Healing hands...Shedding skins.

[Khalika]

Restless were the trees as the gypsy made her way by and through them, finger flexing without strain, though still with lack of strength. Perhaps if she had held on a moment or two longer they would be as once before. No, that way was not open to her.

Their breif encounter still rushed through her like quicksilver. It was more then a lingering sensation in her hand, the healing, mending, re-brithing. She could not explain the sensation, only to think the very fabric of her flesh was growing to become whole once more. Least till she pulled away, this was contrary to her previous wish for death at the hands of Teron Ashfiend.

It had been 2 nights since they spoke of the removal of his armor.. She had since returned to the farm house. he? made himself known to her there as well. Never was an true answer given to the question he posed in the Remedium Instead a clinical responce of weariness of the coming knowledge that he has returned. It was indeed more prudent to remain as he was.

So nothing more was spoken of it and for two day she rested and waited as Daphne-kyle tended and wrapped useless lumps. Though progress was being slowly made, it would never be quick enough for the stubburn Gypsy. When Daphne-Kyle would leave and it would be just two once more. Little was spoken of, for they were never chatty. Often time she would just sit in the silence of his presence, poundering his question and her true answer.

It was such poundering that had her to veer of towards the dagger this night after she had departed the WS&L having been convinced by Daphne-Kyle after the evening bandage change that she need "air" and should escort her home.

Now hours later she stand outside the door to her home. There was nothing lavish about the Cassion farm, less so the wooden door that is before her. Inside he may be, will she tell him? He will surely see she is fixed but how? Does she tell him she used Arak's Ruin to poke a mad man? More to the point she gave the term Arak's Ruin to a mad man so he may poke other. Why? For the simple purpose that they spited her with opinion? These are reason alone why she is not deservant of such a gift as renewal.

A heavy sigh as a hand grasps firmly the latch upon the door as she enters, bandages loose upon her..

"Teron?...Are you here?"...

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Tell me Teron, are you finding your soul?

The words dogged him in the gypsy's relentless question. They danced about him, relentless, as he and Khalika had danced about one another since his freedom. There had been a certain unease, neither as the other had predicted or expected, both in need and yet floundering. Their questions wound tighter like serpent coils, repeating but clenching, a grasp afixing itself with ever-growing and hideous strength. For truth awaited them both and neither, perhaps, with courage enough to face it.

The farm was a quiet place. It gave him over to rumination. In the brilliant aftermath of his liberation, and in the blossoming of promises about such things as no more prisons, and the dimming of his hate, the aftermath struck him as somewhat dimmed. A loneliness had grasped him, for that was indeed the nature of this particular beast, and snared him in doubt and directionless turning. Thoughts of Foggy Bottom, of the townsfolk clawing out their own eyes as they wept int he throes of a madness they did not understand, his madness, took shape int he shadows at the edge of his infernal gaze. Memories of the butchering of Myrkenfolk. And other folk. There had been countless folk he had slaughtered. With every sunrise the memories stirred others and wrestled with one another to drag down the dawn of this new chapter of his existence.

No, this pair was not exactly given to much talk. There was not to little to speak of, but too much. Entirely too much. Too many people to say it too. With those memories the memory of rage and its power, whispered and intoxicating for its power to rend the skies and make them pummel his enemies. Hate was a heady thing.

The gypsy had given him a home at personal cost. The small farm had found itself a tireless worker of implacable strength. Lumber chopped, plow steadied, any gross labor requiring physical strength was found by his armored hands. Such work bore the remnants of his deathly presence in clinging ethereal frost, but it found completion under the hands of one who knew nothing of fatigue and very little of mercy. Yet the latter occupied his thoughts increasingly, his being given it, and how little he had spared for others. It was, in a sense, his gratitude for the gypsy from lips that were too unwieldy to speak of such things as "thank you," and "you helped save me."

For he was not saved, not yet. Perhaps, he considered, he was on his way. Deliverance, for both of them, had only begun.'

So with her return the Ashfiend is standing in whatever passes for a parlor or sitting room in the humble home for an audatious and daring gypsy. What greets her is the memory of warfare, hammered into blackened and battered steel: boots, gauntlets, pauldrons, breastplate placed about the floor. Outside the ring is the lengthy blade Deliverance whose diamond catches what starlight flickers in and lends a soft white to the shape within the ring of armoring.

A tall figure clad in the wretched remnants of burned doublet, leggings and sleeves given over to ancient burns. That outside illumination of the night sky catches upon the pallid flesh, marred by fire as if by burning hands, and setting it aglow with soft alien light. In the numbus of such tranquil illumination, Teron's gaze of dimmed scarlet fury finds her as she enters, nestled within moonlit shadows and framed in the ruin of his golden hair.

"I am here," he rumbled at length, marred lips framing the occasional flash of white teeth. Sinister eyes take in the whole of the gypsy, unspoken cocnern has him probing her for signs of harrassment or assault for having sheltered Myrken's scourge. A gaze that pauses upon loosened bandages on a woman who has little patience for allowing things to mend, and yet seems no longer burdened by undone flesh.

"Perhaps more than I have ever been."

He takes her in once more, bereft of armor and war, a memory of a man solidying steadily into such a shape once again.

"You have been at your hands. Or another has?"

[Khalika]

As the door had pushed open she had at first saw the rings of his hated past. the Armor laying upon the floor, Deliverance keeping close watch upon it all. Then she saw him, and time and life stood still...

The woman has seem much and all in her time, men in varying states of dress and undress But here in this moment she had never seen a man so naked. Even draped as he was in the remain of what was once clothing now given away to age, he held such vulnerability it near took her breath away. Seconds felt like days as she looked upon him, he spoke of her hand and the words washed away till suddenly she snapped back into life.

"Ahh, another..Quite unexpectantly.." Came a fumbled responce as she closes them inside with a shut of the door, making a direct line for the smaller room off and behind the fireplace. She retuned with a bundle of sorts left by Daphne-Kyle on the slim chance he may require other garments.

"You are taller then most." conversation, yet a skim away from eye contact. "But There should be something here, that would suffice. the room is small, if you prefer there is a sleeping area in the Barn..."


She rambling, Gypsy's don't Ramble. Yet as she sets the bundle upon the table with still gauze dripped hands, a nervousness has taken her. He was no longer a thing..But a man and now as she stands before him, a hand lifting slightly. Wanting, yet unsure and perhaps..Possibly wishing she was more woman then Gypsy....

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The gypsy stammers and stutters beneath an infernal, unblinking gaze. SImmering eyes take in her disturbed bandages as she offered the barn for slumber and as she unceremoniously dumped a pile of clothing on the closest table, whose uneven surface wobbled beneath the sudden weight. A step forward had Teron's ghatly pale, unarmored hands poking and prodding through them in a blind search. Fabric fell and left shadows beneath, the ghost of another hand, and the errant memory of the length of blond hair. His own hair fell into his gaze, obscuring the gypsy from view, as memory obscured the rest.

The Starchild had fled into the antechamber beyond the gallery, where shambling hordes battled against the queen's royal guard. A firm grasp for Deliverance, whose length bore the steady rhythmic pulse of dribbling scarlet life, and the other hand for those doubledoors had them being cast aside. The screams of battle echoed behind him in somber, dissonant chorus to the child's tortured breathing. It was little more than a closet, with open wardrobes, whose contents spilled onto the floor and huddled about their huddling captive.

Teron teached for those garments, pulling aside cloaks and gowns as the secret beneath and within turned and fumbled to avoid his grasp. The Starchild burrowed deeper, avoided an angered stab with his blood-blackened blade, swallowed a shriek, and scurried further into the pile of would-be graveclothes. Another dive of his fist unearthed a single worn boot and wooden necklace, a bite for his trouble, and nothing further.

Stepping back, he raised his free hand before him and called upon his sorcery to set his anger and hammer it into a flame to burn and consume whatever flesh yet huddled within the chamber.

He halted, the towering figure clad in rags and bereft of armor, as the gypsy's offered garments spilled out a wooden necklace of beads that scraped against the table, partly muffled by the wrapping clothes. He plucked it from the surface and studied it, a thumb wandered over the curve of its figurepiece: a simple, elegant dove.

"You were right about me," he whispered into the dark with words that bloomed with the truth revealed to him in his prison of the soul. "About the killing, the slaughter and destruction. Six thousand years of devestation," he paused as the enormity of it all whispered at the limits of his hearing, from just beyond the reach of his chained spirit. "To prove to myself that I was a monster, to earn for myself, in my heart, the need for my extermination."

"And yet the more you, and the others fought me, the more you learned and shared with me," that voice dropped to a sepulchre whisper. "The more I needed it, as if in bloodshed I had forged some measure of friends, and been understood by at least one human being."

The gypsy's hand fell upon his forearm as the chill swelled about her grasp, leeching out from dead and chaining flesh that bound his simmering soul in the shadow of his burning rage. A tempered and diminished rage, but a rage all the same that bid the sun ignore his flesh and the shadows to reach and bow for him.

"Too soon," Teron murmured with his eyes yet upon the dove. "It is too soon for such things as rest and sleep." He turned from her, ignorant of her grasp and its wondering intent, as a pair of paces took him within the circle of battered armor once again. The circle welcomed him as he stepped into armored boots and guards, cinched the straps about his legs, and grasped the charnel tomb of his breastplate.

"Too soon for peace," he rumbled in a voice of graveyards and barren trees at midnight. "Too soon to dismiss, and forget. Peace comes through conquering, and there are yet battles left to be won." The harsh, grating syllables began to accelerate each ponderous, intentional act that resumed sealing him once more within war and death, for battles and dyings of a different bent.

"Corpses require graves, and promises require honoring. I will not abandon my betrothed for lost, to... inaction," the last words elft him in a hungry snarl, venemous with sharp, self-hate and seasoned with shame. "I will find the urn, and," a hesitancy blooms in a heavy pause as ruined lips tremble with the thought of it. "And end this. My wife," he paused, grating syllables trembled at the silent avalanche of loss. "My wife deserved better. Now, she deserves rest."

The breastplate resumed, pauldrons donned, with battered armor so ruined to make reassemblage a simpler act that otherwise thought. Bloodless hands reclaimed those strained gauntlets and were buried anew in them. A new rage for an old tomb. An aged grey scarf for the lower half of his visage, carefully wound, as flaring eyes sparked with intensity of purpose and remembered zeal. He paused, the last movement setting the chains at his side to rattle sharply in brittle chime against his armored leg in memorium of the urn that once rested there.

A gesture shrugged the black cloak back onto his looming frame, fingers captured the hood framed in golden thread and pulled it down to cast his visage into somber shadows. The dove necklace swayed in his grasp, bound up carefully about his wrist, betwixt his fingers, the bird of peace allowed to hang free.

"I was told to walk in forgiveness," Teron confessed at length. "And only in it can I stand, and do, what must be done. What I should have done, a long time ago. I am sorry," he offered in the deluge of confidences and secrets that blossomed eagerly in the torrent of truth that overflowed those wrecked lips. "Sorry for leaving you to die, that I could not stay my hand until the end."

"And yet, to do this, I may need your help. You who are mourning the loss of your kin, and I with the audacity to ask you that it be set aside for my gain."

[Khalika]

"I still recall the taste of your tears
Echoing your voice just like the ringing in my ears
My favorite dreams of you still wash ashore
Scraping through my head 'till I don't want to sleep
Anymore"
-NIN

"My Wife deserved better. Now, she deserves rest."

It was those words of his that held her in pause. The need to lay to rest something cherished. It was this very task that lead her to place a foot upon myrken soil for the first time. How he bewitched her in his living years, how he haunts her in his dead ones....

~~ "Quills?..." She always hated that term of inderment of his. He thought it was fitting considering how prickly she can be. "Damit Quills, we'll figure this out." He was moving through the front entrance of her tent. It was dark, candles extinguished, it was not a good sign. The smell of the burning mangrove bark was an even worse sign. "He is Vertex, you know more then I, G'val could not be responsible for the ambush."

He felt the knife upon his throat then as he pass through the second flap, her body pressed against his own. " You are right he could not...For unlike the humans who surround him, my brother knows not the words that is betrayal." He moved not for the weapon at his side, there was no time for the blade was cutting flesh and he could feel the bath that followed.

"Mandella.." A whispered gasp not for mercy or forgivness but understandng. He was crumbling soon to fall back into her arm then the two of them to the floor. There she saw his eyes and heard her true name, the name her mother placed upon her at birth. A name only he speaks, it gives her pauses as she looks upon this man she has loved like fire love air. All consuming. She thought he betrayed her to his former life to the Ghauls who she fights..To her biological Father who rules all.

"Dexter." She has weavered now hand over his own clutching at his throat to stop the gushing red river. His eyes tell it true those deep blues of the sea, they say everything.. I understand, i love you....I forgive you...

A sudden shout from out the tent and soon Franklin Horseguard an old soldier who has followed her from the start pushes through inside.. "Khalika...It's T'ilk you best come quick.." It is only then that he sees the carnage before him. "What have you done?" She hears him not...Not yet anyways.

"I will follow you.." She whispers as a hand grabs the dagger once more intending to plunge it into her chest. He will not have it, this farmer from a far off land. this man who used his last bit of strength, sacrificed his last breath by moving his hand from his throat to stop her.

He died then, upon the dirt floor of a war tent. Arm drops, body goes limp as eyes darken in death. She looks up then to see the old soldier. Standing she passes by him.."He stays where he lays.."~~

She can still feel his blood between her fingers, it has her hand wringing as Teron continued his reasoning for action. She is looking inside now at nothing and everything, notice of him returning to old habits go unmentioned. This talk of making peace is empty within her. She has not felt peace, may never feel it.

"I believe, you should start at Darkenholm.." Nothing more, as she moves past him heading towards the kitchen area, a back entrance. "If Ariane resides in Myrken still, she will reside there.."

She will help him finish this, even if she perhaps feels he is falling backwards insitead of stepping forward...

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The gypsy's words become curt, and her thoughts die quick deaths upon them even as his chained infernal gaze notes the gentle wringing of hands and the turn of her thoughts. Determination withdrew a step and tore its color from the world through powerful exhertion of will, and with it he claimed one step away from her. The gesture stirred the torn black cloak that nestled about his armored frame.

Doubt crept into his gaze, souring all that it crawled across in the dungeon of his thoughts now so poorly contained that they threatened to run amuck through each other. Restraint set his hidden teeth to clench as one hand reclaimed Deliverance from its abrupt resting place no more.

"I am very selfish," Teron murmured at length, in syllables flavored with bitter metal. "I always have been," and the truth has set a babbling brook over the memory of ruined lips concealed beneath that comforting gray scarf. "I ask from you and offer so little. I would help, but do not know how. I am a fire that burns all it touches," he paused then as the dark well flickered into his thoughts, and Ariane's whispered voice straining for him in the depths, her features overlaying the gypsy's.

"Hands that touch fire," he had defined his state for her. "And cannot let go."

"But now, perhaps," he offered as that gaze drifted for the easy featurelessness of the floor. "Now, I can begin to let go."

His barked orders to Valinor echo within his thoughts, overlain by the gypsy's footfalls as she approached in the aftermath of Vraal's ending in the orphange monument he had erected. Shattered stone, a broken demon, and his own visage for that searing gaze. All in the resounding silence of empty victory.

"What did you hope to see?" she had asked.

A mailed hand plucks a small object from the burned pouch upon his stout belt. His palm offered to the gypsy, fingers uncurled for a single black petal charred into ruinous preservation. "Crush this, call upon me, and I will come," the metallic syllables left him after a weighty pause.

"I am well known only to murder," he explained. "And if murder will protect you, then it is yours to have."

[Khalika]

Was he handing her a calling card? Did he really think she would go through and risk what she has if all she wanted was for him to Kill?.. She was well capable of her own murders...

"Are you going somewhere?" Of course he is too Darkenhold, to Find Arianne and his answer. It was the most logical choice, for in her recollection Arianne was in possision of the urn when the Gypsy departed the wood for the sea. But when he speaks of call for him, it made her think of a greater distance. Was he on borrowed time? Was this not so much a return as a passing? The pause at the back door as she looks back though not fully at him. "Leave it on the table.."

Then she is gone, out the back door to the fresh air. She needed perspective on all that has happened and she could not find that with him near. Ajex is found, the sted seems as to echo her mood his head rearing back. Her hand tangling in his mane as she pulls herself up upon him. She misses the feel of riding him bareback, saddles are something they use out of necessity more then want or need. There was not the relationship of Horse and owner. More a equal partnership a give and take of minds they have traveled the world in eachothers company.

She is gone soon after, driving or being driven it makes no matter. Minds need to be clear, Ghost needed to be laid to rest..Perspective need to be gained..

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The petal remaiend in that hand for some time after she had slipped off into the darkness. It was from darkness he had rescued her before his imprisonment, had snatched her from the clutches of the dark elves. Now she had departed, this gypsy who had sought him out at the end, and the musings of his aged mind set his gaze to flickering like candles in a potent wind.

Inaction, lostness and confusion had cemented his feet and burdened his direction. Indeed there had been no direction. Weapons and armor for war and devestation, and freed in a grace he did not yet understand, there was yet a princess to be saved. A betrothed at least. Things left undone. Elysia. Heath. Pyres lit that could not be quenched. Graves dug that could not be emptied.

All he remembered was how to destroy.

And if one held Elysia, that one would be unmade.

The petal found its way to the table as Teron overturned his mailed hand. With the other he snatched up Deliverance and slipped it onto the breadth of his armored back. More confusion for the gypsy, he pondered, what she had hoped to see. What had she expected, wanted, in this mutal lostness? Perhaps for direction?

How to give it to someone whose sister was already lost?

Teron set his teeth as he gazed upon the petal. Myrken had changed and he did not know how much. Who was in power, how might they harm the gypsy when they learned he had been freed? A petal for her protection. He would return, he mused, as he followed her path into the darkness. As the shadows embraaced him, they carried this freed fiend to the tamed darkness outside of Darkenhold.

Behind he left a promise. He had also left an effort, in enough chopped wood to last through the not so distant winter and a few baskets of plants ripe for the harvest. Perhaps, he mused in darkness, he was known to more than murder and devestation. The trouble was to have eyes for such things to be seen. Such things as compassion and mercy.

Somewhat thankfully, he had been given a strong glimpse of just those things.