the courtyard, and like its fountain there, these toy with that warm light; reflect and refract and shine. 'Armies will break themselves upon these walls,' their architect had once said, and this may well be so. But first, they might be dazzled by them. Even the very gates --

Oh, but it's the gates which are an issue now, and for no reason involving their design. They are a concern only because of what stands waiting beyond them, and what has moved from within this fortress home to meet it.

He'd waited a time out there, this Ashfiend; has a long death left him imagination enough to conceive of what occured behind closed doors? But whatever that might have been, it has given birth to this: a narrow-boned figure clad in high-necked, pallid greys, long of stride where she moves across the courtyard, and quiet when she draws the tall gate open.

It is only a moment's work. And it concludes with the lifting of the crossbow she'd held by her side, up against the shoulder until the 'Fiend's eyes may see very clearly its gauze-bound bolt.

The angle of that weapon does not relent. The grey of her eyes surely does not. He has brought himself to a place that is her sister's and her own, and which houses other bodies besides. He's done this mere days after an assault upon the Governor, upon Burel's men, upon her own student. But he's come here by daylight, and that ... speaks. Now so will he, for the whole of her response to him is simply this:

"Explain."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Flagstones and fountains catch the dim furnace of his gaze, settled above a ruined countenance locked away beneath a hood's ever-present shadow and the loose coils of a gray scarf wound about the lower half of his visage. The craftsmanship of formidable walls that would eagerly resist siege craft is duly noted along with trees that bear the silent promise of spring fullness and future life. They stir the memory of color and remembrance of wind against one's face and sunlight against closed eyelids, twisting the dull swaths of imitation hues that shade things in various degrees of flammability.

Trees with kinetic potency are soon dismissed as gravestones to strangers, unwept and untreasured, as the distractions quickly fade beneath the honing edge of ever-present wrath. Beneath his long, mounted shadow the grass already begins to suffer and turn away from death brought near on unnatural horseback. The silent steed stares ahead with eyes flecked in unnatural emerald while bitter, colored teeth clamp tightly together to resist suddenly carnivorous appetites.

Her explanation could be found, at first, in a mailed hand that held aloft a small urn, silver and etched with runes. Its rise accompanied by the snapping of slender chains whose lengths dangle noose-like from the urn's crown while shattered links tumbled against the soft ground below. It remained there, clutched, an ornamental treasure soon cast at her feet in demonstrative challenge. Striking the earth the crown parted, rolling aside, to reveal the emptiness within - of urn and its bearer's heart.

"No," he whispered through dead lips. A silence came in his following hesitation as the tension swelled into the very air between them, suddenly pregnant with wrath barely restrained at having to suffer such atrocity.

"No," he repeated in a voice strangled upon its own baleful hate with one hand yet clutched upon the beast's reins. "You shall explain this to me, this unspeakable act of vile treachery." The syllables left him as independent syllabic curses, each filled with an echoing, growing hate breaking into the world and staining it dark beneath his looming shadow.

The hand that had dashed the urn to the ground slowly curled into a tight, trembling fist whose armored knuckles flickered with leashed, dancing shadows. The air around him began to grow cold as the statuesque figure buried in ancient armor stirred and occasionally quivered in the length of his extremities while fury emboldened every limb and dust-choked pore with a pounding semblance of murderous life.

"You will explain it to me now."

[Carnath-Emory]

The swordswoman is accustomed to facing mounted opponents. Is accustomed most of all to measuring the world and her interactions within it in terms of Take and Concede, in terms of lunge and thrust and distance. The sun is high in the sky overhead, a chill is in the air, and a sharp four-step advance would take her within reach of the Ashfiend's mount. Expecting the descent of Arak's Ruin, the thunder of rearing hooves, that last step would be a lunging crouch, employing the dagger to hamstring, the schiavona's full length to disembowel --

So that it is a very steady gaze which she's set upon this pair, this Ashfiend and his mount. It measures his smallest motions, devours such subtleties as his seat upon the saddle, his gauntleted hands upon the reins. It does not flinch when chains snap like broken glass, but it registers the enormity of this desecration.

So does the rest of her, when he flings the urn down upon the dying ground between them.

Will he see these things? Have they any importance to this creature at all? For in that instant her features have betrayed her: a breath's sucked in through lips fallen slightly parted, a frown shot hard across her brow, and the glance snapped back up to meet his own is bright with shock. All of these things in the moments before she can regain her composure, school her features back into some cool repose, and still --

Still, there lingers something in the eyes, where shock has evolved into some edge of furious revulsion.


"This is not our work." It is the wholly necessary response; it is what he must hear first. And he must know this thing already, else there'd be blades between them now instead of swords, and still it is essential that it be said. "Nor is this carelessness. She is surely safe. She is surely kept."

Because this is clear to her almost immediately, recalling that night's chaos as she does. This precious, precious thing, passed from hand to hand, fought for by body after body. Months ago, the Ashfiend had placed the urn into her safekeeping, and she had in turn given it over to the one man capable of ensuring it would never be found. It was not Teron she'd been cautious of, then. It was every scoundrel or fool who reckoned it possible to use what was significant to him.

For bargaining.
For threatening.
For leverage of almost any sort.

"She is surely thieved, and she can be returned as surely as she can be stolen.

She can surely be returned."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The woman faced him boldly, as she always had, some credit to her discipline and mean skill with a slender blade. What the woman lacked in strength she consistently made up for with resolute determination and a willingness to dare. Burning eyes found some measure of honor yet with her, this quicksilver construct who had grudgingly won a measure of respect, who understood that certain lines were not to be crossed - namely any line that he declared to be uncrossable. Yet there were others, others with whom she kept company, who were not so honorable.

The black beast held its ground, with the armored rider a ghastly shadow who bled a livid stain of darkness out onto the grass. The sunlight upon him, that struggled to reach through a thin veneer of darkness that yet clung to him, shaded him in nearly colorless gray - the hue of ancient white-washed tombs and faded coffins.

"Do not play coy with me," he rumbled in grating accusation. One hand remained upon the reins that curled firmly about an armored grasp at the behest of which the lumbering steed might attempt to trample the lithe woman beneath its sharp hooves. The other extremity, bound in scorched and scarred steel descended upon the black-pronged hilt of Arak's Ruin, which had carved through her mystical armor once before.

"The urn was wrestled over by your companions, by your allies who stand with you against me." The words left him with a resonant, coarse grating full of angry, sharpened echoes that curled hidden lips and pressed them in furious consternation in their wake. Each attempt at speech was met with a trembling hesitancy, the quiver of unseen, tattered lips and the riotous flicker of a searing, merciless gaze.

"Hear me," he continued in a strangled snarl. "For every day that passes without her complete return, one of your people will die. If this is insufficient, then after a week one of your people will die every hour," this last accompanied by a hand plucked from his sword, that extended an accusatory finger leveled at Ariane with the weight of promised doom. Yet even that hand, so sure of wreaking destruction, trembled at the realization that her eventual un-return could well mean: that she had been cast to the winds, and lost forever.

A heavy silence then to coil about them both after his threat, his sworn promise, until the hand returns to his weapon to rest there. An aged sigh escaped him, sifting the folds of a loose scarf coiled about the lower half of his countenance. Without echo or echoing strength, a mere handful of words left him, empty and hollow, as he stared an awful future full on and was reminded of the consuming nature of fear.

"If there is anything left to be returned."

Hos shoulders slouched minutely, as whatever phantasm that filled out his blackened plate fell in upon itself, threatening to buckle against the titanic weight of raw fear. Bleached lifeless in the sunlight, his strength seemed as if to fail him, to flee before him, to scurry for the long shadows that followed and betrayed his presence while the gentle chill of his remnant curse yet clung to armored joints. In despair he raised his gaze for hers, hardened into a resolve that spelled wanton destruction for anything his wrath might chance to descend upon. That gaze held a quivering seed of madness that hated the world, but would see all of it incinerated if such an awful thing were to come to pass.

"I will tear down the constabulary with my bare hands, if it proves necessary," he hissed against the rising passion that choked his coarse, bloodless throat. "But one way or another, I will have her back."

"At any cost."

[Carnath-Emory]

It is not in her to shrink before a threat. Not when she stands upon land which is hers; not by any means when that threat cannot be swayed by open fear. There are lines which she does not cross, for reasons entirely of her own, and the thieving of precious things from monsters happens to be one of those. There are also lines that she will not suffer to be crossed by others, and the Ashfiend has done this repeatedly, has done this in one particular way which he ought to comprehend, and which he simply might not.

That fact is almost completely irrelevant in this moment.

"I play at nothing," she murmurs, very early in this conversation, and gives not a glance for the set of his hand upon that blade's hilt. The threat is a redundancy, when the whole of his presence here is itself a threat, and she will not satisfy him by acknowledging it. Let his hand clasp. Let his gaze sear. It is all wholly familiar, and her interest is only for what is new. The desecrated urn. The very secondary notion that this thievery might have caused the Ashfiend a moment of real and terrible agony.

There is a portion of her which must silently relish that.

But very quickly, the matter devolves into threats, and these, too, are piercingly familiar. A woman has not forgotten Foggy Bottom, has not forgotten the Kaczmareks. Nor the stretch of wholesale slaughter which this Ashfiend visited upon the whole of Myrkentown. Nor by any means the fifteen hours she'd spent in the cool, dark depths of some forgotten place --


[INDENT]the crush of her spine against cold, damp soil
the lift of his hand, exciting nerves into furious agony
the promise spoken wordlessly to green, green eyes[/INDENT]

"You spoke that vow months ago." These are kindless words. They may prove to be murderous as well, if he takes offense to a statement of fact, and the Ashfiend had long-ago demonstrated a vast capacity for precisely that.

"You have done this, months ago. You have done this so well that the air above Myrkentown still stinks of funeral pyres. Do you think it will move them to your bidding now? You have already done your worst, and you have already promised them more: a whole world laid to waste, you said.

You said this."

Like words could be nailed through flesh, like facts could be driven by a hammer through his deathless skull. They do not relent, and she does not pause with them now, because when the words come to their end he will have his sword for her throat, and that will be the end of her. How is she to persuade a crazed thing, a thing which has proven stubborn to the sound of reason? How is it possible, for a woman already so clumsy with words in any case, a woman who lacks the capacity to persuade at all?

It isn't.
And so she doesn't.

There is simply the plain matter of this crossbow, held level with her chin, its gauze-bound bolt faced unswervingly towards that mounted revenant. There is simply the matter of these plain words, quiet and cool and artlessly earnest:

"You do not move me with your threats. My ears have their fill of those already; you see? There have been too many. I am deaf to them now. But this," and the set of her chin relents, concedes some small tilt towards what lies fallen and gleaming upon the ground, "this is a foulness. And it is one that I do not understand, for that night she was in that tavern and you were not. She was seized from you, and I know not why, I know not even how, and that --

That is a thing which you might explain to me."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

There is another silence between them as the woman dismisses his threats with words lined in cold vigilance for the threatening movements of arcane fingertips of a reaping fist. Searing eyes narrow, slightly, as he regards Ariane anew, suddenly struck with a realization that, were her sentiments widespread, heralded a change in action.

That she had managed her fear.

That threats of the inevitable future that he most certainly intended, as she had pointed out, had already begun and would no longer be enough. For Elysia's sake the realization set his teeth together beneath the curtain of a gray scarf and bloodless lips. Her weapon had changed to words, this woman who spoke strangely, and a crossbow clutched in pale fingers. Many people had died, over two hundred by his quick reckoning, a number that he mused over as he raised one leg and slipped to the ground with nature's acknowledgment of muted sound and the fluttering length of his tattered black cloak.

There had been a time, Ariane reminded him, when he did not always answer the spoken word with spell, fist and sword. There had been a time when reason added its own peculiar light to his thoughts, when piety had staid his wrath, when mercy had held his blade. A when that was now consumed not by a how could I do this, but by a why can't I do this? Living or dead they served all the same.

A slow, steady tread carried him towards her, his presence testified to by the chill that spilled about him like a malevolent, tamed plague bound to serve him as surely as fury lay chained at his core - that ever burned in his vigilant eyes. Drawing near he stooped to pluck the empty urn and its crown, fitting the latter back onto the former, while easily clutching its curvature in the palm of one hand.

And yet a hesitant shadow flitted across his vision, giving the entombed, towering frame a moment's pause, a momentary confession that is just as quickly forgotten.

"It is all that I am."

He continued after a brief spell as if it had never occurred, bleeding out through lips in a secret unable to be caught by a burning conscience and the remnants of humanity set to scattering with Elysia's loss.

"It is enough for you to know that the girl stole it while I was otherwise engaged," he offers in a hollow, dismissive tone. "That I followed her, thinking her an agent of your friends' will, and silenced her for her insult." That the girl had crumpled at his feet, that he had trodden upon her during the ensuing scuffle, left him as rote recitation. There were no lives, save the kindling that assailed him and that would eventually be consumed. There was nothing but her, enthroned in her silver treasure chest, now dirtied by grubby, willful hands.

"You were all present that evening, and the mapmaker fought over it with the teahouse girl. I then took it from the foreign warrior whose name I do not know," the hand stirred lightly upon his weapon's handle. Deliverance had yet to be tested against Ariane, but Arak's Ruin had cleft bloody furrows into the swordswoman before. Against so swift a foe it would likely prove the superior weapon.

"It was not above Calomel to use her as a bargaining chip before," he snarled while his hand clenched the sword's handle until it groaned beneath spasming strength. "Nor need it be now. Do you pride yourselves in being heroes?" he continued, hooded head canting sardonically aside while a sneer curled over his wrecked visage. "I remember heroism. And I remember holiness," the words left him like a suddenly remembered hymn, a rapidly growing familiarity replete with hidden secrets and private moments that still the hollow tin of his voice and leave its echoing rumbling muffled, imperfectly bound - the voice of an almost-man.

"And I tell you that I would not have sunk so low."

Was she, indeed, deaf to his promises? The stink of burned dead might yet linger upon her thoughts, even as the chill of the same clung to him and began to slither about her in perverse, heat-leeching embrace.

"Living or dead, all will serve me. Perhaps murder is a fate too easily dismissed. Perhaps a fate that lies between them will better parley the cost of what your allies have done."

A fate as a nearly-mindless servant filled only with thoughts of their master's will.

A fate like Thrandoll, bound to the Caer Gardraark until it crumbles into eternity, or Valinor, bound in a chain of treachery to serve the Ashfiend.

A fate like Teron's, lost to his own hate that all else is eventually forgotten.

"If you will not willingly divulge her fate, then tell me this much."

The dimming sunlight that struck him, the life of grass underfoot, the warmth of her body: all served as fuel for his infernal gaze, for the anathema of life sheathed within ancient, blackened armor decorated with the fading memory of a sword crossed at the hilt by paired weeping, wilting roses. A memory of goodness and holiness, lost in the smoking haze of a life burned to ash, and cursed to burn forever.

A memory of a man entombed in armor and wreathed in hatred.

A memory of a man who was a man no longer broken by a sudden, frantic, strangled hiss as the urn threatened to buckle beneath a desperately clutching hand, adorn with curling, addicted fingers, that sought hope in what remained of her - the vehicle of her eternal rest.

"Tell me she is alright."

[Carnath-Emory]

She has managed her fear. Had tamed it very well, because she is a woman accustomed to its presence; like aggression, like a certain quiet arrogance, it is one of the hallmarks of her daily existence. If she were capable of yielding to fear, she'd have done so long ago, and died very quickly afterwards.

No. She has met him with a lifted chin and a steady weapon: a very quiet defiance.

But with ears that know how to hear, as well, and a mind that is willing to listen. The crossbow has not wavered in her hands as he's sat mounted, and it does not relent in its vigilance now as he sweeps down from the saddle. But he is attentive to the urn that he'd flung at her feet, and she is attentive to him, with a steady gaze that betrays no flinch, but a great deal of thought. Absolutely that.

The words which escape her, when he speaks his first, are so quiet that the morning breeze steals them from lips which had scarcely moved.

It is with answers that he follows these, and they are uniquely unsatisfying, a pattern that is to be repeated throughout the rest of this day. Pressing questions will be met by quiet frustration, and I don't know why, they will tell her; I don't know how, they will scowl, their displeasure so palpable that she need express none of her own. It is enough, this man - this cadaver - states flatly to her now, and it is not, it is absolutely not, but it is a beginning, at least. It has sparked some small motion from her, something like a nod: assent, acknowledgement, a silent encouragement for him to continue, to divulge the whole of these things to an audience that is his alone, but what follows is a different thing entirely.

He has reached through the cool calm in which the swordswoman has shrouded her fear, and a man less gripped by his own needs might have recognised that immediately, for it is written in small, small words upon her features. This thin frown fractures the impassive mask of her features. This subtle widening of her eyes describes restrained outrage. And:

"I would not have sunk so low!" she cries of a sudden, bright and clear.

I would not, and they will never quite forgive me for this thing I cannot explain.

"I would not," she repeats then, and more quietly, because the accusation burns, the implication tears at the very fabric of her. "But nor have they. Do you grasp this? It is not their doing. For all of these months they have kept from this, and they have not begun at it now. But this can be learned, it can be understood, what has happened, and -- "

There are threats which can move this woman. There are two very particular things which will move her immediately to his bidding, and wholesale slaughter does not number amongst them. But what he describes now, what is so deliberately alluded to, it comes very, very near. She answers it with a deliberate thing of her own: a slow glance down towards his gauntlet, where it menaces at a weapon's hilt.

"And if you cut me down now, it gains you nothing. And if you raise me over again, still it gain you nothing; they will burn me to a second death, and what then? You w - "

There are threats which can move this woman. But there are words which can move her as well, and it is a familiar thing which he speaks now, a piercing thing. A blunt touch to the spirit of her --


[INDENT]where a precious thing had slid from her grasp, lost to chains and monstrous claws, and her hand was not quite quick enough even when she ran

where her sister lay small and still and very dead, too late for safety, too late for living

where months of horrified vengeance would be healed by the smile of his eyes; diffident, he moved away

where a precious thing had slid from her grasp, lost to the far depths of a place where no light had ever shone; eighty-six days dying, for a thing so crushed could surely not yet live[/INDENT]

The woman's eyes betray her. So invasive is the embrace of the Ashfiend's cold that the tears are frost before they can quite reach her cheeks, and in any case this cannot last for long. It cannot last at all. But long enough, just long enough, for an incline of the head, and for a quieter voice to answer him:

"I cannot.

But she will be."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

For thousands of years his tread had been a relentless one. His coming had been the slow coming of inevitable and everlasting winter upon Vraal's enemies and, later, upon his own. Arak's world had fallen and eventually collapsed into the sea. Countless others had been trampled into ruin, forgotten even by time, and unsung even in the oldest songs. With a mind given to cunning and planning and strategy, he had managed these things. Yet it was a mind ever given to unrestrained fury - and what she daringly asked of him, that he listen, that he understand, threatens to run afoul of that which had born him along all the long years that wound through the twisted corridors of an ancient mind.

Listen, she requested. Understand us, understand the living. Understand what you once were and remember that we are like unto that. The inner-words came from a strained voice, shaped into a hoarse, struggling whisper that echoed in whatever vast tomb held his own words that echoed forth filled with power and hatred.

You must listen, it spoke. You must understand. You must remember.

"There is nothing left to remember," he snarled coldly, with burning eyes turned aside to some phantom that occupied the space near Ariane. The chill threatened to withdraw from her to coil about himself, protective and defensive of this latest intrusion.

Understanding and remembering may help us find her, if Ariane speaks truth.

"No," the rumble left him, grating upon itself. "You are no longer. You were the reason I died. I have endured, I have survived."

Yes, we have endured. But we have not survived. We are but the shadow left after a body has perished. We are the silence after a scream on the wind.

A heavy silence for them, the pair within, entombed in that armor: one speaking to another buried beneath the sand of time and ruin. A silence too for the outward pair, for the wreckage of a myth enduring through furious momentum, and the swordswoman who answered and dared the creature steeped in death to recall, if he sought to understand, what it meant to be alive. Her words echoed in the dim waste of his inner-self and spun hot, gusting circles of dust around a great pyre bound in his tattered soul.

You have trusted her before. You said it youself, that it was not in her nature to deceive.

His hooded countenance fell with a terribly and morose gravity that dimmed his unearthly gaze and loosened the grasp upon his weapon. Trust wormed and echoed in his thoughts, and it required a measure of faith to extend it to her now which he did in the subtle retreat of his ponderous chill. Faith was a willingness to believe, he remembered, he heard whispered to him, a hope in things not seen. Yet while the notion of hope soured in his heart he raised his rumbling voice for her once more. Belief also required the exhertion of the will.

"I will believe you," he offered at first. "But there is no reason for me to trust the others. Calomel has tried this trick before, and the mapmaker's meddling knows no bounds. For serving as her custodian, I will spare you Ariane," he murmured in hollow tones, painted with a sanguine future for the rest.

"I will seek out Calomel and Burnie, and they will yield to my demands. Or they will serve until their time-worn bodies crumble into dust."

His eyes flared again as the chill fanned outward, hungry with the possible future driven by the memory that the two shaped in his mind.

"I will not suffer them to play Vraal."

[Carnath-Emory]

The swordswoman had learned long ago that to measure the threat of a channeler, one must pay particular attention to his eyes. There is a chill which sets into the eyes of a man who seizes the power which is Saidin; there is a distinct lack of humanity, of what the Faithful would call soul. In a fashion very similar, she had learned more recently to measure the Ashfiend's moods by the chill shroud which his very self exudes: the fluctuations of that stuff, the manner in which it will sometimes draw protectively into him as if it were more armour than cloak.

Once, just once, she had seen it leave him entirely.

She is a cold thing herself, this rapier-woman, inclined towards arctic silences and a demeanour little short of frigid. It is fitting in every way that she would wear half-shed tears like crystalline frost upon her eyelashes; it is in a very real sense a fine reflection of her essential nature. But it is not welcome -- there was a moment of quiet horror in which her fear was that he would murder her with carelessness, with a cold embrace that lingered longer than her flesh could quite stand. Her relief at its withdrawal is immediate, for all that the breath of it still escapes her as a cloud of cooling mist.

It is possible to read the ebb and flow of the Ashfiend's mood by the tidal changes to that coldness, but the direction of his gaze is less clear to her. There is a long space in which she reckons it must be Elysia that he addresses, some phantom conjured by his own mind -- damaged as it must be by all the agonies that a six-thousand-year vengeance can inflict. Some idealised thing, perhaps a punishing thing; isn't that how it often goes, with the figments that the mind creates? With the one hand they comfort, with the other they condemn...

It may be Elysia. But it is surely beyond her to wholly comprehend at this moment, and in any case there are more pressing concerns; there are immediacies. This puzzle is left for later thought, and instead there must be this slow, slow incline of her head to the Ashfiend, when his gaze falls upon her once more. When his words do, quiet and sonorous and as tangible as a more literal touch. Her eyes lift to his in the last moments of that gesture, and in time her chin must follow suit, so that it is an even gaze for him now, a cool counterpoint to the ancient burn of his own.

"Calomel did this long ago, but never once since then. He placed her into your hands, that day; do you recall this? Of his own will, of his own heart he gave her over to you, and he's set no glance at her since."

And do you remember the words which he spoke? Sunlight and warmth; an Ashfiend that can never be loved, and a Trevallyn that ever will be. Recall these things. But hours from now. Hours from now, and miles from here.

"This is not his work. He does not conspire towards this; I stake my life on that."

And what had a man said to her once? 'It is the very nature of the spoken word to be so dangerous -- once said, a thing cannot be drawn back into one's throat. Take care, m'hanwylyd...'

And she does. She does, and speaks this thing despite it, this terrible and fine and dangerous thing. Because in the end, there are things which are dangerous, and there are things which are necessary; there are also things which are right.

"Do you hear this? It is not Vraal that they emulate, nor has it ever been. They would not stoop to that. They have not done this vile thing. They -- "

And she cannot effectively intercede for their lives. There may be words which would move him, and she does not know them. There may be an approach that would manipulate him to her will, and even if she comprehended it, she would still prove incapable. In the end, words fail her, but she is made for other things entirely, is made less for word than for deed, so that:

"Allow me to approach them," she breathes; dares that, as the bitter chill of him writhes about her once more. "Allow me to learn what has occured. They surely know nothing of this; death would not change this. Life again would not change this.

But I can learn."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

For all the world he stood like a statue, an upright tomb, with bejeweled eyes burning with an ever-present flame that cast no shadow save one across his own countenance safely tucked away beneath hood and scarf such was its effrontery to the living. It was a quiet recognition of the world, of the ruin he had become, that it was never meant to be this way and yet was. A way that he clung to with armored, bloodstained fingertips and a merciless, chilling grasp.

How frustrating it was when something precious managed to slip through such a grasp. How much more when that something was the one and only, the strengthening blessing of the past and the promising balm of the future bound up in fairy tales the likes of which he had once spawned. All the ash, from warring with demons in the hearts of volcanoes to the blackened remnants of entire cities had ruthlessly commingled upon his ancient armor and lost track of right and wrong. There was only Elysia.

And there was only not having her.

The sudden flicker to that unearthly gaze that skewered flesh and soul testified that Ariane asked a great deal from a creature who struggled to recall such things as reason and faith beyond sword and fist. It is a flicker of doubt and of cynical humor that escapes him in a dry, hollow chuckles that perishes a quick death.

"Calomel surrendered her because of my blade, not his sense of honor," he grated to disprove her edifying riposte. And the governor's words came to the fore with their conversation, with her silent willing for it to be so: the muttered condemnation of his current state and reminder of who he had once been.

A step forward then, a narrowing of the gaze into hard fire, a stirring of his chilling aura in ire. "It is not life," his hand raised and finger elongated in accusation, as if mocked, or insulted, while the grating words echoed upon themselves in mildly stirred anger. It was a finger clad in ancient armor, blackened by mythic flame, that had curled desperately around Deliverance in the heart of a volcano. It was a finger that had he had found steeped in Elysia's blood upon awakening during one awful siege. It was a finger that he had leveled at heaven in challenge to knock down the celestial gates and drag the sun down to the world and scour the dark depths of death itself to find her again.

"It is not life," he continued in response to her explanation that his punishments would gain him little. "It is a perpetual gray. A kindling world ready for the flame. A private land of ever, inward death and hands that clutch..."

His gaze flickered and faltered, downcast at that hand, adorn with that finger still levied upon her. A finger, he momentarily mused, best turned upon himself.

"Hands that clutch fire and cannot let go." Hands, he knew, that were no longer - merely fists. Was it any wonder that she had not loved him upon her first resurrection? Wedding bands cannot be placed with trembling fists, neither can lovers hold with hands given only to violence. It was fire in his core, and fists that had bored inward to that chained fury.

Remembering Ariane, his eyes sought hers once more and raked over her gray-clad flesh armed with the potent crossbow. He noted how her chest rose with steady breath, how her eyes wavered with the occasional blink above the frost of her deadly tears upon which his attention lingered and bid him withdraw a ponderous half-step. For all her living indecencies she indulged in before him, he hated her as well. But sometimes he hated someone even more than her, Burnie, Calomel or even Vraal.

Sometimes he hated himself the most.

Reason, trust and faith inexorably bound one towards truth, and truth was a profound weapon when turned inward.

"You have three days to learn," he rumbled coldly, his hand regarded for several weighty moments before it fell to his side and he turned his eyes upon her.

"Or everyone, everyone, will wish that they had died."

[Carnath-Emory]

The loss of a precious thing terrifies; it will haunt, a thing that is valued and that is placed beyond one's easy reach. The existence of a precious thing terrifies, for that potential is inherent in its existence, or so a woman has always reckoned. Deep within this fortress there is a table set aside for the sorts which are more easily kept, and its surface is is crowded with things that shine, delicate and brutal and wonderful things. Bamboo wind-chimes for a sister who had died; letters and exotic spices from a lover who had fled; a page of fine parchment upon which an oak tree grows in exquisite detail, a counterpart to the living thing which thrives an hour's ride from here...

There was a time that she, too, might have worn them chained to her side. Certainly she'd wanted to hold their givers in this way. Precious, close, safe.

"You mistake him. Calomel returned her for that her place is with you. Those were not his hands that stole her; not that time. Nor this." Which statement approaches dangerously close to the defiance which had caused her real hurt at the Ashfiend's gauntleted hands some month and more ago. It is said because it must be said, the same quiet and fervent insistence that had countered all her student's claims regarding that artifact. Her student's, a squire's, a friend's, so many that in the end her fortune had been that none of them were so punishing as this deathless thing can be.

Who has leveled an ironclad finger upon her, as if he meant to accuse, and that is surely the case. His mind is as given to accusation as to punishment; to anything at all but grief.

"I've no better word for it than life," she answers him now, but with assent in that tone; the incline of her head is slow and clear, concedes the knowing quality of his words. "Damnation," she breathes at their end, which had been Renne's word, and one that he'd ever saved for such moments as the Ashfiend describes.

A man whose touch is ruin
A prince without a kingdom
Hands that clutch fire and cannot let go...

She does not advance when he withdraws that step. She does not move at all, this narrow thing who's stood straight-spined throughout this kindless conversation. There is the crossbow still, levelled upon him even as he withdraws: it will not be forgotten by him that she stands in defense of what she claims for her own. There is the steady cool of her eyes, except that tears had briefly tainted them, and glitter as frost upon their dark lashes still. She is resolute, and her mind is not lost in all the difficult thoughts that he's provoked, for no reason that she will not dare that yet. Later, though; much later, when the hour is quiet and there is particular company...

"Three days," she echoes him quietly then, with a slight lift of her chin to answer the drop of his hand.

"I do not fail the promises I speak."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

He regarded her with desperately hungry eyes that entertained her writhing on the ground, beneath his plying sorcery, for her continued defense of a man who had sought to become Vraal - if only for a brief time. It was enough to remind him of the taste of bile. That the woman defended him, and the squire who had stolen it at Calomel's behest, brought a derisive snort of pure contempt.

"The squire stole it and delivered it to him," he began in a cold and terrible rumble filled with hatred that had nowhere to go inward. Thus he expelled it, breathed it outward, to disperse it throughout the world in measured, rotting doses. "And this merely to have him return it with pretty words? It is you who must understand that there is no truth in what you say, not concerning this."

His gaze flickers momentarily to that crossbow, stout wood and steel with a bolt topped in gauze likely blessed by some priest. He offered a slow, measured shake of his hooded head as he started for his waiting steed, hulking and dark with staring, luminous green eyes. "We both know your weapon is useless. Unless you mean it otherwise." A swift and sure motion, born of long practice and repetition, has the armroed figure climbing atop his tamed beast and grasping reins in a mailed hand while the urn rests cradled in the other, precious, dented and empty.

"Unless it is a message to me that you will defend what is yours."

He allowed a silence between them, understanding the woman to no small degree, at least in this common motivation. "I understand this," he offered in that hollow voice, all echoes and memory born along by hate's hot breath. "For I will do the same."

"For the sake of your companions, your vow had best be true. In three days I will come for you."

Flame-wreathed eyes lingered upon the tears frosted upon her countenance. He felt a twitching impulse of sudden unsurety, to grasp Deliverance to be mindful that the blade was yet with him, that the woman did not bait him with a trap.

That Ariane had not learned how to end him forever.

He turned the steed around with a swift and sure pull upon the creaking leather reins. He did not bother parting with any further warning. The woman had found resolve and they would not deter her one way or another. She knew that to fail in her promise would be to invite his wrath, particularly concerning Elysia. His attention turned towards the constabulary, or the remedium, or wherever they might lair as he spurred his mount away from Darkenhold and openly towards the waiting roads.

Perhaps he would finally end his enemies after subjecting them to his pain-inducing sorcery for the hundreth time.

End them, only to begin them anew.

[Carnath-Emory]

"The squire stole it." She will not spare Patience Mayfair this. She will not, and no matter that they'd reached some unlikely accord in recent weeks; it remains the matter that hangs festering between them, and always has. Not, of course, between she and Patience alone, and yet: "The squire thieved it of you, and that choice was hers, hers alone. Whatever might have come after, you cannot fault him for receiving what was thrust upon him; you cannot be sorry that it was given into more fitting hands than hers."

This is the whole of what she will dare, the beginning and end of such livid audacity; she is committed to the truth of these things, but she is not a fool, is not by any means a suicide. Knowing full well that she has surely spoken too much, the swordswoman quietens now, becomes a student for the Ashfiend's words, if not the vicious hatred with which he speaks them. This is as well, for she has found Answers in the mouth of monsters, and this holds true even now, even here and now. The crossbow does not waver in its aim upon this deathless creature, her conviction has no tremour at all, but:

"I do," she breathes, as he accuses her of these things; his are words which speak directly to the heart of her, which flay to the heart of this confrontation. He has exposed intentions which she will not deny at all, which she claims with quiet and relentless pride. "And I will --

Defend all that is mine. With all that is mine."

As simply as that, as clearly as that: a moment's quiet accord shared between two monsters. She with her small chin slightly lifted in the midst of it, with colourless eyes that yield nothing at all, unless one imagines her understanding to be a concession, and that is surely not so. Do these eyes betray more than they ought to? For upon a night many weeks ago, she had watched some subtle moisture escape his own, had watched in some very quiet fascination as it descended his features, at what it contrived to work upon that which it touched.

Of all that she'd learned that night, which was a very great deal indeed, this was the most significant: this matter of tears and of scars. It is in the Ashfiend's favour that she communicates that understanding so poorly. But this is not a good fortune which can favour him for long, or so the woman has fiercely hoped, and this she keeps from her eyes now at all costs; has for the length of this unlikely conversation.

This confrontation between two things so unwilling to yield.

The Ashfiend demures from repeating his warnings, and so does a swordswoman keep from repeating that bold vow. It is madness enough that she'd spoken the words at all. Instead it will be a quiet watch with which she greets the 'Fiend's departure, and perhaps he will even realise this: that the grey of her gaze does not leave his form until it has become very distant, very small. That the crossbow does not lower by any increment until he has gone from view entirely, and then it's sunk to her side with some whispered invective for accompaniment. She is whirled about and back through the gates then, is moving with purpose towards Darkenhold's stables.

By the halfway point, her stride has become a sprint.