Old Ghosts & Other Things

[Kaelyn Ianale]

The night was almost eerily still on the edges of the Iron Desert, interrupted only by the quiet sounds of a caravan that had tucked itself up against the banks of the Bloodwater river. In the far distance the sky was broken up by near invisible storm clouds that lit up occasionally with lightning - the caravan did not prepare for rain. They knew the storm would never make it past the north plateau on the river’s far side. Instead, they banked fires and settled in for the long and frigid darkness of a desert winter’s night.

On the far outskirts of the caravan’s circle a fire still burned, two figures sat alone and in close proximity. The woman was wrapped in a heavy blue cloak with its wolf fur and brocade - a northern make that was entirely too expensively made for the rest of her layered attire. The man wore little more than outer clothes, having always been the more hot-natured sort of the two. He often boasted he could handle the cold wastes in nothing but a loin cloth.

They didn’t speak, the companions - not for a long time at least. Such was their relationship, built as it was upon years of friendship and understanding. Kai knew the woman at his side though, too well at times. Her silence felt heavy tonight and she continued to toy with the golden ring that had been present upon her hand for years. That was never a good sign, and for the past month he had been preparing himself for the inevitable.

It came that night.

”I think I am going home,” Kaelyn broke the silence with a soft and weary murmur. Kai looked at her askance - the caravan of Yrzana was home in his eyes and should be for her too. They had both been born among its people. Yet he knew her meaning for all he wished he didn’t, inhaling deeply as he turned his stare off to the distant storm.

”I thought you were,” he said anyway, too proud to react in any other way. All he got in turn was silence, and after a beat too long he looked toward her. Her gaze lingered on the ring with a wistful, distant stare. He knew with certainty then. They were over. Again. For how long this time, he was uncertain but it felt like it would be a long time, indeed.

”You’re thinking of him again, aren’t you?” he finally gritted out, and the apologetic look she turned to him dug straight through his chest. They had been lovers for the past handful of years, yet he had always sensed... known... that he was competing against a ghost of some distant memory. It was most obvious when she murmured in her sleep, another’s name on her lips even as she was tucked close to his side. Though he swallowed the bitterness that coated his tongue, he only nodded and looked away again.

”It is like a disease,” she said with a bitter chuckle as she looked away. ”I cannot help it, and I know I am not the only one that suffers it.” A beat of silence drew out too long before she inhaled, an apology on the tip of her tongue. ”I’m so-...”

”How long this time?” he interrupted with a sudden, heavy weariness.

Kaelyn only shrugged as she stared off in the distance, reluctantly leaning away from Kai and the warmth he had a habit of radiating.

”I’m tired, Kai,” she said softly, and to him it felt distinctly like a proper farewell.

”You said that last time, too,” he said petulantly. He was met with... Nothing. That concerned him, as the woman had always been quick with her scathing retorts. Silence didn’t suit her.

”I suppose it depends on what I find there. It’s been a long time, things could be... Chaotic.” Different, she meant. She couldn’t stomach the idea of things being different, so she chose a word that some illogical part of her liked better. Chaotic couldn’t be controlled, that she could accept. ”You know what they say of that peninsula. Bottled in madness, on a good day.” She was trying for humor, but the wry smile fell short.

”... When are you going?”

Kai knew the answer to that. Kaelyn hadn’t traveled alone through the desert in years, not since the Albarians had gotten hold of her. She would stay with the caravan until they ended up in port again. She confirmed as much with her answer, which - he calculated quickly. She would be gone in two weeks when they moved back down along the river to its mouth. He had two weeks left before she vanished on him again. This time, he had the grave sensation that it might be for good.

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Some time later...

The ship she had managed to buy passage on banked early morning on the shores of Galmair. She had traveled only once before to the peninsula and had not stayed long, yet it was just familiar enough that with a few questions she found her way into a tavern. A few more questions and she learned precisely what she wanted to know. It had taken all of an hour to track him down, at least partially. It was good enough for her.

”He’s in Runewick these days. Followed Fooser down there.”

That much had honestly surprised her, and she cringed at the idea of traveling into the literal heart of lands crawling with the magic sorts. It was as she was leaving the gates of Galmair that fate decided, however, to throw her a bone she wasn’t prepared to catch.

Just beyond the walls of the city, lit by the dancing lights of two camp fires, a group of people had gathered to play some odd little game. Kaelyn stood wordlessly just in the gate’s shadows and watched, her eyes settling on one figure in particular. Naturally, there was a woman by his side.

She didn’t intervene. There was a sudden, deep desire that settled in Kaelyn’s bones to do anything but be seen by the group. This wasn’t how she wanted first words in so very long to be exchanged, not in front of so many unfamiliar faces. So, she let the moment slide and let the group continue their game. In silence, she stepped away from Galmair’s gates and headed down the road in the direction of Runewick.

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”Boy,” Kaelyn called mildly as a young boy roughly twelve, perhaps thirteen of age. He wore the livery of a message runner, and had the build to fit it as well as he came to an awkward stop and looked to her. ”See that this is delivered to the name addressed, will you? I’ll pay well,” she promised and he nodded as he took the folded parchment. He took a look at the name and set off, half his pay pocketed.

Somewhere in the depths of Runewick, a parchment letter was delivered. The seal was unremarkable, standard and unstamped wax. Once opened, it revealed that there was nothing within beyond a single heavy copper coin.

[Drathe]

“Ay, get up!” The gruff voice demanded as he felt the collar of his shirt choke him, harshly pulled and lifting his head from the table. He opened his eyes groggily, drink and a knock out blow to the head having him in a daze. Was it, had it gone? No, it was still there. Anger, that stomach gripping icy kind and it frosted hard against the heated yearning of his heart.
“We’re closed, get up and out or pay for a room, just don’t die in here.” Ah, the voice of the bar keeper he realized as he felt the collar go loose and his head drop with a thunk to the table top.

His eyes moved as he lay there on his front. The tavern was empty but for two men, one rubbing at a swollen and bloodied nose, the other holding his ribs, both slowly staggering towards the exit. Dice were scattered about the floor, along with copper coins and spots of blood that swirled in puddles of spilt drink.
“Why do you do this to me!?” He called out slurred.
“Me?” Came the gruff voice again only further away now, somewhere behind. “You started it.”
“You did, you broke me when you left and now you come back! Wha-what about tha' time in the river”
The gruff voice replied with humour “The river?”
“Aye, we said we would never leave the other, I p-pulled you under the water and we held each other until we almost…” A wave of nausea came over him, his eyes closed and he swallowed hard.
“Almost what?” Prompted the unseen voice accompanied by the sound of clanking glasses.
“Almost drowned because neither of us would leave the other under.”
“What are you talking about.”
“You forgot, Kaelyn?!” Drathe replied, the anger in his belly rising and pushing up the nausea.
“Kaelyn? Who’s Ka? I aint your sweetheart bud, now are you going to get out or die? Just hurry up and do one, I’m locking up!”
A cold wet rag slapped Drathe in the face. Its sting and smell intense. Slowly he sat up on the table edge, hands slipping on the ale soaked top. Oh by the gods, his eye hurt with every blink, his jaw was throbbing and his head pounded.
“Kaelyn?” He called out confused as he slid to his feet, his scabbard following behind him with a harsh scraping over the table. "Ka!”
“She aint here.” Came the gruff voice from down behind the counter, a stocky hand reaching up now and then to take cow horn mugs from the bar top.”But if I were you and I’m glad I aint, this Kae.” The sound of mug stacking stopped as the tavern keeper took a moment still hidden behind the counter.
“Alright, sure she left, don’t most women and dogs, but, she came back. Don’t that count for something? Talk to her and hold your temper.” The hollow sound of mugs being stacked started again.”Gods know if you fight like I just seen ya, she’ll kick your arse into next week for sure if you get heavy handed, or you'll end up dead trying to fight out your anger with strangers.”

Drathe had managed to stagger his way to the door by now, though oddly each step seemed to be getting heavier, the candles must have been burning out too because the room was definitely getting darker. A good breath of fresh air would sort him out on the walk home. He could listen calmly to his head and heart now that the heat of his temper had been vented, maybe even pay heed to the tavern keeper.
A shakey hand, knuckles bruised reached out for the door latch and pulled it open, he took a step through.
“Oi! Not in there thats the larder!” Complained the gruff voice
Drathe pitched forward having passed out.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

"I can't do this again."

The parting words that hung heavy in the air as Drathe turned his back on her lingered like an imprinted bruise as Kaelyn stood silent amid the shrine to Adron. Every fiber of her being wanted to chase him down, yet she found herself rooted in place as she watched him go, a mere silhouette against the lightening grey of oncoming dawn. So much had been said between them, yet it felt like even more had gone unspoken. Those words, the truths they had spent years skirting around were beginning to become stones wrapped around her ankles. She had come so close to saying so many of those things as they spoke that evening, a mutual agreement between them to put anger and emotion aside in some attempt to hash out... This.

Whatever this was.

I can't do this again.

The words echoed somewhere in the depths of her mind, yet it was not Drathe's voice that said them but her own. Turning at last in an attempt to shake the frozen state of uncertainty was had taken hold, Kaelyn drew both hands up and into her hair. Fingers tightened in loose locks, pulling until she felt a stinging tug at her temples. Frustration bubbled up suddenly and violently, leading to a half-snarled sound that clipped short a bitter swear.

Gods, why couldn't she just learn to hate him and let it all go?

Had she had something in her hands, she surely would have thrown it at the first thing that came close enough. Instead, Kaelyn turned an uncertain half-circle before dropping her hands and moving back for the tavern. Shoving through the door that led into the Necktie, she looked aside to the grizzled old dwarf that diligently stacked fresh cleaned mugs to one side in a ritual he'd done for years. He glanced up to her and though he didn't smile, there was a patient warmth to his look as he motioned her over to take a seat.

"Right sight for sore eyes, ye are," he said gruffly as Kaelyn obliged, sitting upon the stool directly across from where Borgate stood nearly at height with his bar top. She sighed heavily, leaning over the table with arms crossed, watching him. It was an odd realization that beyond Blue himself, Borgate was likely the only person on the peninsula that knew more about her than what sat at the surface. He had seen her at her worst and best, through memories she'd rather never live again, and memories she chased every night before sleep took her over.

Resting her cheek in a palm, Kaelyn managed a smile that didn't quite reach her gaze. "Borgate, you've not aged a day. You must share your secret," she teased though - and he noticed as much - the usual bite and quip to her jests was gone. She sounded weary, though he made no comment on it. Instead he smirked and patted his wide girth of a belly. "Proud dwarven blood, that is," he answered before busying himself with pouring her a glass of red wine. The girl had always had a taste for finery beyond her means, as it were.

Yet as she looked over the wine, it went decidedly untouched. The hand that cradled her cheek shifted up, rubbing at her temple as she felt the dwarf's stare bore into her. "Y'know," he began with all the weight of a father about to lecture a child, and Kaelyn braced for the worst. "I been watchin' ye two for what feels like bloodly centuries." He sniffed slightly as he flung a well-used rag over a shoulder, stumping about as he cleaned the bar from the night prior. Kaelyn said nothing for a long moment, watching him with no small amount of wary suspicion to his intent. Borgate didn't often comment on others' lives, being a life-long bartender. When he did, it was often with some grossly needed advice, and she wasn't wholly sure she was ready to hear it.

"Ye two need to get yer heads out yer arses, in this dwarf's opinion."

"Is that so?" Kaelyn muttered dryly in response, her expression having fallen to a careful, masked neutrality.

Borgate huffed as he adjusted a small keg with a following grunt. He dusted his hands and then turned back to her, a pudgy finger pointing her way. "Lass, look. It was all fun an' entertainin' to watch ye two cat and mouse about and harass half my regulars at the Sheep years back. But here's the truth of it, aye? Yer both grown adults now. Time ye acted like it and do one o' two things." The finger that pointed accusingly at her lifted in gesture of 'first'. "Get over yer idiot selves and do somethin' about each other..." A second finger lifted to join the first. "Or bloody well let the poor man go and stop draggin' him about by the collar like he's a dog to play with." He ended his expert advice with a curt nod that bristled his beard, squinting across the way at the woman.

His words settled hard and stung in the same instance, as truth was wont to so often do. For the longest moment, Kaelyn had not the slightest idea how to respond. She stared for a moment at the old dwarf, then dropped her gaze to the table as she finally reached for the glass of wine. She drew it close with the sound of glass scraping wood, turning the delicate stem of the glass between suddenly restless fingers. "And what, exactly, is the something we should be doing?" she asked idly and was met almost immediately with a grunt that sounded distinctly like nuh-uh. Borgate's head shook as he gruffed out, "Now that part ain't none of my business."

Which drew a soft, sardonic laugh from her despite herself. "Of course," she said flatly. "Gods be damned you have actual, useful advice." It was sarcasm, and to others perhaps it would have seemed biting but Borgate knew the girl. He brushed it off with a grin and then waved her off. "Room up and te the left is open. Pay me in the mornin'," he said with a frank dismissal. Kaelyn narrowed her eyes softly at him, then - as she had so many times in years past - obliged. Plucking up the glass of wine, she nodded to him and turned for the stairs as rays of early morning sun finally broke through one of the eastern windows.

Within the solitude of the small but well-kempt room that Borgate had given her for the day, Kaelyn finished off the glass of wine with little thought as she stepped to the window that faced out over the water and the shrine. The dwarf's words lingered, mixing and muddling with all that Drathe had said to her the night prior. Leaning against the window's frame, she let her forehead thump softly against the woodwork as she watched the water below. The rolling of the slow tide threatened to drag up a memory - breathless beneath water that had numbed bare skin, hands clinging tight to one another. Promises made, oaths sworn that she had broken with no reason given.

Do somethin' about each other.

Closing her eyes, Kaelyn drew from the window and sat the now empty glass down as she rummaged about the room until a bit of parchment and a proper quill was found. With those words in the back of her mind, with too many emotions lying right beneath the fragile surface, she began writing a letter that never found itself delivered - left, folded away. Perhaps for a later day.

[Drathe]

Iron grey clouds held the morning sun at bay. He sat by the fire, ham sizzling in the old black iron pan and filling the air with a mouth watering scent. A clap of thunder rolled over head, deep and lingering. Each time its rumble petered out it grumbled a little more seemingly inexhaustible until the sky finally filled with a blinding flash. He barely notice, lost in his mind, in deepening thoughts. “Cowards” she had called them. Were they? Was he? Is that why she would leave? Is that why at the last moment of their recent meeting, the possible start of reconnection, the start of what could be everything again, right then with his heart pounding and driving the blood to further him on, his temper stepped in and ended it? Just as when he saw her for the first time in Wick. His heart galloped with a joy so long forgotten before a swiftly rising anger snatched and pulled hard on the reigns. But then, once bitten twice shy? So how about three times bitten? How else should he be? Feel?

The gentle pitter-patter of rain began to sound in the trees above, light and sporadic in its rhythm. Oh gods, was she right? It wasn’t simple temper was it. Simple anger at her leaving years ago, a choice he felt some responsibility for. It was fear in sheeps clothing, stalking the pen of his heart and barking hard when ever she, the only one who could ever shepherd him to pasture was now near. A fear of risking it all again, fear of the poetic justice he so deserved for his younger misspent life and that she had delivered him to each time she had left before.

The rain intensified, heavy enough now to fall through the trees and land on him. Hisses and wisps of steam left the frying pay and burnt meat. He shook his head as if trying to cast out the negative. Did the bear ever take to heart the pain of bee stings after lapping at the honey, did they ever turn down the chance of it despite knowing the paint they had felt? If anything surly the effort made its taste all the sweeter, unimaginably delicious in reward for the risk. It did. He knew it did, he had even told her that. “What if I stayed this time?” She had said, not asked, adding weight to her intent of not being the Desert Wind he so long held a love hate for. The rogues heart had lept at hearing that, ready to jump any fence or pen of previous hurts only to cower back as the wolf growled and asserted its presence again. “A coward?” He spoke aloud, softy. Surly a coward runs from the fight? Surly a coward doesn’t just drop his weapon, his defense he fights on? I’ve fought on, always and am still here for it.

Water had soaked his hair, causing tufts to matt as drops rolled from them and fell to the forest floor. The fire spat its hatred at the elements constant pester as the frying pan sizzled burnt and wet ham. He shivered, the water having permeated his coat and stealing his warmth. It pulled him from the depths of rumination. He sighed deeply when he saw the ruined breakfast.”Great, start the day as you mean to go on, fruk sake.” He cursed aloud as he stood making to boot the pan in anger from its perch. It was then he paused, foot in air and set it down. “Now your fighting burnt bacon?” he said aloud to himself face pitching up to the rain falling from the trees above. He exhaled a humored breath. “I understand” came softly spoken words. ”Stop fighting, be brave and lower your guard, your anger or you’ll go hungry again, for breakfast and her.”

The heavy pattering of rain on leaves above subsided swiftly as if responding to the moment, the understanding born to the man. Drips fell long in flight from above, some catching a golden sparkle of sun shards that started to beam through the forest edge. It was not long before the man was tucking into ham, juicy for the rain and flavorsome for the burnt and rendered fat around it. That which was not edible was gently discarded and neatly pushed to the side of the pan. With that he stood, calling out to the forest “I understand.” With those words in the back of his mind, with too many emotions lying right beneath the fragile surface, he began the walk back to town, to warmth, to her, but never found himself delivered. His new found understanding folded away. Perhaps for a later day.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

"You remember that night, in the river."

"I do, yes. Of course I do!"

A figure moved hurriedly through the trees somewhere just west of the Necktie, rushed footsteps crunching through the first fallen leaves of oncoming autumn, threatening to hang on a branch that had dropped dead and crumbling among refuse and roots. She made it all of a dozen strides across the second bridge when everything came rushing back up to the surface, breaking through the panic that had pushed her to make a run for it. Again.

Slowing, Kaelyn found herself coming to a stop beneath an old cherry tree that had grown wild among a thicket of naldors. A hand extended to the side to land upon the tree's slender trun, fingertips momentarily fixating on the dichotomy of smooth bark interrupted by rough, scored marks that ran all the way up into the tree's branches. Her chest rose on a sharp intake of breath as she stilled entirely, eyes turning over the distant landscape in front of her - Galmair off beyond the rise of hills and tree tops, and an empty, broken pathway that held no promise beyond trouble. The harbour was that way, and the smallest, most miniscule part of her considered the distance for a fleeting moment. The clenching sickness that twisted her gut at the mere thought quickly put it to rest though as she straightened and turned, leaning heavily against the tree.

As she stood there in the silence of nothing beyond the rustle of tree leaves and the static roll of water moving on either side of her, Kaelyn realized something that the panic had refused to let her see. She took another breath, deep and long, held it until her lungs burned before releasing it through softly clenched teeth. She had expected a gross, overwhelming rush of emotion the moment her feet started moving. Too much had been said, finally, that night. Yet as she stood there, all she felt was... Relief.

When was the last time she'd felt that?

The woman slid to the ground with back braced to tree, the texture of the bark catching and scraping at clothing as she went, her legs all but giving way from beneath her until she was sat upon the cool grass. Like a cord pulled too taut and finally snapped, she felt loose and weak. A thousand pounds removed from shoulders too used to carrying the weight. The weight of guilt, hesitation, reluctance and denial in an instant had been removed and she had not even realized it, too quick and too ready to bolt again.

A glance was thrown off to the east in the direction of the inn, hardly more than a stone's throw away between the trees. Didn't manage to get very far this time, did you?, the invasive and sardonic thought flicked through her mind as her head tipped back against the tree, a rough and exhausted chuckle bubbling up from parted lips. Her eyes closed for a moment, and when they opened again she was staring up among the tree's branches to the evening-stained sky overhead. Storm clouds were rolling in, she couldn't help but notice distractedly as her mind slid back to the past hour.

"I have spent the last years trying to run from that night..."

"The night I left, I wanted that to be the end. Clean cut. Both of us. Stop it there."

"I left because of you... I came back because of you... And the fact that even after all this time trying to run from those words, they still ring true for me. If you asked right now, I would lay down my life for you. I can't escape it. Not this time."

Thunder rumbled in the distance as the roiling clouds made their presence properly known, a perfect punctuation to her thoughts as she pulled at a handful of grass under a palm. She turned her gaze westward, watching as the sky twisted from evening pink to an angry red tinged with grey of the rain that was beginning to scent the air. She gave it about an hour before the storm hit, which meant if she wanted shelter, she was forced to move one way or another - to Galmair. Back to the Inn.

"Damn the world. Damn the riches. Would I be enough?"

She couldn't bother to move, she decided only moments later. Running one hand along the other wrist, playing fingers over old scars of too-tight ropes and ink laid under skin, Kaelyn let her focus slide to nothing until the sound of footsteps off to her side broke through her distant reverie.

"Forever and always."

"Mind if I?" A woman's voice broke through, and Kaelyn blinked back to immediate awareness as she looked aside to find Eleanor moving through the trees toward her. She was given no chance to answer before Eleanor took a seat beneath the shelter of the cherry tree somewhere off to the other side, out of Kaelyn's line of sight. Tucking her chin toward a shoulder, Kaelyn listened to the sound of the woman settling before Eleanor spoke up a second time. "Long history there?"

She had been Kae's opening to bolt, having come across the Necktie's bridge just as the moment became a fulcrum, threatening to fall one way or another. She had seen the man and woman, enough to make a well educated guess as to the situation. Kaelyn couldn't help the soft chuckle that slipped quiet from her. "Long. Winding. Immeasurably complicated."

There was no more accurate description for what had existed between her and Drathe for the better part of a decade, if not longer.

"He is good for you?"

"Best and worst thing to have ever existed for me."

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They spent the better part of the next hour talking, mostly of things Kaelyn never had been good at talking about. All the while she watched the storm creep closer and at some point the wind had shifted, running fast and hard through the trees until it began nipping through the thin and too-few layers of clothing she wore. It was with a curious reluctance that the woman finally pushed to her feet and found an excuse to part ways with the priestess that had come with apologies and left instead a great deal of wisdom and truth that Kaelyn wasn't sure she was ready to carry.

"As I said, I see you have no iota of faith in yourself. You look back at all you have done, you look forward at all the ways you can make the same mistakes and worse, and you look within at all the fear, hurt, and loathing."

"I am a woman of the cloth, Kaelyn. It is of my nature to have too much faith. I have faith that you need not be the woman you see and fear... And hate."

Those words stuck like a barb under skin that couldn't be reached, and Kaelyn would be lying if she said they did not land too close to the heart. She regarded the woman for a beat too long and then did as she always did. She turned away with a quiet, indifferent farewell.

Only, this time she did not run for safe harbours and distant shores for all that miniscule side of her that desired to do just so pricked at the surface. With the storm rolling swift at her back, Kaelyn instead returned to the inn. Darkness was falling and lightning licked bright and hot across the sky as she stepped through the doors of the Necktie just a stride before the first heavy drops of rain fell. A look and a word was exchanged with Borgate, and then she was making for the stairs that led up to the rooms above.

She didn't move for the door of the room he'd given her the night before. Rather, there was another she stepped to, closed and likely locked on the far side. For a long moment, hesitation drew her to a lingering stop as she studied the woodgrain of the simple door. Then, with knuckles curled into a fist, she rapped twice and softly at the door. Arms folded tight about herself as she stepped back and waited for whatever she was to find on the other side.

[Drathe]

Progression, regression, sun rise, sun set, breath in, breath out.

The breeze was blowing strong enough to ruffle his hair and ripple the waves of the briny water, lapping beneath his boots against the uprights of the small dock. The rogue sat on its weathered edge, legs hanging, hands holding to the smooth wooden planks, their texture interrupted by rough, scored marks that ran all the way along their lengths.

Out before him over the darkening sea the sky was a painters dream. Rich reds of sunset were streaked with golden edged pink cloud to the West. While rolling in from the East a broiling cover of violet and purple ebbed into deep and menacing tones of darkest grey.

His lips pressed into a thin line as he conversed in thought... Again after her talk of courage, she had ran, physically ran. How far could you run to escape emotion, courage? He asked his minds picture of her.

His weary head eased back until it could no further. Was the Iron Desert far enough? Seemingly not for this was the third time she had returned. How long could you keep running? Could you run from the few thing that really mattered, things that had people on their knees arms up to the sky calling to the gods for just one more moment, just a little longer please! Or pull for so long that everything just seemed to unravel never quite fitting back together with out ‘that’, to just hold it all contently in place? He sniffed, his nose and cheeks cold from the breeze blowing in the brooding clouds from the horizon. And if you could… could you live a life like it and die fulfilled and complete?

Both of them had seemed to have managed it thus far, only, to know the answer to the last part would be all to late, no gods or prayers would give them redress if it proved not to be. But he knew, he knew.

He had tried, honestly tried to take a differing tact, learn from what had been said before and act on it. Hold temper down, patch up wounded pride and keep fear back with calmness. So they talked over fire light near The Hemp Neck Tie. He had been measured and calm in voice and stance. But she had pushed back against it and him with upset of “…this is not us, not how we talk.”

She was right. It must have felt patronising and one sided, far to cool and out of what they knew, what they did. He though it over. Their true fighting was never about the kill, never about taking chunks from one another to claim victor. It was about achieving the after glow of tempering the moment and pull the other alongside. So tempers rose to bring to boil their stew of regrets and hurts. King and Queen together again spooned each others portion down. It was followed on with a refreshing and genuine, rare vintage bottle of apology, its taste so wholesome and thirsted for after such a salty meal it brought sobbing tears to the eyes, at least to one of them. Contented, they embraced.

“Well, we got there girl.” He said to the sea, a smile growing over his cupids bow lips. He leaned his weight back, swung his legs up and stood, the wood creaking under him. His thumbs tucked into the old worn leather sword belt at his hips for hands to hang loosely from them. The choke that then grew in his throat almost pushed tears into his eyes. A hard swallow had it mostly back from whence it came. “Then you fruking did it again.” Disappointment soaking his tone. In his chest he felt the worried pacing of skittish sheep about their heart shaped pen as the fear wolf in their clothing stood on its inside with them, watching, growling.

The room at the Hempy was clean and more than sufficient. He had no want to be in Wick, it wasn’t home, held no comfort or place for him. Borgate had sent him up after a casual talk with drink in hand. The bed was good as he settled in, boots at the side, sword in scabbard by the head end. He had washed, had another drink to settle him and felt weary enough to sleep. With the candle blown out darkness stole all distraction. ‘I should marry you!? Fruking kind of an idea is that.” He turned in the bed. “Can’t even hold each others company long enough to talk, let alone to get a damn ring on your finger.’ Sleep came, though it wasn’t easy.

He woke from vivid, troubled dreams at the gentle knock on the door, far too softer a sound for the large fits of Borgate. Rain rattled on the glass of the window behind him. He reached down grabbing a boot and in temper at the breaking of his hard earned sleep, threw it at the door. It struck home with a loud thunk. “Fruk off, this rooms taken and I paid!”

… …The bed sheet was pulled back and the cold air of night washed over him. His naked skin tightened, goose bumps rising. He reached instinctively for the scabbard at the end of the bed, for the short sword to be drawn smoothly, quietly and gripped tightly.

Bare feet set down on the cold wooden floor and padded softly toward the door. The blade was held point ready at stomach height, poised to strike at the opening of the door. The latch was held back, handle turned and pulled for hinges to creek as the door was opened juuuust a little.

His head moved inline with the thin gap, a tired weary eye catching the candle light in the hall beyond. It rolled right, then left and settled on her. The sword point dropped as too did his tense shoulders. He padded back to the bed, having pulled at the door for it to swing open and let her shadow surrounded by a dull rectangle of candle light, partially cover the bed and floor of the room.

“Desert a bit too far away at this hour?” He called back thrusting the blade into the scabbard and setting it down. He turned, naked and un-shy about it, briefly looking to the door way. The light caught the shape of him well, flattering in the dim orange hues that touched his right side. He got into bed drawing the bed sheets right up to his neck and shuffled into a comfortable position.“So, you coming in or what?"

[Kaelyn Ianale]

The solid thud of what was unmistakably a boot hitting square upon the door she stood before had Kaelyn biting back a grin. There were things this man did that, no matter how angry and hurt they sought to be with one another, drew her mirth. His temper when woken was one such thing, which drew her to wait a moment - she counted to three after the boot audibly fell to the ground on the other side - before she spoke up. "Blue. It's me..." Another two-tap knock was given just to ensure he knew that his visitor wasn't deterred by the temper.

It seemed an eternity coated in a thick layer of uncertainty before the door finally opened under the heavy slide of the latch on the other side. With her arms folded loose about herself, Kaelyn stood quiet as the man appeared in the very smallest sliver of space that he opened - the blade's point that glinted behind the door, held at just the right height to do serious damage in a single lunge did not go amiss. A moment slid by, and then the door swung open as Drathe let his guard down if just enough to allow her into the room. The soft breath of relief that slipped from Kaelyn's lips could very easily have gone amiss as her arms as well unfolded, a similar dropping of guards as she followed in a second behind him.

The door closed with a soft but weighted click of hinges behind her as she stepped fully over the threshold. There upon the other side of it, Kaelyn found herself suddenly overcome with an emotion she'd not bothered with in years. She was nervous as she leaned upon the door, a hand slipping back to slide the latch back into place, barring the outside world from them. For all she tried out of some misplaced and sudden need for decency not to stare at the man that strode across the room naked, her gaze betrayed her and for some reason it made her quake like a maiden all over. Her chest rose on a deep breath in some attempt to settle the fraying nerves, though the words he spoke cut through far better.

"Desert a bit too far away at this hour?"

A wince flicked over Kaelyn's face, but she took the barb skin-deep. She eased off of the door and reached for the brooch that sat weighted at her throat, fingers busying themselves with unlatching the cloak and shrugging it from her shoulders. "So it seems," she responded softly as she moved to the table shoved in a corner, a single well-made but equally well-worn chair sat next to it. The cloak was draped over the chair's back, and that was where she lingered as she watched him through the flickering play of candle's light.

What went unspoken was that she'd hardly made it past that second bridge before desire broke through panic and quelled that maddening reflex once and for all. This hour. This time. Forever more, she could have insisted but the words were lost. She'd never trusted words, so easily broken they were.

It seemed a lost cause to apologize for fleeing, just as much. She wouldn't apologize, simply because she knew words would fall short of any damage repaired. Instead, she found herself standing there on the edge of the room, just beyond the full casting light of the candle left burning that so perfectly played over the shape of the man as he returned to the bed. The air felt heavy, and it had nothing at all to do with the weight of the storm that had rolled in just beyond the walls.

They had a way of always ending up at crossroads. Fulcrum moments where one word, one action could have them both tipping into the abyss, given half a chance. It always seemed to be these moments that they pushed and pulled and clawed their way to. Funny, she couldn't help but think - these moments never failed to ruin her in some way or another.

"So, you coming in or what?"

Drathe's voice drew Kaelyn's attention back to him, and for a moment she wondered if he'd noticed at all that she had in fact already stepped in the moment he'd allowed her the room to do so. Or perhaps... He didn't mean through the door at all. Hope, bittersweet as it so often was between the two of them, threatened to bloom as she ran a hand along the back of the chair she had taken stance aside. A soft noise slipped from her, impossible to decipher entirely.

Then she was moving, hand falling away from the cloak and chair. Somewhere along the way, she toed out of the soft-soled boots she hated wearing, but were so necessary in these cold lands. Then her weight was settling on the far side of the bed, too small and too large in the same breath. Her back was placed to the man that had laid out beneath the blankets of the bed, and her hands lifted to the thick braid of hair to pull it over a shoulder. Fingers reached for the ties of her hair, unraveling the braid as she looked not to the man at her back but to the nearby window that was slicked over with the rush of falling rain.

That storm raged, a perfect echo of the tumultuous expanse of silence that settled between man and woman. Every storm though, no matter how long, nor how violently it raged, had to come to an end at some point and nothing was so sweet as the silence and calm that followed. As lightning shot through the sky and cast cold light through the room around them, clashing against the warmth of the candle on the other side, she turned at last to face him.

And so softly that it was nearly swallowed beneath the rolling force of thunder that followed the lightning, a single word sighed from her.

"Drathe..."

[Drathe]

His eyes opened as she sat on the bed, her weight pulling the bed sheets over him just a little tighter. He rolled his head over the pillow to see her back to him, hands playing through that long, full dark hair of hers. Rogue wisps and loose strands of it caught the candle light and glowed deep golds and umbers. Her hands, dexterous and feminine worked the hair loose with casual ease born of the many times it had been done. Even in the dim light, the odd scar or edges of a paler mark on the back of her wrists showed. He had always thought they accentuated her beauty, her power. To him all of her scars showed her ability to survive, to fight, to never accept defeat. Not necessarily physically, but in mind, spirit, soul. She was stronger than anyone he had ever known, woman or man, he truly loved her for it. The fact she was here now showed that, didn’t it? Showed courage and conviction in what she earlier run from? The anxiety and aggravation, the want to rile at her evaporated, the hurt dissipated as he studied her.

When she turned he was looking at her. His eyes weary and tired but there was a softness to his stare, even in the little expression that graced his face. No glares or harsh looks to match the earlier sarcasm, the cheap blow for want of returning a little hurt for that taken earlier in the night. All this fighting, these battles and moment, gaining ground, loosing ground it all felt so stupid when she was close, when they were quiet and just… Just. He wanted to embrace her, take the woman in to his arms and make them both one inseparable physical moment.

She called his name softly, thunder rolling outside like the sky knew the gravitas of the moment. He spoke quickly before she could again.
“Say whatever you want to, need to Kae, I will listen, but I don’t want to fight.” His words humble in their honest request. “We were fighting when you left, we have been fighting in my head the years you have been gone and now together, we are fighting.” He continued, rising on an elbow to close their gap as he looked to her eyes, wanting, needing to connect deeply not just be heard. “You know I would never try to tame you, trap you or hold you back, only a fool thinks he can tame the Desert winds” He spoke with integrity from the heart. “We can argue about my gambling or, or your overly inquisitive nature but, if your not here to tell me your leaving? Then tell me we can take our time to rediscover each other in the knowing that if either of us runs, we run together whatever that means.”

He fell silent, eyes lowering to a close, giving a moment for the desert woman to have her thoughts. Slowly they opened looking up at her through his brows, head following in its slow rise up to face her.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

He didn't give her the chance to say anything more. As Drathe's name died off as little more than a murmur beneath the thunder that shook around them, as she turned aside to look his way only to find his gaze fixated on her in turn, Kaelyn felt the shift in the moment between them. At long last that viciously sharp blade they teetered so long along the edge of was laid down, put to rest. They'd taken their pounds of flesh respectively and as Drathe bared the truth of his weariness with the fighting, she was helpless to anything beyond agreement. She listened, she took the weight of his words for what they were, and in the end she merely shook her head in some contradictory sense of agreement.

"No more," she murmured quietly through the stretch between them. No more - no more fighting, no more fleeing, no more digging just to spite him and get a rise so she could chase the high of the afterglow that followed their constantly cresting tempers. If he was laying down arms, she had to do the same. So instead of pushing for words, the woman turned more onto the bed, drawing a leg upon it fully until she was leaned slightly against the headrest behind her. There was still an arm's length between them perhaps, if the bed was so large. Never before, she thought absently as her attention lingered upon the man stretched out along the other side of the bed, had such a minimal stretch of space felt so expansive.

"Only a fool thinks he can tame the desert winds."

That nickname. A faint but sincere smile played over Kaelyn's lips as one hand toyed restlessly with the hem of the sleeve that fell long and loose down her arm. "You've always called me that," she observed softly, not yet commenting directly on his words. "I've always loved it, but I never thought it fit with you." She paused, lips pursing in thought as her brows knitted together, only to smooth out a moment more as dark eyes slid over Drathe's face, taking in the play of the candle's warm glow over his features. The hand that fussed with her sleeve itched too much, and finally she reached across the way between them. A touch of fingertips, featherlight as they ghosted along the stubble of his jaw. "I've always thought myself more a moth. You the flame that keeps luring me back, no matter how many times I try to escape."

The hand upon his jaw shifted so that her thumb could trace along the curve of his bottom lip. The touch was almost reverent, remembering and refamiliarizing to the shape of a man she knew better than she knew herself. Of a man she'd longed for in the darkest of nights, most especially when she had no right nor reason to do so. Her expression softened to something raw in its honesty - the mask of guardedness, of indifference and coyness finally pulled off and laid to rest to bare the love, the vulnerability he always managed to draw from her in these quiet moments.

"I'm not leaving," she added after almost too long a silence, her stare lowering from Drathe's face to the lips her thumb had brushed over - lips she knew had ruined so many hearts in the past, be it from their touch or the words that slipped past them. As her brows drew together again, she let her hand draw away as his head lifted, eyes that had closed for a moment returning to her and drawing her gaze back to them yet again. "I'm not leaving, Blue. Not unless you tell me to go," she added softly, and on the edges of the words were an unspoken promise. If either of us runs, we run together.

She couldn't do it again. She couldn't run again, not when so quickly he had pulled her in as if they had never parted ways. It was a battle lost, and that realization washed over her like a slow-rising tide in that silent moment of unspoken promise as she fell quiet. As his head lifted to her, she inhaled deeply, slowly. Her teeth caught at her bottom lip and worried it before she spoke again, her voice hitching with emotion that she'd been so practiced at keeping at bay even as he had sobbed before her earlier.

"I love you, Drathe." The words bled raw and true from her against the pull of the emotion that tried for a moment to render her mute, to keep the words buried deep. "Gods, I..." Her voice cracked and she fell silent for a beat, finding her words, her composition. She nodded faintly, a belated reaction to his words as she inhaled through parted lips. "If we run... We run together. I'm not leaving again - by my blood, on my life, whatever you want me to swear oath by. If you'll have me, one last time. If you'll... If you'll let this desert wind of yours come to rest and not begrudge her for it."

Please, she was just shy of saying. Just shy of begging for that one final chance to lay everything between them to rest once and for all. It was her, laying down the arms of a vicious and long-winded history of everything between them, and as she did, she reached for him. Wishing distantly that the candle that cast them both into sharp relief would sputter out and send them into darkness so that words needn't be said anymore - so that they could remember one another in ways words could never suffice.

[Drathe]

He listened as she spoke, his grey eyes devoted to her. She was close enough to hear her breathing, to see her chest rise with the breath she took to give life to her words. To feel the slightest movement of her on the bed. Then she reached out and touched him.

The way she did that, touching the side of his jaw, thumb then over his lips made him feel masculine, real and whole. A warrior made knight by the touching of a sword upon shoulder. No, more than that, something more elevated, pure and loved, a Knight on knee before the touch of his Queen. It always stirred something in him even when done with firm hand, holding him to her chastisement. Her confident firm hand holding a barking dogs maw, tempting its bite until it grumbled and whined to her will. No one could ever get away with that but her. No one could ever stir what he felt when she did that.

"I'm not leaving, Blue. Not unless you tell me to go,” she said. No he thought, not now, not ever, not even in the past had, would, could it be said, not in such context. The way she spoke, he believed her, truly believed as he lay before her alter. The conviction and simplicity of her words held a complexity he understood. And then she said it, the simplest thing of all, "I love you, Drathe." He didn’t hear the rest of what she spoke for he fell. He fell into a feeling, into a memory he never knew held so much sway until now. Something that had made him who and what he was today, shaped him and driven him utterly. Something, he had wasted his life on.

The cards were laid down on the table face up by a trembling hand, a young hand, probably around 14 years old. A King and Queen. Cards he had chosen to keep, not the best hand in value a high risk in fact, but they could richly reward him if fate rolled the dice in his favour. Across the table two other cards were placed, an ace and a Joker. Above them the grin of a stocky bearded man, greasy skinned and harsh of eye. The lad licked his lips, it all depended on the roll of the dice. He took a breath looking up and around. A crowd had hemmed them in, surrounding them, watching with their own wagers in hand on the outcome of the game. The air was hot and close, thick with the smell of stale sweat, sweet mead and rich pipe smoke. He himself had every penny to his name at steak, hard earned and literally fought for coin. A silly thing to do because the young lad as of yet had not been taught the art of cheating, the slight of hand and throwing of weighted dice that he would later be all too familiar with. This was all down to luck, fate. The bearded man threw his dice. The ace in hand doubling the 5 and the joker laughing off the low number to be rolled again as six.

The lad sat there almost unable to move for the tension in him as the man across the table bellowed a deep victorious laugh, the sound oppressive and belittling. The crowd cheered heartily with him. A large firm hand rested on the lads shoulder from behind, the voice that of the man he worked for, a father figure of sorts if one could call a whore house minder such - spoke in his ear. “Roll the dice, lad.” And he did. The two bone dice left his trembling hand, they bounced and skidded to a halt. The crowd went silent at the result. Both the two up right faces showed ones. Now in most games two ones is a poor show, in this game also with any other hand but his. Only one king and one Queen can rule the kingdom and nothing is stronger than a King and Queen in unison, together. Any other number on the dice would have been a loss with that hand.

The room exploded into a frenzy of shouting, jeers and cheers. The hand on his shoulder shook him firmly as the voice pressed into his ear so close and strong it hurt. “Nothing in the world feels like this does it, Drathe! That adrenalin, that hand trembling excitement and fear of what’s to come. You won! Not even love feels like this boy. Understand this. Don’t waste your time or heart on it, court the risk, love the game, give your heart to nothing else. You think it’ll have you broke? Huh? Wait till you’ve a woman on your arm, Drathe. They will take you for every copper”

The boy, felt like a king and for the first time in his miserable life, he was in love. True unadulterated, heart pounding, unmeasurable love with all of what just happened and nothing else ever came close to the feeling of that day, that moment. All that chasing rich women, seeking the thrill, the gambling, the drink, the women, the fighting, the social games and ruffians work through his life, with those words of wisdom a subconscious manta. Nothing until right now that is. Hearing, knowing her words to be true.

Drathe took in a sharp breath as he came back to realization, came back to the beauty of the desert woman sat on the bed against the head board. The dim candle light and quite room about them, save for the patter of rain on the window. Two cards in the game of life placed on a bed face up, one a King one a Queen and fate at last had shown the roll of the dice. “Two ones.” He said at her through that boyish grin of his, his eyes bright and full of a confidence not there a moment ago. Not that she would understand. His head shook with the slightest of movement, the desert woman reaching for him.

“By your blood, on your life,” He chose to repeat back, that having come to his recollection. “I want you, I ~need~ you and I want the rising of tomorrows sun to be be the dawn of our Kingdom together.” He pushed back and up from under the bed sheets reaching for her, wanting her. His movements full of familiar confidence save for one thing, his hands trembled.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

Two ones.

She didn't understand the reference, not directly. It wouldn't be until much later, among friends as they played some dice game among themselves that even the slightest hint of understanding in that regard would strike her. The intent behind them did not go amiss however, and something loosened around Kaelyn's chest, allowed her to breathe again when the wickedly charming, boyish grin of Drathe's finally reappeared. She had missed that smile for all she had never truly trusted it. It was the way that the grin lit his eyes, of how it promised trouble in the sweetest of ways -- how it brought back memories of the rogue she'd fell in with so very long ago when they were both little more than fools playing to the heartstrings of tricksters and thieves. It was Blue as she knew him best, and as that side of him at last resurfaced, everything seemed to click into place like the tumblers of a finally-cracked lock.

She was home.

"I want you, I need you and I want the rising of tomorrow's sun the to be the dawn building our Kingdom together.” He sometimes overwhelmed her with the sheer poetry of words he was able to concoct in the height of emotion, and all Kaelyn could manage was a nod of her head. An agreement, unspoken as she was at a loss for any words that would compare. Their kingdom, born of reckless passions and throwing themselves to the wind - a kingdom of helter-skelter deeds, in which no matter how far they went nor how dark the path became, they had one another's backs.

He reached for her just as she did him, and as trembling hands found one another, she let all efforts to find words fade away. The candle he'd lit burned low at some point and at last sputtered out. His name, breathed upon her lips once more as darkness surrounded them and the storm burned itself out to little more than spattering rain, and amid it all promises were made with not a word spoken.

When dawn broke hours later to the glistening remnants of the passing night's storm, it also brought a promise kept. The window upon the eastern wall of the room had been thrown open at some point, and there upon the bed Kaelyn sat, watching the first rays of sunlight cast itself across the room. Blankets tangled around her legs and a chill raced up bare skin, but she couldn't find it in herself to move lest she disturb the warm body pressed against her far side. A tradition, broken - neither of them had stolen away in the dark with excuses on their lips the next time around. A hand reached over blindly until fingers found bare skin not her own, and she murmured on a whisper.

"Sun's risen." And I'm still here.

--------------------------------------

[Drathe]

No good deed goes unpunished


He hurt, oh by the gods he hurt like he never knew it was possible to. All he could taste and smell was blood, his eyes so pressed closed by the swelling of his broken face he could barely see. All consuming, all encompassing agony and despite the people who's arms held him, carried him to the safety of the hospital, he felt so utterly alone in it. Eleanor the Priestess of Cherga and the Lizard warrior Fooser pushed into the Runewick's hospital with haste, the ruined Drathe supported in their arms. They set him down on the bed. The man’s ghostly white skin only coloured by the deep set blueish bruising and darkening blood that wept from the multitudes of small cuts, each one a witness to a fist or weapon butt. He was cold, right deep to his bones and his limbs felt like lead. He had taken beatings before, no stranger to a fight from lad to man and sure, this was serious, he knew that but he could make it through this, couldn’t he?

The rogue could hear the voice of Eli Travinus giving instructions, hear hurried foot falls over the wooden floor, feel himself being moved and undressed. There was little he could do to aid or protest it. The strength it took him to try and focus, to understand through the pain was intense and on the limit of his capability.
‘I fr-fruked up, Fooser,’ he tried to apologies, bloody spittle flopping over his ruined lips. Again, he heard their voices, felt their hands, water on skin, cloth scrape over up and down his already cold, cold body and legs. The way Eli was talking, the things he was saying about his wounded legs and the haste of all their actions started to panic him. A sense of loosing hope began to trickle into veins no longer full of his vibrant, warm life giving blood, like ice water from a frozen spring.
‘Don't let me- die, El-Eleanor. Sp-speak to her, ask , not-not yet.’ Drathe’s eyes fix on her, wild and burning as they pierce through the small gaps of their swollen sockets.
Eleanor meet him with a cold intense look of understanding that ebbed into a glow of terrible fury as she began to pray, her strong, distinctive voice clear and direct. ‘Mistress Below, not yet! Not when these idiots just -FINALLY- grew heads!’

Time swam, losing all meaning. Pain like a tide rising and falling, rising and falling as the trio used their skills to full advantage.
‘Ka-Kae will kill m-me.’ He choked out, chest jerking with a weak cough that sent bloody spittle out and over his split, swollen lips. A potion at some point was poured into his mouth and the prayers of the Priestess continued on with conviction as the room began to darken, his consciousness losing the will to be in the moment. It needed distraction, a break from the now and drifted back to a time earlier in the day…


Nails scratching on wood! That’s what it was! It dawned on him as he stood before the weathered main door of the Hempy, the sound having come from above, from the balcony. Again it faintly played his ears and was that a wimper to? His head listed, interest piqued. That drink could wait a moment.

He drew to a pause at the top of the stairs, hand pulling his weight to the rail. A cough was heard coming from behind the door that faced him. He moved over and pressed an ear to it, the wood damp and smelling of linseed oil. He listened. Clearly someone must have rented the room, only, mmmm, the sounds were just, they were just odd.

Scratching, this time louder, nails raking at the bottom of the door.
‘Hello?’ He called politely, a single brow raising at the silence returned. He waved a dismissive hand, nose wrinkling with the same intent as he leaned away, just as the sound of weeping tugged his ear right back. ‘You aright in there?’ He called, firmer of voice and wanting a reply. Nothing but sad weeping was heard.

The rogues hand took to the latch and gingerly he opened the door. It did as prompted, not locked to the mystery beyond. Slowly with hinges tick-tick-ticking, the gap opened. Right there on the floor behind it, a young woman sat back on her legs. Small and thin of form, hair unkempt and messy about her face. Dirty smudges covered her cheeks and resided in the corners of her mouth. The hands that hand been scratching at the door were the same with a heavy build up of dirt under and around the nails. A poor wretched looking creature, reminding him of the gutter snipes of Bane.

She crawled at him with an unexpected speed, animalistic in her movement. It caused him to retreat a pace just as swiftly.
‘Are you sick?’ He asked with firm tone, hand up, palm facing her in a gesture to halt the advance. She growled, feral and unsettling in tone but held short.
‘Ay, don't start that!’ The open hand curled into a pointed index finger directed at her. ‘Because I know who'll come out of this worse off.’ The sound ceased but her lips remained drawn, teeth on show.

Then a flash of thought had both hands patting over the pockets of his coat for food, a gift to appease her, earn a little trust. He came up short.
‘Wait here. I’ll be back.’ And with that, he set off to the tavern below. Bounding two steps at a time as a shiver ran the length of his spine, chasing him all the way down.

‘Aye, Darthe, ‘ came the gruff tones of Brogate at his request. ‘Give us a-moment though, some of us ‘ave ta work fer a livin’. Aint got time ta run around fer yer lunch.’ The Dwarf half turned back to him having walked past heading for the side door that lead out to the barrels and presses. ‘An’ nah I’d not be rentin’ a room ta those tha’ cant pay upfront.’ He winked before disappearing through the threshold.

Drathe spoke a mild curse before he pressed his chest to the bar and leaned over, eyes searching over bottles and mugs until something suitable caught them. A corked bottle with tangerine juice scribbled on it was snatched up. He rocked back off the bar and turned into a jog only to skid to a surprised halt. There in the middle of the room, crawling over the floor at him was the feral young woman. She stopped, looking at him inquisitively, head twisting to one side as if that angle would reveal something new to the eye.

He held up the bottle with an awkward smile before setting himself down on one knee. His sword scabbard hit the floor with a thunk and slid back behind him. ‘Drink!’ He said softly, placing the bottle on the floor and giving it a push. It rolled along the wooden boards, smooth as they were from the daily grind of grit, boots and ale soaked mops.

She snatched it up from its steady path toward her, taking it to her mouth. The sound of teeth exploring glass was not a pleasant one to the ear. But she seemed, happy with the new toy.
With elbow set upon the raised knee he leaned his weight forward and settled his chin into hand, the other taking to his hip, arm akimbo. He watched the simplistic exploration of the bottle for a moment.
‘So do you have a name?’ He asked gently, brow rising to frame wider eyes. She ignored him, continuing to play with the bottle, the sound of a teeth tapping glass still abundant.

Drathe adjusted his position sitting back on his rump, knee raised before him. The young girl content but always alert to him as they toyed with each other a while, until the bottle was finally retrieved. He opened it for her to drink from only to have it spill on the floor, the puddle lapped at as if she were a canine. But none the less, a thin understanding of friendship had been brokered.

It was then a large shadow filled the door way, far too tall to be Borgate. ‘Lord Gray, do come!’ The voice called out and Drathe’s heart sank.


When the chickens come home to roost.


The sight of the hospital ceiling and fresh unadulterated pain surging through his head greeted him as he came too. The sound of his own raw and animalistic scream drawing him back to reality, back to this miserable crestfallen moment - his broken face being wiped and cleaned with a wet cloth. Words came to his recollection, Eleanor’s. ‘If you die now, when she's finally found courage, I'll never forgive you for it.’ He could feel his hand in her own firm hold. Eli ran the middle finger of both hands down either side of the man’s off set jaw. The pads sliding over blood slick stubble to find a specific place along both sides of the bone. They followed the curve of it before easing back along the same path in an assessing manner. “Hold him very tight now.” He instructed.

Fooser pressed his clawed hands down on the arm and shoulder of the beaten man laying on the bed. Eleanor nodded and gave more of her weight to the hold she already had on the other side, planting firmly against the possibility of his rising. Eli, without another word of confirmation, gripped and pulled firmly to set the dislocated jaw back in place. It went in with a knuckle cracking pop of bone. Drathe’s chest and arms tensed, every muscle fiber pulling taught against the weight of those upon him. The shock of a fresh wave of pain in the sea of agony he was already drowning in was too much for anything other than base reflex. Then, the tension in the jaw and throat ebbed away to a simple throbbing ache. He sagged back, exhausted. This was torture, torment as bad as the original affliction and he faded from it again, mind seeking refuge somewhere, anywhere other than here.

The feral woman turned and smiled with familiarity at the hooded man as he entered the tavern, crawling over to seek attention.
‘Know this man?’ Asked the hooded one as he moved inside with a confident swagger, Jefferson Grey the Undead Lord now filling the threshold of the door. No one in the tavern moved a muscle, Borgate still absent from his place behind the bar.
‘You shouted me in here... For this? Chsk, Drathe?’ The undead lords head cocked with a click of bone, a pleased grin on his rotten face that went against the indifference in his tone.
Drathe exhaled deeply, shoulders falling, head flopping forward. ‘Jefferson,’ he called back with an air of the familiar. Hopefully this would be like last time, a quick chat and then on to their own separate ways. But just in case, he eyed a table of weapons for sale not far out of reach. The thought being a quicker draw from there than what would be possible from his sitting position, his own sword handle and scabbard pressed tightly into his hip. The feral was now beside him, yapping playfully at the hooded one who had moved around to stand behind. Lord Grey stood before him in all his undead magnificence, a sense of dread oozing from him that made hairs rise on the arms.
‘Drathe…’ Spoke the undead lord nonchalantly. ’I do not care to waste my time slaughtering you this day. Would you consider coming for a chat, however?’ Though offered as an invite, it was nothing other than an expectation. ‘Matter of fact... Don't answer that.’ Jefferson threw up a hand and clicked his fingers. ‘Valherian! Tie his hands and bring him to me.’
‘Woh, woh, woh.’ Drathe protested, hands rising in gesture of being no immediate threat - still sat on the floor. ‘Is that really needed!?’ A gesture Valherian used to his advantage, swiftly leaning over his quary and lashing the offered arms tightly. ‘I mean, come on, its me!?’ Drathe continued, as if they were friends of sorts.
The undead lord cackled under his breath. ‘Chsk... Oh yes, it is you, old friend.’ He swerved his hand up, beckoning Valherian to bring the captive forth and left the tavern.
‘Fruk sake, go easy!’ The rogue growled, temper rising as he was dragged ungracefully over the floor before stumbling to rise and follow on. ‘Can't we just talk here? Over a drink? I'll buy!’
‘Silence, pathetic sack of flesh!’ Replied Jefferson, throwing the back of his bony rotten hand toward Drathe's face. The rogue took the blow unexpectedly across the cheek, its sting harsh.

They walked for a time, Drathe being offered no respite from the tug of the rope.
‘Ay, dog girl!’ He called over a shoulder, pulling hard on the rope to slow the pace and antagonise, temper getting the better of him. ‘You own me a bottle of tangerine juice you bitch!’
Grey smiled pleased. ‘Your pet has done well, Valherian.’ The hooded one agreed as he pulled the rogue on.

They arrived at a place he wasn’t sure of. It looked familiar with its stone walls, bridges and towers but his mind was on other things. Survival and the odds of the game about to be played chief among them. Not to mention how the hellbriar was he going to explain this one to Kaelyn. He pictured her sat on the bed next to him, watching the first rays of sunlight cast itself across the room. Blankets tangled around her legs, her fingers blindly stroking the bare skin of his arm as he lay beside her. Dark messy hair, that moon tattoo on her cheek, goosebumps on her skin from the cold morning air. That skin, its colour and warmth like no other. Guilt crawled into him. Gods, what if he didn’t make it out of this, she would think he broke their promise, that everything said and meant wasn’t so. That maybe, just maybe he had played her and ran with the prize of her heart at the winning of the game.

This was typical ‘Blue Luck.’ Twists of fate mostly of his own past doings that seemed to catch up at moments when his life was looking good. Like the swing of a pendulum. When at the apex and life was good, the deals, deeds and doings done to attain such height would inevitably start to weight in and pull it down, swinging it through moments of absolute low until again the deals, deeds and doing would claw it back up to apex again. He never seem to see these things coming, never guard against them despite all he did to smooth off the corners or polish up the brass. It felt at times as if he didn’t deserve to elevate himself, make or be something better than what he had always been. Trouble is, once at the top a King can only fall and the pendulums rise he felt had crested.

His stubbed cheek scrunched up, eye narrowing as he was taken into the depths of a stone structure. This didn’t feel good. That cock sure attitude, that underpinning self confidence waned as he was tied standing to a column, ropes set tight around his arms and chest. He inhaled deeply and held his breath, an old trick he knew so that when the ropes were tied and he let that air out, his chest would fall and give room enough to wiggle an arm out. The ropes however were pulled so damn tight it squeezed the air out of him.

Without further ado the show began. The feral watching Valherian and the Undead Lord perform a warm up act of adhoc punches and blows to the head, setting Drathe’s ears ringing and nose bleeding before a savage winding having him gasping for caught breath. He was dazed, worry settling in his stomach, but his witts were still about him. Just a little scare tactic, a little softening up to make him more agreeable to changing his mind he though. Jefferson swung his hand up and clutched the rogues face between his clawed fingers and thumb, glaring with utter disdain through his cataract pale eyes.
‘Chsk... Finally, I have the turncloak in my grasp.’ He said with vitroil, black bile flicking from his teeth. ‘I suspect you supposed that you would merely walk off into the sunset, did you?’
‘I had hoped.’ Drathe replied dazed.‘Aye.'
‘Foolish mortal! You would stand with Fooser the insolent and declare yourself damned?! Not only this, DARE to raise arms against my legion in the battle of Cadomyr!’ An icy drenching of understanding sluiced through him. He knew the game being played now. None.

Years ago, not long after Kaelyn had left for the Iron Desert again, breaking his spirit in the process. The undead lord had offered coin and reason to work for him. What seemed like a lifeline, a purpose ended up as a tangled patch work of lies and difficult choices for survival, the legacy of which was still playing out to this day. On the undead lords most recent return, again he had offered the rogue a place for rich reward. This time he was turned down, Drathe having made good on some of the previous damage and lies that haunted him. The last thing Jefferson has said was, ‘A word of advice to an old friend then, don’t be in Cadomyr when I come to call.’ He had been, fighting along side people he had come to called friends.

‘Well,’ Drathe replied with a casualness bordering on cocky. ‘You've kind of become a bit of an arsehole.’ He knew he would pay for that, but if he couldn’t get a damn punch in, then at least he could have a jab with spite. Jefferson turned his head with a sound of crepitus, scratching his bony hand from Drathe's face.
‘The spirit of this one will break easily. Cock sure, perhaps. Though merely to disguise insecurity. Valherian... Let us see how hungry your pet truly is.’

Time for the main show. Valherian called the feral woman fourth. She scuttled over with a small old bone poking out of her teeth, head following the demanding gestures to look at Drathe, confused. A multitude of kicks, punches and weapon butt strikes were set upon him, a blade at one point pressed to his throat. Acts of violence to weaken his resolve, to quell his kicking at the feral who although pestered him, seemed reluctant for anything more.

‘You could have had all you desired... And more. Yet, you chose to waste whatever talent you had left in your aged, weak vessel.’ Belittled Jefferson. Drathe gave a brief smile, lips split and staining his loose teeth orange with blood. He had the desert wind. What else could he want? His head rocked back with a savage series of blows from Valherian that broke his nose. Just one more thing came to mind as panic started to get the better of him. To live. He pushed down through his legs to stand as best he could in the hold of the ropes he had been sagging in. Sill defiant, still un-begging. Maybe if he showed strength, Jefferson would reward it?

The undead lord did, thrusting the spike of his partisan toward each of the bound man’s thighs. It penetrated the fabric, skin and muscle with ease, like a warm knife through butter. Drathe, already taking a new barrage of blows and questions from the hooded one hardly registered the weapon strikes until once again he found himself sagging in the embrace of the ropes. He tried to stand, feet slipping on the gravel and small rocks but his legs felt like they were tearing, something ripping inside them.

The show continued with the arrival of large broad bodied ork, who wasted no time in leaving his marks on the captive. Questions were asked and with what breath he could muster he tried to give answer, to buy a little respite. Drathe was ruined by now, blood matted his hair, trickled freely from all over his swollen, broken face. It soaked from leg wounds and through the fabric of his trousers to spatter in droplets onto the dull grey stones around his boots. A lusty, vibrant and confident colour. A shade of red artists would pay good coin to have on their brush. It went to waste, simply soaking into the cold, stone chippings and rocks. Threats of a golum and blows to the armour over his torso that crushed it into his chest was registered somewhere in his mind, but he was done. Standing in the rising tide of sensory and emotional overload he drowned.


You reap what you sow


The hospital atmosphere was tense. Eli’s face finally showed empathetic emotion. The wear on a medico's nerves and body was rarely on display, but the brutality shown on Drathe bid his eyes close. A quick moment of silent apology for the next bit. It felt counter intuitive to cause pain yet again, but experience gave him conviction in his work. He brought the pads of his fingers up and into Drathes crooked nose, pulling up and wiggling, seeking to find the right movement and place, it set back into a shape more recognisable.‘I am sorry Drathe! Don't speak! Grit your teeth!’ He spoke, genuine in apology at the feeble whine and weak raise of hand from his patient. From the swollen creases of Drathes eyes, tears rolled smoothly over the purple and blue skin before they fell lost to the mess of a bed sheet. Eleanor worked her skill with prayer just as dexterously and sure. ‘El‘Great Eldan, Keeper of the Light, let not a single flicker pass within this man's spirit! Queen of Irkalla, Sheol, the Underworld of Unending Names, Lady of the Infinite Grey Veil, Who weeps for the young men forced to abandon their beloveds, Who weeps for the girls wrenched from their lovers' laps, take not this man!’ While Fooser worked calmly, quietly following the directions of Eli to the letter until at last, there was little more to be done other than wait and hope. There was one last thing though, someone would have to tell Kaelyn.

He lay there unresponsive but breathing steadily, the faint pulse of his heart seen in his neck and to the knowing eye, suffice in its rhythm. He was alive thanks in whole to the people here but his gratitude would have to be indebted for now. His mind could not stomach the physical, the raw assault of his body crying, screaming, clawing at it for attention, for survival. He was away again, retreating deeply into memories the consequences off demanded some sort of explanation, understanding, sorting.

He was in a large stone room surrounded by columns and the glow of portals. Sat on the floor, back to a pillar with wounded legs out before him. They were weeping profusely but he was took weak, in too much pain to lift his bruised arms. He knew he had to slow the bleeding. A moment, I’ll get some pressure on them in a moment, just, need, a moment.

The ork stood close by looking off to one side having carried him in without grace and setting him down. The feral sat in front of him, crouching low and watching curiously. She rose, presenting her face to his then turned an ear, listening. Satisfied it seemed that he was still breathing she turned back and sat once more before him. The pain was incredible, but to feel it he had to be alive still. Good. He need to see her, Kae that is. Had to somehow, anyhow try and get an angle out of this.

That hand of cards, that strong but risk fraught hand of King and Queen, that impossible roll of dice, two ones. The intense game that had been played to achieve that glorious moment, well this was the opposite. This was a screwed up, torn card of a king. Crumpled and dropped to the floor. The Queen left in play on the table alone and the dice a mixed roll of low numbers. He felt cheated and robbed the irony of which was not lost on him.

Jefferson paced back into view with purpose, a black feather in hand. The undead lord crouched briefly before Drathe, dabbing the quill into the open wounds of his legs before scratching it over a small scrap of stiff parchment. The gaul of it! His temper like old pale ash with a coaxing breath started to glow. His body though was unable or willing to commit. He passed out to the sound of wings flapping somewhere behind him shortly after.

More pain, how can any more be felt. When a bucket is full it over flows but its contents are what its contents are. Yet pain, that never seemed to be as such, if it wasn’t the intensity then the character, if it wasn’t the character then the nature. It just never ended, never ceased in its demand for attention as he was dragged out of the room by his hair and scruff of neck, a bloody trail streaking from his legs behind him. He was outside on a thin walkway now, laying there looking over its side, his misshapen jaw juddering at the deepening cold he felt. Was that, Fooser in all his prowess below, fighting off Jefferson’s minions? He fought so well. It seemed to Drathe that no matter what that lizard did, it was always done with a marriage of absolute perfection in skill and drive in conviction.

‘So you've brought me here to show that you killed someone, and want me to pay for the privileged of it?’ The lizard call up, calmly. Drathe tried to lift hand. Killed? Dead? What? No! NO! He was still alive! His hair was gripped, head lifted. ‘Foos...’ He called out in a croaked whisper.
‘Louder, he didn't hear.’ Demanded Valherian.
‘F-Fooser!’ He shouted. Bloody spittle flicking from his mouth, the effort all draining. He wanted to live, need to. With no heirs to carry on his Blue blood this would be it. Children, what a time, a place to birth such a thought. He knew Kae was barren, something that had gnawed at her to the point of giving everything, EVERYTHING for a chance of motherhood, to bear HIS child. That chance had been presented by Kyre the witch, but he had riled at Kaelyn for the risk was too great, price too high. Like a ship riding the waves of a deepening storm, it had become too much, the highs and lows of the clashes they chased too wearing. One morning he found she had left, probably to the Iron Desert. Both of them having been unable to face each other with understanding and courage. Right now though, he felt he understood at least in part, the desert woman’s drive at the time. They had so much to teach, to pass on. They could have moulded, sculpted such a better person than them selves, a person that could have changed the world if not just their own.

He was back now against the pillar in that large room again. The ork stood filling the door way to the outer walkway, voices shouting a negotiation of sorts from beyond. The feral again sat before him, watching, concern in the poise of her head, in her brows. He was definitely on the edge, his body shivering, a clammy sweat on his crusted bloody brow, bone cold and weak as a new born foal. The pain he felt flowed through him now instead of constantly into and filling him, overwhelming him, a small mercy.
‘He-help me.’ He whispered faintly, drooling onto his own chest.
The feral woman leaned back, head listing to the side as she looked from him to the Ork then to the bag that been tossed behind the captive. She shuffled closer reaching out and pulling it around between them. His fingers press onto the stone floor and curled to pull his arm an inch closer. This was his chance, the bag was his bag and there was a healing potion in it.

The feral observed a moment more and with a quick glance at the ork whos back was still to them, opened the flap and pawed out bottle with Allesandras writing on. Violet liquid swished about inside. Yes! He though, eyes closing, mouth hanging open, waiting, ready to receive. Tangerine juice! You reap what you sow!… But nothing came. His eyes opened to the feral trying to pour the liquid into his mouth but the cork, the damn cork was still in it. Of course, he had done that part in the tavern.
‘Blood, get the prisoner.’ Came Valherian’s voice from outside. The ork turned into the room eyes shooting accusingly to the feral as he stomped over. She threw the bottle to the floor besides her smashing it, teasing, taunting the man with her action. The ork’s concern seemed appeased, his attention back on Drathe, grabbing him up and throwing him like a rag doll over shoulder to carry him out.

His face burned and pulsed with the pooling of blood as he hung there, head resting against the ork's back. He could see the feral on all fours lapping at the spilt liquid like she had at the tavern. She turned, eyes locked on the narrow swollen slits of his own. She probably didn’t understand, he thought awash in sadness, in despair for them both. Then as the ork paced off through the door, Drathe hanging head down over his back, she dashed over rearing up to press her mouth to Drathe’s and spit a dose of the potions she had lapped up into him. She fell back as the ork swiped his large arm to shoo her.

If he could, he would have given that feral woman everything to his name. What a kind, brave, selfless act from a creature so feral and base. A total contrast to the feral acts bestowed upon him from creatures that could be so kind and brave and selfless if they chose to. It was only a little but it was enough as it absorbed into the cuts and wounds of his mouth, ran into his upturned nostrils. It leached into his veins and with what little power such a small sip had, fortified the waning blood in him. Then, he passed out. A view from a tower, being carried down stairs, Fooser and Jefferson shouting, a portal, laying on the bridge at Runewick, being carried through its streets all blurred with no reference of time.

The door to Runewicks hospital flung open. Eleanor the Priestess of Cherga and the Lizard warrior Fooser carrying the ruined Drathe to set him down on a bed.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

"Kaelyn, I'm going to need you to trust me."

It was with a strange flavor of humor that Kaelyn realized such words had precisely the opposite effect. Almost immediately as she stood there in the center of Cadomyr's market and watched Eleanor take a pair of cuffs in hand, Kaelyn felt the bitter sting of suspicion race up her spine. In an instant she had gone from relaxed companion to the equivalent of a deer aware that it was about to be cornered. Every fiber of her being was begging to flee, there was desert at her back and all around her, she could lose the other woman so swiftly.

"About?" she asked instead with no small amount of distrust, her mood ruined. Why? she wanted to ask. Why was Eleanor suddenly demanding trust when it had been given with surprising lack of hesitation for a woman so quick to doubt the world around her? Why was it being asked as the woman held cuffs and pinned her with a look that had every single fight-or-flight part of her on high alert?

"He's not dead."

"But Gods, did that idiot come close."

Words had been said prior, but when Eleanor spoke those two phrases, Kaelyn felt as if she had suddenly tripped backwards into the abyss. There was the briefest moment of hesitation and confusion - Who? She wondered - but logic was quick on its heel, and at its side realization. Eleanor only truly associated her with one person. One person that would make the other woman so wary about telling her bad news that she had considered cuffing her.

Blood rushed so swiftly from Kaelyn's face that her ears roared and for a moment, she wondered if - how she was still upright.

Blue.

Bitter fear rolled through the woman with such force she nearly gagged upon the acrid taste, and before she rightly knew what she was doing, her body was moving. Runewick, Eleanor had said. The instant she knew, Kaelyn had turned and bolted across the rough cobbles of Cadomyr's market. She hit the gate leading out and for just a breath of a moment she considered going straight. Into the dunes, into the dark stretches of a desert that could swallow her whole and leave nothing at all left to find. It was only the single thought - you promised - that veered her instead to Runewick through that dizzying pull of magic that made no sense. She was heaving by the time she reached the hospital.

"What happened?" she had bitten out as Eleanor followed and reappeared. Her voice cracked on the thick and overwhelming emotion that she was trying so hard to force down, incapable yet of stepping through that door, seeing what was beyond. She knew, somehow. She knew it was beyond anything either of them had suffered yet, by the way this companion, this kindred spirit had approached her.

" We only know so much, but I will tell you what we do. We don't know when, how, or where they got him. But Gray and his goons captured him."

Gray.

This trumped up, half-rotted piece of flesh and his barking dogs had done this. Kaelyn stilled, and suddenly everything went quiet within her. Like calm before the storm - no. Rather, the eye of the storm, the stillness surrounded by dark and dangerous clouds on all sides, no escape to be had other than up, up to impossible heights. The stillness was a tell-tale sign to Kaelyn as the trembling, the fear, the racing of her heart settled. She felt.. Dizzy. Light-headed, and then it too was gone as she stared toward Eleanor, who stood so far from her.

She weighed her thoughts for the span of precisely five heartbeats, and then she knew. An old itch, one she'd not suffered in so very long nor satisfied for longer, began first upon her palm before it crawled like cold, dead fingers up her spine.

"I'll kill them."



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⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"Kae... What will you do?"

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"Nothing you would approve of."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"Kaelyn... I really, really don't want to bury you. Please."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"If we run, we run together. You promised that, and so did I, Blue... He doesn't get to run into Cherga's realm without me."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"Nor you without him. Let him recover."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"If he doesn't... I'll be certain to take Gray with me."



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She had always thought of her life as a swinging pendulum - with each steady, strong rise there was an inevitable fall waiting when it reached its apex. Typically the rises and falls came like the steady and predictable ebb and flow of a wave. She could see the pitches coming miles away, and usually chased the fall like a fool, high off the adrenaline she knew it would bring. It was in all she did - her fickleness with lovers, her flirting with disaster, her willingness to launch blind into things on a whim one moment, and bridle harder than a terrified horse the next. She was used to the pendulum's swing.

Only, suddenly it felt as if someone had simply cut the pendulum from its ties. She had been on a rise, a slow building height. They had been right there, teetering on promises it had taken a lifetime and more to finally confess and get to. A king and his queen, standing upon the delicate foundations of an unshakeable empire.

And then this. The sight of Drathe there upon the bed, lost somewhere in the depths of a sleep that was being forced upon him by a body too weary to do anything beyond heal itself, bound practically head to toe in bandages that still weren't enough to fully staunch the bleeding, would forever be seared into the woman's mind. She had spent the night's vigil at his bedside once Fooser and Eleanor had departed, she had seen to the many bandage changes and constant checks by the medicos and their apprentices keeping the man just this side of Cherga's realm. She had even stitched the worst of the wounds herself once the swelling had gone down enough and the wounds had been cleaned with minimal damage.

It wasn't enough, though. She was walking a blade's edge and exhaustion was making her unsteady. It itched at eyes that were red with the remnants of tears, it burned like embers that refused to die out just under her skin. This... This all was too much, and she could not simply sit idle.

Retribution. It whispered like a lover's voice at the nape of her neck, familiar in ways she wished it weren't. Yet how did one seek retribution against the dead?


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


"Fine. Fine! You want me to play this game of yours, you son of a bitch? Then let's play!"

She didn't know what had driven her to shout the challenge at the inanimate objects that sat around her. Something had driven her by tooth and nail to the strange and eclectic altar tucked deep into the woods somewhere between Galmair and Runewick, where thin conifer thickets turned into deep woods and roaming wolves became winged fae. She wanted to pretend to ignorance, that she had gone there out of a fit of madness, but such was not the case. All her life, she'd been the plaything of the God whose altar this belonged to. As a child, an adolescent she had sworn herself to Ronagan, when her life was petty thievery and sticky fingers, creeping under caravan shadows. It had never been Ronagan that had his touch on her though, and all her life Kaelyn had tried to ignore the truth.

He'd finally played a move on the chess board she couldn't ignore, however. So here she stood among the Trickster's lair, senseless sensibilities all around her - an unfinished dice game upon a table surrounded by chairs turned all wrong. A chair surrounded by four tables, the communal sit inverted. Chance. Chaos. Balance set right or set wrong, for good or for bad as was needed to keep the scales just so. Such was Nargun's realm, and finally she had approached its threshold.

In a fit of anger, she had snatched a candle holder that had sat empty upon his altar - not many were so brave to openly worship a Trickster, the candlestick had not been used in Gods knew how long. Bitter anger had her throwing the metal holder at one of the two massive mirrors that flanked either side of the altar.

The mirror should have shattered when the candle holder connected with it. Any normal mirror would have, but this was the seeing glass of a god of improbability. Instead, the solid metal candle holder shattered in ways that should have been impossible. The sound of a near explosion ricocheted through the woods as shards of metal went flying, dangerous shrapnel that somehow, just barely managed to avoid the two figures within the altar.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Silly girl, the shattered holder seemed to say. What did you expect to happen? Try again.

Useless bastard, why would I come to you anyway?

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Because it is chaos that wins the unexpected battle. It is chaos and improbability and wildly impossible odds that lets the hundred defeat the hundred thousand.

It was chaos that had her swearing, taunting, cursing the very name of the God she had come to the altar to in hopes of finding favor. It was chaos, it was desperation and the laying of cards face-down upon tables that had her ultimately swearing an oath to the deity she had spent all her life prior avoiding. Bloody handprints marked the edge of the altar and in the end, she walked off with an echo of words from her lips.

"By my blood, on my life."

And as the woman turned her back on the altar, the most traditional of embodiments of the deities, she felt the call of the unfinished dice game there upon the table. She stepped to it and, with complete disregard for the evident game at play, snatched up the pair of six-sided dice there upon the table. A squeeze was given, and the dice fell from her hand to clatter like bone dice were known to do. One rolled slow, the other spun, and when they both came to a still she felt both fear and satisfaction settle in perfect unison to the dichotomy that her life was.

Two ones.

[Drathe]

Drathe had been responding well to the treatments and care given over the past couple of days. Though he had not responded to people not even Kaelyn. He had taken in offered sips of water and potions when presented to his mouth though. Each sip a labored and troubled event. The swellings of his face and body had been reduced by the small amount of potion he had taken onboard and the bruising was in full bloom. The colours magnificent, like that of dark purple and bluey storm clouds with edges tinged in oranges and greens. His legs though, they did not seem to be settling. Hot to the touch and angry around the stitching.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

"Infection is setting in."

The medico that stood aside the bed cast Kaelyn a look that could only be described as apologetic, a knowing gravity to her weary expression as she oversaw the treatment of the man upon the bed. It had been by her and her apprentices' hands that Drathe had been kept as comfortable as possible since he had been brought in three days prior while they put out calls for other, more powerful healers. The calls had gone unheard or unheeded, no one had come and unfortunately even by Kaelyn's fairly skilled hands at stitching they had not headed off infection.

They both knew, the two women that stood at the bed's end as one of the apprentices delicately changed out bandages once more to the lingering scent of blood and sickness. If something else wasn't done soon, one of two things would come to pass for the man lay prone before them - either he would pull through but likely be crippled for the rest of his days by the deep wounds, or the infection would set in his blood and he would suffer the most painful of slow, rotting deaths.

She couldn't stomach the thought of either.

It was sometime well past midnight when the medico and her apprentices retired from the hospital's room to the building just a door over, on the promise that if they were needed they'd be but a call away. The hospital was so quiet at night after the others had left, leaving just the woman and man there within its depths. Kaelyn had developed a routine and typically at this point she would have been sorting out the chair in the corner for another cramped and fitful night of cat-naps. Gods, when was the last time she'd slept properly?

Not tonight, though. The medico's words itched at the back of her mind, causing her to pace and wander a pointless, restless path along the entirety of the room. At one point she ended up staring blankly at the single shelf of books packed with novels and guides to all manners of healing. All these books and no answer to stop infection when it came to ruined legs.

It can't end like this. The words echoed, a quiet beating mantra through her restless mind. This isn't how our story ends, with a pitiful whimper.

Something had to be done.



◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


"Kaelyn, my little dove. Do you trust me?"

It was her mother's voice, wavering with threadbare emotion that had only just been bridled to keep a mother's hysterical mourning at bay.

The girl was barely out of adolescence - eighteen? No, nineteen, she'd seen her nineteenth year just months prior. Life's pendulum had been lingering on a high, she had only recently been betrothed to a man she'd fallen swiftly for among the caravan - he was all a girl of such youth would desire, strong and protective with promises of an easy and kept future. They were in love, or so the naive fool had been led to believe. Until her cycles had ceased and the evidence of an unexpected new life had begun making itself known. She had told him with joy in her voice. She was met with rage.

She'd never fully understood what happened that day. Perhaps it was too soon, he was unfit and unprepared to suffer the responsibilities of being father and provider. Perhaps he had always simply been mad and that was what triggered it all to unveil itself. What had begun as a heartwrenching verbal fight between the two with bitter accusations flung at one another had ended in him doing the unthinkable. A single sharp blade, a single unguarded moment.

The world was swimming around her, a haze of noise and commotion. Her mother's hand upon her cheek was warm, shaking her back to awareness. Her body was cold. How strange, she thought distantly. It was daytime in Ronas, why was she cold?

"Kaelyn. I need you awake, love. Look at me, do you trust me?"

Those words were important, though her quickly fading mind couldn't parse why. Only barely did she manage a distant nod. The last thing she remembered was the sharp and steady prick of needles to skin, laying new paths of dark ink along the inside of her wrist. She couldn't even muster the strenth to wince as she was dragged down into unconsciousness.

Somewhere in the darkness of her mind was where the first embers stirred to life. Like a gradual crescendo of heat, an invisible fire seemed to lick up and through her body from some source around her left hand. It was warm, then it burned, and suddenly her body was arching upward in fierce agony. A cry strangled from her, and like a clock run backwards the violent tear of a blade's work through her belly and hip stitched back and disappeared save for a jagged, thin scar that left itself as reminder upon her skin. She should have been dead - no one ever survived a dagger to the belly like that. Yet as the fire raged through her, the cold darkness that she had been so close to giving in to was burned away and she was left writhing until at last, at long last, it settled.

She'd live another day, by some divine right.


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"It is... Wild magic. We do not speak of it for reason, beloved. It is not like the magics they use elsewhere, tossed about with little care to consequence." Her father, his voice haggard and full of unspoken things.

"What consequence?"

Her father winced, and she knew in an instant she would not like his answer.

"The Mistress has... servants. Not your bones and undead, no. These are creatures of divine fire, of life and power. If you know how to summon them, they can make... Trades for the Mistress." His voice roughened as he looked at the pipe he had a habit of smoking when his nerves were frayed, a smoulder set to the leaf packed deep in it. It smelled sweet, comforting. Only, there was no comfort to be had now as Kaelyn watched him through the setting darkness of evening.

"She traded on your life - denied the Mistress a life in her realm. She will have to repay with a life, at some point. Either someone else's... Or her own."

Cold slid down her spine as she listened. "When will she have to repay?" she asked with a tone edged in fear, and he gave her the worst possible answer - a shrug heavy with obvious uncertainty. "When the servant comes to collect his toll, I suppose. They're fickle, the creatures."

Silence lingered too long between father and child, before he dumped the ash from his pipe and rose with the slowness of a man weary of the world.

"Never make a deal with the jinn, child."


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


A knock at the door of Runewick's hospital stirred Kaelyn from the depths of her recollection, a weary weight to her movements as she straightened off the book shelf and glanced over to see a familiar, tall figure step in. They spoke softly amongst each other for a moment, discussing the fate of the man before them and the possible options of how to save him from a slow death of diseased blood. The more she spoke though, the more Kaelyn felt the sickening weight of resolve settle until at last she murmured.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"Eleanor."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"Kaelyn?"

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"I am about to do something ridiculously stupid. If you're going to try and stop me, you should leave now."


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


"Squeeze my hand, mm? Tell me you can actually hear me."

A weight lifted from her shoulder as calloused, familiar fingers of the man tightened about her own. The smelling salts she'd given over to her companion had worked just enough to rouse Drathe to alertness long enough for what she needed. This, she'd been told so long ago by her father, was a disaster waiting to happen if trust of the heart and soul wasn't given. She'd never gotten him to expand upon the why of it, but it was a detail she would not overlook now.

"Do you trust me?"

Drathe wasn't capable of answering, not audibly nor with strength to nod. Yet his eyes, so familiar in the depths of grays within them that had a way of reflecting and betraying his emotion when nothing else would, lingered upon her. There were times between them, so long they'd been companions, that a look was all that was needed. She nodded her understanding and quietly withdrew her hand from his.

"You don't get to go to the Mistress's realm without me." A quiet oath as she reached for the inking tools at her side. He'll kill me for this, she couldn't help but think as she took in the sight of him there upon the bed, letting instinct guide her as to where the mark had to be laid. It was there upon the inside of his hip, and she moved wordlessly to begin the first lines.

"He'll kill me for this," she echoed her distant thought aloud as the ink was set into skin by a small wooden handle whose wide end was set with four delicate needles in a line. "If I don't kill us first," she added with frank grimness, belying the subtle fear in what she was about to do.

"What... What is it?" a voice asked across the bedside, and Kaelyn lingered in silence for a moment as a curved line was ran against skin three shades paler than her own.

"A tether."



◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


"What comes next?"

"The part that might kill us."

Blood had always been the focus of magic her people had used, though most often in the form of one's own sacrifice. A slender cut along the same wrist her mother had laid a tether on so very long ago was her offering and as the warm crimson liquid dripped down to her palm and then along her fingers, she murmured a quiet invocation in the rich, accented language of her people.

Divine Fire and messengers of the Grey One, heed my words. A contract I will sign, by blood of sun and sand - a life for a life. Take of my offering, heal the soul upon which my palm touches of all mortal woes.

There was no dramatic show of magic as she muttered, no light or fire or spark. There was only a sudden heaviness to the air, like the thick weight of oncoming storm shoved into the suddenly too-small room. An indecipehrable presence entered as well, wicked and wild and attentive. Like eyes lingering upon her, Kaelyn felt the presence as hair stood on end along the nape of her neck. She waited a beat, and then set her bloodied palm heavily upon the ink laid against the man's skin.

The reaction was immediate. Like a hook laid into her chest, Kaelyn felt herself wrenched forward with bitter pain that ricocheted through her. It was only barely that she managed to remain standing with her hand against Drathe, her other palm clinging to the edge of the bed he was upon. Her ears rang, and then they roared like a crashing wave going over her head, dragging her under the riptide.

The deal was accepted, the deal was made. As had happened with her so long ago, it was as if the face of a clock was spinning backwards with Drathe. Bruises morphed sickeningly through all their colors and then disappeared entirely. Thin cuts and swollen joints knitted closed and eased away. As the magic burned away infection and finally found the worst of the damange upon him, Kaelyn felt herself fading. Blood dripped sluggish from one nostril and she nearly lost the tether - nearly shattered the magic hold, which could have had untold consequence. She held though, by tooth and nail, until Drathe abruptly came to and sat up on a cry.

The last thing she rightly remembered was the magic abruptly releasing her and arms gathering her up as she dropped to the floor.

Life for a life, silly girl. The voice was sickeningly familiar, laced with amusement of a trick played, a game cheated. Mocking her with distant delight. Time's running.

And then darkness dragged her under, into the oblivion of sleep.

[Drathe]

Half conscious dreams, disorient and sporadic in their continuance suddenly, definitively ceased to nothing. A nothing infinite in its unfelt or sensed boundaries yet claustrophobic in its utter darkness, its total absence of light. He felt himself tumble weightless before his feet took the weight of himself upon them. There he stood, full of angst, alone and in darkness.

Then light, bright and over bearing for anything more than half opened eyes. It blurred and dazzled like the sun. So intense he could smell it burning up inside his nose and throat.

‘Blue, You yOu yOU YOU’ve slept long enough. EnouGH ENOugh. Get your arse up Up uP UP.’ The voice was distant, close, loud and all but a whisper, neither masculine nor feminine or coming from any discernible direction. His hand rose to his face to hold back the light and the smell of it. Then, it faded. Dissipated to a glow like that of a sun on the horizon. An orange orb cut in half by the distant black.

He felt his hand being squeezed and pulled away from its defensive position. Before him in the distance shapes shimmered on the horizon. People, two of them far, far away and shimmering in the haze of the mono colour desert against the half orange orb . ‘Blue blue blUE. I need you awake, aye AYE aYE aye?’ The voice surrounded him, filling both ears then only one, its words brushing over and along his cheek physically. His eyes rolled to the right and focused on a shape, a shimmering, a something and nothing. No a face, definitely a face. ‘There we are Are ARE aRE. You bloody idiot IdiOT.’ There was something familiar something that beckoned trust in it.

In the distance behind the distorted face he could see sand clouds of yellows, tans and golds rolling, rising. A distant roar of wind just touching his ears. ‘I need NEED neED you to Listen listen.’ Again the voice was omnipresent and yet nowhere. ‘Infection, no one comes ComEs COMes, slow death, you know Know knOW this… Do you YOU You trust me ME?’ The hold of no one on his hand released, the face he gazed at started to dissipate. He breathed in deeply, filling his chest to shout back an answer of yes! But nothing came of it, no words were born from the effort. The angst within started to grow, bubbling up, frothing in its rise like soapy suds to overspill its cauldron.

The sand clouds in the distance drew closer now, larger and threatening. Broiling up to heights beyond his comprehension, the only colour and visible thing now other than the orange sun. But he couldn’t run, his legs refused to move. He looked down on them, blood stained into the thighs covering the once clean cloth in red and soaking down the entirety of them. Panic, swelling rising panic filled him like an empty stomach takes to a gallon of water. His hands took to his belly then pushed down the old worn leather sword belt around his hips revealing a new distraction, a new itching, scratching from under it. A tattoo? Dots formed lines, formed shapes, formed symbols. He looked back to the growing roar of sand and wind so close now he could throw a stone at it. Still his legs would not move. Like a wounded steed, eyes wide with fear and front legs rising he made fists and lashed out as the sands swallowed him whole.

The grains were hot, striking at his face like thousands of needles. Prickling at first then biting harder, deeper like barbs. His clothes and armour fell apart, stripped to nothing with what was left being ripped away and gone to the storm. His naked body and legs were lashed, all of him stripped away until he fell forward, through the roaring deafening sands and winds into his present, his now.

Drathe sat bolt upright in the hospital bed, eyes wide with fright, chest rising and falling with deep heavy breaths and beads of sweat upon his brow. He looked every inch the Drathe before the incident, all the physical signs of the pain he undertook gone, healed. He focused on Eleanor on the other side of the room, then to Kaelyn who stood close by, eye closed as if in some kind of trance. 'Kaelyn?' He gasped still catching his breath before his vision narrowed and he fell back into sleep.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

They had survived. He had survived, and in that truth Kaelyn had allowed herself a moment of solace there in the quiet confines of Runewick's hospital. It had been a day - no, perhaps two now - since she had stirred back to consciousness there upon one of the hospital's beds just aside the one Drathe had spent the better half of two weeks within, quite literally fighting for his life. She'd awoken to a man that looked... Untouched, save for two new thin scars along his legs and trails of fresh ink scabbing over above one hip. He'd not been too pleased at first with her about that particular development.

"Necessary? To tattoo me? To practice your ink work while I was helpless? You couldn't have waited and then asked when I could maybe, choose something other than that thing?"

She'd wanted to rile against him, shake him until he couldn't see straight at such a flippant attitude, but how else was a man to act when he didn't understand the truth of it all? She had explained in a threadbare fashion. It was necessary, it was... magic, words she knew he would bridle against as it had never been a secret to the man that she'd held a bitterness toward magic since the day he'd met her. The details of it all went unspoken, and though he'd been irritated with her, eventually a truce, an acceptance was reached.

"A trade, of sorts."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Life for a life, silly girl. Time's running...

"Thank you."


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


It was madness, really. The two of them had only just managed to crawl their way out of the hospital beds, and there they were again weaving into the thick of the forests where bones clattered and monsters moaned. It had started with words that had been said so often between them, and so often had led to bitter misadventure.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"You feeling up to some trouble, Blue?"

He'd never been one to say no to such a question, and like the chaos-driven fools they were they had taken off into the wilds with only blades and bits of parchment between them. They had crawled their way through Elstree and had made it to the great bridge when Kaelyn realized where they were near to. It was as they stood upon the bridge looking north, off in the distant direction of the marshes and the Necktie - a place she knew Drathe was not yet ready to get so near - that an idea struck her. They veered west and eventually came upon a simple gravestone tucked beneath a tree. It looked unassuming, so easy to bypass - so easy in truth that he had been prepared to move right past it.

"You've been to this place before, aye?"

"Here? Aye, sure... Why?"

Trust me. Her hand had reached for his and when their fingers had found one another, she'd tugged him along with a tight grasp as her other palm reached out. It should have pushed against rough, weathered stone - yet instead of a solid surface, the illusion wavered and with her palm a guide, she drew them through. It was the abrupt stopping of the man she had quite literally dragged through with her that was enough to answer her suspicion. He'd had no a clue.


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


"The colour of those trees!"

His childlike awe was enough to draw a smile over Kaelyn's lips as her hand released his, and she wound through the trees in question. The island was strange, locked in a constant state of dusk - or was it dawn? - and enshrouded in so unshakeable a peace that it almost warranted suspicion. It was solace in a world of chaos, a small shelter of quiet and solitude broken only by the sound of birds and gentle creatures moving through underbrush, by the rush of the stream that cut through its middle only to feed back into the broad ocean at suddenly-deep mouths to either end. She had been shown the Grove by another, and had known that she would return just as she had.

With him.

Perhaps for just a moment, she had hoped as she moved through the trees of the grove, time could be put to a standstill. She could feel the storm clouds brewing at her back, and so in a moment of desperation to give them both peace, she'd dragged him here and was rewarded sweetly as she watched him stare up among the fire-red and sun-orange foliage of the embertrees. He'd found a felled log and was walking along it, playing at balancing the way a boy did while on some grand adventure, stick in hand. The weight of the world, the promise of chaos and trouble was laid to rest as she leaned against a tree and watched, keenly aware of the heartache that such a picture of peace would bring her later on.

"It reminds me something of Gobaith," she had mused, something about the grove urging her to speak on a whisper. "That spot near the Union."

"Aye, I guess so. It's been so long I can hardly remember."

"I've never quite been able to forget."



⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀The rush of the deep river that cut through Gobaith's southern half, far removed from Troll's Bane and the like. A full moon held high in the sky, illuminating trees
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀and the river's edge and the two of them. Quiet words spoken, lovers' promises that would be broken. A tease, a dare, and then the splash of water that cooled
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀summer-warmed skin. Hands upon one another, clutching with all the promises that would go unspoken as they dragged one another under the water. Breath held,
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀lungs searing as they refused, refused to surface without the other. Stubborn, always pushing each other to some limit or another, to some dangerous edge
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀simply so they could play hero and pull the other one back.



The memory came over her with such clarity it hurt, and she turned her gaze over the stream that cut like a jagged dagger through the land around them. There was a place back behind her where the stream forked, where rocks and the simple lay of land had formed a natural pool. A sudden desire, a longing like no other came over her and with a look back toward the man that had just stepped off of his makeshift balance beam and was approaching her, she spoke softly.

"Want to go for a swim with me?"

His eyes lingered upon her, that gray stare having always held the power to strip her bare and lay out all of her vulnerabilities, her greatest weaknesses and darkest secrets to the world with the gentlest of looks, as he did now. He answered her on a murmur, a bare whisper that held volumes to it, breathed a promise that needed no words.

"Aye. I do."

With those simple words, that unflinching answer the two of them moved for one another. Together under the dark peace of the grove, they chased memories and the shards of broken promises with abandon, in hopes of maybe, just maybe piecing them all back together.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Blue. I meant what I said that night, by the fire.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Then show me.

And for a moment, for a brief and bare moment, the heavy pendulum that dictated their lives lingered upon that high. It stilled as time did around them, allowing them that peace - stuck, ever so dangerously, on the teetering apex of its rise with only one direction to go when time started running again.



⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Life for a life, silly girl. Time's running...

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

[Kaelyn Ianale]

And so, the pendulum had fallen. With a violent downswing of too many things she had let slip out of control, too many threads she'd wrapped herself in far too soon threatening to pull her in every which direction, Kaelyn had watched as that momentary high turned into a spiraling fall. Years ago it would have been a rush she would have chased to the end, though now as she stood amid the cooling dunes of Cadomyr's desert alone, she found that it didn't quite have the same bite, the same thrill it once claimed.


⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"Go back to town, Blue. Check on that girl of Aleytys', make sure Gray didn't harm her too much. We'll talk again when you're ready to tell me the second reason."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Liar.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"What if we don't talk again? You'd just walk past me without a word?"

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Never.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"What is the second reason, Blue? Is it so hard to say?"

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Silence.


He had turned his back on her and for once, at long last, it was her turn to feel abandoned. She had watched his retreating back as man turned to silhouette and silhouette turned to ghost as he made his way back to the sprawling city against the coast. A chill that had nothing at all to do with the desert night settling around her raced down her spine, crackling with a frustration that threatened to leave her sick. She could have - should have - ran after him, but what would she have done? Fallen to knee, begged, supplicated for his understanding? Would he have forgiven such a show of momentary weakness? She no longer knew, no longer had a measure of what to expect between them, which in its own right frightened her.

She only knew how she wanted things to end, and with a turn toward the open desert in the other direction, Kaelyn realized a fundamental truth to it all in that moment - a truth that left her mouth cotton-dry and bitter. She had reached too far, Icarus to the sun above, and now was left with nothing to grab hold of. The one steadfast hand that had always been there to grab hold of when times got dark had just pulled back, disappeared into the setting sun, and for what reason?

Her pride, her need to play the games laid at her feet with wild abandon and play at risks she had no right or reason to take.

By instinct, the woman's feet had carried her along the edges of the desert until she came upon a small oasis. How ironic, she thought distantly as awareness of her surroundings returned and she stared over the jewel-like pool of water backed by an altar and delicate blossoms of flowers along its edges. Sirani's temple. A wasted affair, she had always thought. Yet she stepped into the seclusion of the altar anyway, bare feet touching cool stone as she made her way to the altar. She didn't touch the pale stone, didn't lay to knee and beg the goddess for understanding and retribution. She didn't reach for the goddess, had never had the desire for Sirani's attention or hand in her endeavors, yet as she stood silent at the center of the small altar's oasis, a desire settled like a warm hand upon the nape of her neck.

Such was how the twin moons of Illarion found the woman, sat upon the edges of the oasis with feet ankle-deep in the cool waters. Silence engulfed the desert around her, interrupted only by the soft scratching of a quill to parchment and, somewhere in the distance, the call of a raven screaming its bitter wit into the dark. As the quill's scratching fell silent, the parchment was rolled and bound with only the delicate strip of fawnskin leather she'd drawn from her hair. Coins slid across the palm of one of the altar's keepers ensured the letter found itself to Cadomyr - beyond that, she could only hope that it was read and not cast to fire or left to gather dust.


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Blue.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Since the day that we first met, we have played at this game of unspoken things. For the longest of times it defined us, walking on eggshells
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀lest we accidentally say too much to the other and face unwanted consequences - a gamble we were making because the other choice was
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀entirely too risky. I always found it a part of our charm, though it frustrated me beyond measure - like a cat and mouse in so many words.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Only, you broke the rules of that game this night by telling the truth of the matter - by confessing there are things unspoken, aloud. Out right.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Why does that truth put to word suddenly strip the game of all its fun? Perhaps you did so intentionally, knowing that my curiosity will drive me
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀half mad and slow my hand. Suffice to say, it worked. By your words, by your breaking of our rules, I have been left to look at the path I've
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀sat myself upon alone and suddenly, I no longer like it.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I have realized one thing if nothing else - there's no reason for me to be playing this game. I do not mean the one with you - is that a game, to
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀begin with, anymore? - but with our mutual friend. The sole reason I ever began this ploy was in hopes of achieving something no one else
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀had yet, to get there first simply for the sake of... what? Boasting that I got there before everyone else, that I played the game best,
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀got the closest, managed to unravel secrets of the dead and dying. I didn't care what that unraveling would cost me, or what unexpected
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀consequences pulling at that particular thread might result in. When I play the game, everything is forfeit, isn't it? That's how it's always been for
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀me. Damn the world, damn the consequences, play for the stakes and nothing else.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I was never playing to be the hero. I was playing for the high, the rush, the arrogance of being able to say I know something you don't, they don't.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Forgive me.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I have been so short-sighted, so lost in a chance at... something, I cannot even put to words what... that I did not realize a fundamental flaw in
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀all of this. Who am I to be playing folly with the person that nearly took the life of the one, single soul I give a damn about in this world? Who in
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Hellsbriar do I think I am, to think it would turn out any better because it's my hand at it instead of yours? I've reached too far, haven't I?

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I don't want to play this game anymore.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Words. I can hear your thoughts from here, she's said those words before and the moment my back's turned, there she is again. Words.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I want to quit. I want to stop, because if I go any further I will end up losing the only thing keeping me sensible, and then what? How does this end?
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀If I keep at this, we both know precisely where, how it all comes to conclusion, don't we? We don't make it out alive this time.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I don't make it out alive.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀


Here, the letter abruptly ends on an incoherent scribble, as if the writer had just come to a conclusion that kept them from finishing. Drips of ink where a quill had been left to linger above parchment for too long finish it off. Then, at the end of the parchment the final addition is added, avoiding the blots of ink.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I'm not ready to end this on silence between us, Drathe. I'm not ready to end this. Help me.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

[Drathe]

Drathe sat perched on the stone lip of the fountain in Cadomyr’s centre. Arms half crossed over him, over that scratched, dented and misshapen old chest plate he always wore. A parchment rolled up and held in fist with its end pressed against his lips, propped his head from falling forward as he walked deeply through his thoughts.

Time seemed to be running dizzyingly fast since she had arrived back in his life. A real jolt from the painfully slow path it meandered in her absence. The soothing of his aching heart, the rebuilding of trust and delicate friendships from the crumbled ruins of his initial siding with Gray all so frustratingly slow over the years. Then in the blink of an eye, Kaelyn was back. Hearts pulsed as one, a beating had been taken, she had given him life and gone on to administer an eloquent if not reckless revenge of sorts. So much drama and intensity in such a short time. She was still every inch the desert wind, galloping over the sands of life. He felt like a rider, proud of the strength and fearlessness of his companion but always pulling the bridle to slow and steady the course, worried at a needless broken leg from the unexpected, the unseen. Now this…

The gentle caress of a desert breeze guided a flurry of sand grains over the ends of his boots and her naked toes. Twilight was approaching Cadomyr, the sky bright on the horizon, a dark royal blue overhead. The Rogue and the Desert Wind stood in the sands of the desert.
‘...I -did- go to the Necktie, though.’ Kaelyn spoke, scuffing her bare foot over a patch of desert grass, looking to him.
‘You say that as if you shouldn't have?’ He replied, his thumbs taking to his sword belt to tuck in behind it, hands hanging loose. She had been fidgety for want of a better word all afternoon. The reason for it was coming, he could feel it.
‘It's... funny, really. Part of me was prepared for you to rile at me for even daring, I admit…’ She continued. Her head listing in casual manner, much in the same fashion his own just had. Her dark eyes settled on the Rogue’s face as she turned directly to him.
'Aye it’s a dangerous place but you aint a child.’ He replied pulling somewhat of a face. Her being in danger of sorts had never been an over arching issue for him. They both had lived hard lives and were streetwise in a nature that suited their habitats and frequents.
‘Ah, so you don't care?’ She baited him softly with a tilted grin before glancing off, shoulder at a slight shrug. ‘As it turns out. Our friend Gray still can't resist a game of dice.’

He knew where this was going, they had talked before at the last encounter with Gray outside of Bane. He had caught Val and the feral girl up to old tricks baiting a man by the name of Leon by the camp fire at the gate. Others from the town had gathered and all had retreated to safety, save for Darrius the drunk fool. Truth be told, Drathe was nervous, anxious, the confidence sapping memories of his beating washing over him like cold water. Not Kaelyn, she had dared to walk outside of the safe and play with death and his friends, confident in her abilities but possibly foolhardy to the greater risk. She seemed different, overly confident and singularly ambitious. ‘Do you trust me, Drathe.’ She had asked him, ready to chase some idea, some plan of hers. His heart sank.

"Do you trust me." Something he had heard over the years time and time again. Never a, here’s the plan we should follow or this is what we will do. Just those words before she went head strong right into the thick of whatever it was on her own, he then having to pull her back some to reason. One such notable time came to mind again, that of the witch and want of child. ‘Do you trust me.’ She had said back then, eyes wet with the holding back of desperation for her cause. He did, as always he had. But then to find through further heated argument that the cost of what was offered was her servitude for a year and a day, her servitude! No! He had to make her understand, she was too proud, too free, to headstrong and wild for that. “You can’t tie the wind down. What is a vivacious wind captured in a bottle, its lifeless stagnant air.” He had pulled too hard at the bridle, it snapping under their tension and she had run back to the desert.

Yes he trusted her. He did, of course he did, He trusted her intelligence, her experience, her abilities, with his life. But that was not what he took the words for any more. Not last time outside of Gal anyway. She was asking for permission. That despite all she had previously said about them doing, chasing, working, building, planning, fighting together. She was asking, do you trust me to go out alone and do my thing. It felt like being left behind again.

The sand beneath his boots moved some causing Drathe’s weight to shift.
‘You played dice with him!?’ His hands rose for palms to rub at his face, his stubbled cheeks as he looked on her deeply unsettled. ‘There is no way he just let you go!?’
Kaelyn didn’t answer, the silence in and of itself a response enough, opening her arms wide, inviting him a look. Then she purses her lips a little, one eye closing as she looked off along the sand. ‘I walked out of there, no promises made. Luck would have it. That... is beside the point, though. I have his attention, now. The question is, how do we use it?’
Drathe exhaled relieved, head shaking. He couldn’t help but let just a hint of a smile play the very corners of his lips, in his eyes. Proud of her. 'Only you, Kaelyn.'
She turned her eyes back to him, that bare hint of a gleam in his own enough to relax her guard. Through wry smile she replied, ‘You'd kill me if you knew how close the game actually was.’

They spoke of the game, its deeper meaning in terms of the odds and Gray’s lack of commitment to a second round, both having rolled well. Then Kaelyn began watching her feet, toying with the sand as she went quiet, worrying her lower lip between her teeth… ‘He didn't want to risk my winning, and I do not think it's because of what I wagered on my win. I only wagered he tell me the truth of things, answer whatever questions I asked. He's smart enough to have spun the truth any which way.’
Drathe 's eyes slowly closed as his head eased back. 'Do I dare even ask what you put on the table?’
Kaelyn made an idle noise at the back of her throat ending on a soft sigh. She looked up toward the sky, the setting sun. ‘Were he to have won, he would have brought me before Prea… On oath that I walked out alive.' She added the last bit a touch hollowly.
The Rogue wrinkled his nose, thumb pawing at is tip a moment before he looked on her resigned. A slow lingering blink followed. He was waiting for it, ready to hear “Do you trust me?”
‘Neither of us won,’ she continued. ‘And he wouldn't play a second time. So what does that tell me, Blue? …' She spoke on until there it was. Only far more subtle and verbose than just 4 words.
‘Kae, come on,’ He pleaded gently, hands open and held out as if feeling the balance of what was said between them.
The desert woman lifted a hand to quietly rub at her cheek, then along her nose as she regarded him quietly through the falling darkness. ‘… What would -you- do?’

What would he do? Well, that had already been answered for him, having been there and suffered the consequences that went way deeper than a simple beating half to death. He had not told her of Allesandra or of Srrt and the web they had ended up in, the ends pulled by Gray. But this, wasn’t about that, this was about her, his life blood, Kae.
‘I have two answers to that and both you wont want to hear.’ He said simply.
‘And yet here I am, listening.’
So he told her straight and on a level, told her how he saw it. He watched how Kaelyn kept her chin tilted low, her expression having slid into a quiet blankness as she listened, save for the softest pursing of her lips. ‘That’s all I've got to say on that… you’ll never get closer to this.’ The man’s hand rose for finger to tap at his head.
Kaelyn then nodded subtly, her attention settling somewhere along his chest rather than his face.
They spoke on, to and fro until Drathe's lips press pensively, head back, eyes slowly looking from one star to another. A few bright ones had started to shine above. ‘You know ~friend~ or not, promises made or not, she'll use that against you.’ He said simply, all his talk having been calm, still resigned to that something. No temper or stoking her up for fires to roar, no riling at her, just talk to give a devils advocate or differing perspective. The desert woman fell into a heavy and lingering silence as she kept herself turned from him. Her hand at her brow falling as a weight settled over her.
‘Likely... I should just leave the dice on the table.’ She said.
‘No,’ Drathe replied lightly. ‘Dice are part of the game to be played.’
‘The odds are getting too high, this time.’ She muttered the words softly, her expression suddenly weary, worn even, a gambler a coin short of the pot.
Drathe turned, a casual and easy look about him, a warmth for her in those eyes catching what little light was left. ‘You've only just started.’
She lulled her head slightly to the left as he turned toward her, coaxing her attention back to him. She took one look at that too-casual expression, and her brows furrowed in some form of dissatisfaction.
‘You're not saying something.’
‘...Your right, I'm not.’ He cast a brief look down before back at her on an angle. ‘And I wont. The second answer.’ He couldn’t say it now, couldn’t tell her that the second answer was not to because he didn't want her to go it alone. When she said “do you trust me,” he hated it, that she was leaving him behind in a way whether she meant to or not. It hurt the supposed heartless, insensitive, care free Rogue. Not just that, but the way she talked and acted sometimes as if her life blood and body was nothing more than ante freely throw into the hat made him mad. She was worth everything to him! A queens randsome! Playing the games, tempting the risks wasn't about taking stupid ones, it was about calculated, measured worthwhile en-devours. He knew she knew that. But he wouldn’t pull the bridle till it snapped this time, nor did he want to become the bottle that stifled the wind. He loved her for what she was and in the risks she took, just as he did and enjoyed all be it of a more measured taste. The first resigned look her gave her almost at the start of the conversation he had decided to let her do whatever she was going to, however hard that would be for him for as long as he could weather. With only gentle persuasion and as always, his watching her back when he could, the proverbial dice would decide all else. They had thus far.
She looked on him for almost a beat too long, then something in her visibly bridled, drew up. Her face settling into a blankness that rivaled the resignation in his own look, and she turned her gaze entirely from him off over the desert. ‘Go back to town, Blue. Check on that girl of Aletys's, make sure Gray didn't harm her too much. We'll talk again when you're ready to tell me the second reason.’
Her tone was forcibly dismissive, a play albeit a convincing one as she straightened and brushed her hands idly down herself. Drathe's head bobbed a few times, eyes still on her before he looked up at the sky again, cheek scrunching up. He couldn’t say, just couldn’t do it. Of course she was going to be put-out in some way for his not telling, who wouldn't. But, he reasoned, it was better this way, hopefully she’d forget about it and move on, preoccupied with current events or a soon to be found curiosity with stronger sway over her than this and all would be as it was. Kaelyn the Desert Wind throwing caution to it.

The breeze blew a light misty spray from the fountain over him, pulling his attention back to The Cad market. He pulled the parchment away from his mouth holding it out before him and staring it at, rolled tightly as it was and rebound with its fawn skin leather strip. This was the exact opposite of his intention. ‘You don’t need my help, you need my honesty.’ He stood and walked out in search of her.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"I've never lied to you."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"Not even by omission?"


Silence stretched between the two, damning by the weight of it as it settled. Dawn was just cresting along the eastern horizon, setting shadows on a sharp edge over distant dunes and the withered trees that marked the desert's edge. Between the two companions a fire crackled sporadically, the last remnants of embers having been stirred to life for what little they had left. The air smelled of smoke and the sharpness of a distant storm that marked the nature of the late-autumn months. Somewhere beyond the little sanctuary of the camp site, foxes screamed at one another - a mother and her kits were hunting vermin in the spotty brush, giving Kaelyn something to fixate on rather than the man within arm's length of her.

The question slid from her quietly, an accusation and a challenge at once as she looked aside and to Drathe just as he in turn looked to her, brown eyes meeting grey - proverbial blades clashing, the matched gazes both wielding power to strip one another bare. He hesitated, and she felt the creeping desire to turn and run itching up her spine. If he could not be honest with her now...

"Alright," he finally said and something in her chest loosened just a hint. "Simply, in a clamshell - I hate it when you say 'do you trust me?'. I do, I do trust you, but it's not what you're asking, is it?"

She sat in silence, incapable of answering him in any sensible way for a long moment as she stared at the man. She wanted to curse him, a sudden and intense urge bubbling up in her to rail at him - though over what, she wasn't certain. He had always had this damnable capability of reading between the lines with her in ways no one else had ever quite managed. He matched her step for step, wit to wit, and in that was always able to see right through her. Like now, how many times had she used that very phrase with him, with other companions, always expecting the answer she got? And then one day, he had answered differently.


⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"No, not particularly..."


That answer had bridled her so hard, she'd lost all desire to do what she'd had in mind, precisely what he was about to accuse her of doing. It had likely saved her life, though he'd never properly know - nor would she.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"What is it you hear when I ask that?"

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"That you're going it alone, off to jump headfirst into something and damn the consequences."

He could go straight to Hellsbriar for being so accurate, she thought distantly as she looked over him.


⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀The moment it gets risky, the moment it gets dangerous, I ask you. Do you trust me? Do you trust me to leave you behind, because I'm too much a coward to risk losing you?


"There is a little more I feel I need to say," he said on a deep sigh. "I need to tell you a little of what happened while you were away..."


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


They had ended up at the oasis, Sirani's temple of all places. It wasn't a true oasis, fed as it was from streams and rivulets that ran through and crisscrossed the land around Cadomyr on the edges of the dunes, but the water was clear and cool and called to her in so many ways. Water had always done that - she had never understood why people of the lands beyond the desert always envisioned them to be people of heat and fire. A true desert-born heart came to water, the promise of life and renewal that it was. Her hands were fisted in the material of the thin skirt she wore, hiking cloth up above her ankles as she stepped into the shallows and played. In an attempt at distraction, she stepped in a familiar dancer's pattern through the water, balancing upon one foot as the other skimmed the surface.

"What were we talking about earlier?" Drathe's voice was light, relaxed in the way he liked to speak when he was fronting. She had never trusted the light-heartedness when she knew there was a heavy matter at hand, and something instinctive told her this was the case. They had been interrupted earlier, what with old friends and feral things, but they had found a chance again to speak, and Kaelyn felt... Nervous. So she played among the water as he stood off along the stone path.

"I think you should know a little of what happened when you were gone."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Should I?

"That's where we were. Aye."

She had never asked him of his life when she was gone. He had never asked her, in turn beyond their perfunctory "Up to no good?"s. An unspoken agreement between them each time they had reunited, that whatever happened when they were apart was for then, not now. That he felt it necessary to break that rule was telling enough.

So he told her - he told her of S'rrt and Allesandra, of how he and the girl had been together. She refused to acknowledge the twinge of jealousy that settled at the nape of her neck as she listened, though her gaze fell from him as he continued, focusing on the earth beneath her feet as she stepped from the water. He told her of how Gray had taken the girl for ransom, leaving him in a situation that "complicated" could not even do justice toward. And then he hesitated.

He hesitated, and she looked up to him as he told her the part he would know, in his heart of hearts, would be the part that actually got through to her.

"... Alle was with child."

"My child."

Everything stilled in that beat of a moment, and then Kaelyn had the very strange sensation of her world tilting on edge. She stared at him for a moment too long, until suddenly she couldn't look at him at all. Instead she focused on the distant horizon and tried very desperately to mask the sudden, overwhelming cacophony of emotions that those words were pushing on her. Two words, and suddenly memories she'd refused to revisit for years crawled like old ghosts to the forefront.


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


"No, Kae! I'll not have this, not see you humiliated for nothing more than idle promise."

She had clung to him that night as he tried to push away, their arms locked not in a lover's embrace but like the antlers of two beasts on a warpath that diverged on one another. Hands fisted in clothes and their voices lashed at one another, not to hurt but to get a point across though they wounded regardless. She had just revealed the price she was willing to pay to make possible the impossible, to give life to a child of theirs. A blood bond, enslavement for a year and a day. She should have expected him to fight against it yet had been so blinded by the possible end of such a commitment that nothing else had mattered. She had seen her life as forfeit, as always. What was a year and a day for what she could have at the end of it?

"It's that little image at the end of all of this. Of a black haired, grey eyed child, half you and half me that I can't look away from."

He'd pulled away from her at that point, left her empty and tipping over the blade's edge. It was what would ultimately set in motion a decision she'd regret, possibly for the rest of her days.

"I'm worn out Kae. I've run from all I know and had. I've nothing left but you and you ask me to do this with you. Talking like it's a done and sure deal, not just hope. It's all just hope for everything you'll gamble and go through..."

"I don't want hope, I just want you."


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


She had expected envy to be the emotion at the forefront in those silent moments as she stared off, yet it was barely a whisper at the back of everything else. It was sadness that overwhelmed her unexpectedly, made worse when Drathe made clear that this woman had lost this child, a life that had been given by happenstance and taken by ill fate. Everything suddenly felt painfully off-balance as she stood there in the midst of the oasis, and it wasn't until Drathe continued speaking, pushing through the revelation - perhaps in hopes of giving her something else to focus on. It worked, if only just so.

"I'm telling you this because it goes back to what I was trying to say earlier." His hands were running over his head, through close-cropped hair, and some distant part of her itched to grab his hands if only to stop the tell-tale signs of his frustrations. She found that she couldn't move though, not really, as he continued on.

"You must do what you feel you've got to do. I will not bridle you. You have my full support, that I promise!"

She blinked, and a revelation settled like a too-heavy, too-large cloak over her shoulders. It should have been comforting, and perhaps in any other moment, any other situation it could have been but in that instant it felt smothering. He was trying so clearly, so desperately to keep away from making her feel pinned down or pulled away from some perceived desire that he was backing off entirely when she had always relied on him to stop her from going too far. It was a bitter testament to the emotional scars of their last true argument laid on both their hearts, somehow still raw even after so many years between them.

Her heart ached.

"I'm finding it hard to live that care-free, live life on the edge path you want now, after that."

The irony, she thought absently. She had been trying to say from the first day they'd crossed paths near Runewick's depot that she didn't want that path anymore, for all it kept dragging her back like a drunkard went back to their alcohol every time they got a little too sober.

"What sort of life is it you want, then?" she asked before she could stop herself, her gaze having found him again. He answered without hesitation, his tone frank and bitterly honest.

"One with you."

Gods, how she wished she could hate him.



⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Drathe... I'm sorry. For everything. I'm not apologizing just for me. I'm sorry for it all.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Do you think I don't understand what you just told me you lost in that story? I'm sorry.


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


It had been dawn the next day by the time they had left the oasis. Some job of sorts drew him away toward Cadomyr proper, and with a promise to find him later she had left for Runewick. What she hadn't expected was a sudden, desperate desire that had her in Galmair instead. It was midday when she'd descended into Galmair's underground and found herself in front of an apartment door. A knock, a dog's bark, and then Eleanor stood in a doorframe with a withering look to her.

She had no right, not with the woman's blood on her hands, and yet she found herself asking anyway.

"Can we talk?"



⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀The Iron Desert's northern border is defined by the Bloodwater. A great river that flows for miles upon miles, unstoppable.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Yet nine times out of ten, you cannot drink from the river. A bitter temptation to those unaware, lost in the desert as they are.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀We must leave the river to find the oasis, but to leave the river is to risk death by so many other means.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀It takes a courage that seems foolish, or a knowledge that looks ignorant, to abandon a river in a desert.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀What happens, then... When you know you must leave the river, but are too afraid of how lost you might become between it and the oasis?

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀You tell me, desert girl.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀You drink from the river and hope it does not kill you, or you die anyway.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Sounds like a poor gamble. Especially for one that knows the odds, and what she toys with.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Indeed, it does.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀To indulge in a poison knowing there is true water to be found, if she dares walk away.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

[Drathe]

The wagon had been at a stand still for a while now, the two oxen laying before it still in their yokes, tails flicking. The small party of four had been unable to continue due to a thin and sickly tree laying across the well traveled wagon ruts. A real nothing to get excited about. But still, they had stopped. A hired hand just as thin in form had gone over and moved the blockage with all the effort of one hand. Then he and the other paid for muscle had gone off for “a look about and a piss, aright!” Leaving the merchant and Drathe alone in the wagon.

The rogue was sat on the tail board facing in. His chin resting on the pommel of a short sword standing tip down between his legs and propping up his head. Another slow, tedious and uncomfortable journey baby sitting a merchant and his silken wares. It gave the mind too much time to wander and it did so.


Kaelyn had rented a flat to stay at and given him a key. Quite the occasion considering their reluctance to be tied to anything more than an inn’s room for a period of time. It was the very definition of surprise to him. The place was large, more than needed. If she was making a statement, then as with most things she did, she did it all in. He looked about the rooms as they talked. It was nice, plenty of space to meet all needs and some. Girl had done good as they say. The trophy horse head left by the previous occupier upon the wall was a nice touch, a beast rare if ever seen at all in these parts of the land.

"Rather big a place for just one person. I figured if I -had- to share it..."
We could have chosen together?

"It's something I've wanted for a long time, but could never convince myself to take."
We could have convinced each other?

"A proper place like this. But... I need an oasis. Figurative as it is, in this case."
We could have dug for water the two of us?

Playful, casual, if not honest words she has said but they itched at him like the quill end of a small feather caught in a shirt. Was he being too sensitive? Not something he was ever accused of, but, where was the "we" in all that? Was the freely give key the metaphor for it? Was she taking the burden of commitment but letting him its boon in this place? Or was this another “do you trust me of sorts.” He felt confused, unsure as he continued to explore the flat.

They had ended up laying on their backs across one of the beds. He having pulled her by the shoulder with him as he went from sitting.
‘I want you here, too.’ She said. ‘I know I tease, but let me make that much clear. Though suddenly I feel like I'm the one afraid of bridling -you-. Instead of the other way about.’
‘No.’ He replied softly, the press of his chin to her head easing as his own rolled for gaze to cast up at the ceiling. ‘You've never done that.’ Even now, she applied no pressure, only offered all and everything openly asking for nothing. But that itching. ‘Its good to know you want me here though… You've done good. I'm proud of you.’
‘I cannot tell if there is something being unsaid here, or if I'm just trying to ruin the moment.’
‘Nothing to be said or ruined.’ He replied simply. There wasn't? She, ~they~ had a place to stay. It cost him nothing so far and it was comfortable. But that itch. They sat back up on the bedside.
‘Aye. I'm just ah… Trying to put proof behind promises, this time.’ She had said. ‘... I want you. I want this, a place where we can shut out the world for a while, if we so care to. Some semblance of truth when I say I'm not going to just disappear again tomorrow. I won't hold you to any obligation to indulge in it, but now there's something here. To take, if you want it.’ He had his Queen and now she had offered him place at a veritable palace without obligation. Something physical to add weight to her words and their meaning. A corner stone to build upon. Maybe he was over thinking honest intent and endeavor. He wanted to indulge in her offer whole heartedly but, ‘To take, if you want it,’ she had finished. He wanted it, but to take? He knew the way she had meant, the tone and the context of it, but his open hand rose just a little as if to reach for such a thing before closing into a gentle fist and settling back on his lap. A movement mirroring his inner unrest. When she said that, ‘to take,’ the moment was held at knife point by disquieted thoughts.

Over the years of his life he had done nothing but take from women. Rich bitches to be more exact. Mostly wealthy with the stink of arrogance about them. Women that felt like small victories over his wretched past as a young lad, all set in motion by one such woman. He had grown up in a whore house, mother forced to pay off a dead fathers debts until sickness had wracked her and a knife had set her free. The working girls there had taught him their knowledge and in motherly fashion, brought him up. He used it all to take rich bitches hearts, take their bodies and then when the opportunity presented it self, take their wealthy items. To take. It just added to his unrest at the situation. Again was he over thinking it all? His head bowed as he turned to face her with an inscrutable smile.
‘You know, haaaa. Kae. …I love you.’
Her expression faded as she watched the fist. Her head lulled aside watching him now, that smile.
‘I know.’ She said quietly as his eyes close, her own lingering upon him and seeing a warmth return to his lips.
‘You did good. This is good!’ He took a moment to look up and around again. ‘A Queen in her palace!’ He said, excluding any reference of himself. The words a soft chuckle that grew swiftly into a light laugh. That itch he felt, he understood it now, he felt a guest in what he assumed would have been a joint venture. Then to be graciously offered to take a place in it if he wished? Mmmm. Why take what could have started out jointly theirs. Through white ash the embers of his temper glowed.
‘Right, I'd best be off. Don't want to outstay my welcome ~just~ yet. End up a servant or a footman.’
‘And what if I want you to stay?’ the desert woman countered with a simple, direct frankness.

Drathe, get over here!’ Shouted the voice of the thin hired hand from behind the thick bushes and clumps of small trees. The rustle of leaves and slapping wings of a few startled birds taking to the sky followed. A brief conversation, the words too muffled ebbed from the same direction. Then the sounds of a scuffle, of deep thunks and clashing metalic chings giving a pressing sense of reason to the pathetic fallen tree. Nothing could be seen from the wagon, just the sound of voices and shouts growing fewer.
‘Drathe, Draaathe! What the fruk are you doing!’ harangued the voice of the other party member from the dense thickets up ahead. Did he hear it? No. All Drathe heard was the soft moans of her and the protests of the creaking bed as he envisioned their christening of the new place, their first night there together. He had stayed. The glowing embers of his temper burning brightly and giving heat to a lustful entanglement. That woman was a picture to behold and when naked, quite simply the vision of a goddess. Who needed gods? Why bother wasting time and oiled pigments trying to capture such an unquantifiable beauty when it was already right here amongst mortals. When they lay together, the heat of fire and coalstone, the high and weightless relief of azure blue skies and clouds as soft as fresh lambs wool. There was your religion if ever one was needed and unlike the selfish gods, at least one was rewarded for that worship. As he lay there, cooling from the exertion with her at his side, temper pacified, mind calmer he accepted the situation. Maybe he really was just over thinking it all. Always so used to reading between lines had he forgotten what it was to just accept the writing?

They had spent time at the festival together. Each others company easy, playful, comfortable and content. It felt good, like old times. Such a simple, underrated state of emotion but he felt happy. Even when he had to leave, the promise of an easy job for a merchant calling him away, he carried the glow.


The sounds of the scuffle had died away, a sinister silence returning.
‘P-Please, this is what I hired you for!’ Came the overwrought voice of the merchant, reaching over the wagon side to rock the rogues leg. The action had his chin slip from sword pommel only to instructively jerk his head up, jarred from contented day dreams to the present. ‘What you doing!’ He gruffed irefully, eyes narrowed.
‘They are coming!’ The merchant pointed a shaky finger across Drathe to a large man stood before the bushes, a two handed wooden mallet in hands.
‘Well, where are the other two shits?’ He asked twisting about himself seeking them.
‘I don’t know, dead?’ Came the merchants whimpering from under the wagon.
‘For the love of gods, why is nothing ever frukin’ easy in life.’ He cursed, temper bubbling as he threw his legs over the side and strolled towards the big man.

...

The cold of night had them pulling their coats tightly around themselves as both Drathe and the merchant trudged on foot towards town, a distinct lack of wagon or wares with them. 'So I'm still going to get paid right?'
'With what?' sobbed the merchant.

[Kaelyn Ianale]

"Perhaps you need some clarity," Eleanor had suggested quietly as they sat in the depths of Galmair, her head settled upon Kaelyn's lap in a way that beckoned the desert woman's fingers to caress through her hair. "Does he not want you to change? Or does he not want to change you?"

The question had lingered with Kaelyn long after she had left the other woman's presence. Clarity certainly was something the priestess had always been good at offering her, in ways both obvious and otherwise. They had a strange relationship, one Drathe had made plain he loathed in so many ways. Like snakes they were, both highly aware of how each could kill the other with a bitter and well-placed bite, yet they chose each time to put fangs away for the sake of companionship. Most of the time, at least. Neither of them trusted the other, not really, and yet...

And yet, Eleanor had a way of saying things Kaelyn needed to hear, at the most opportune of moments. She had coaxed Kaelyn to face a strange and deeply embedded fear - a belief she had clung to as excuse and catalyst for so much throughout her life upon Gobaith and Illarion. Why was she so terrified of allowing peace into her life, her existence? Was she so terrified that embracing those moments of quiet, of stillness would cost her so much?

She could not trust the quiet of the oasis, so she drank from the bitter, toxic river until she stood on the brink of drowning for it, gagging on the ichor of a life she kept insisting she couldn't let go of. I fear the oasis is a mirage...

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"I'm finding it hard to live that care-free, live life on the edge path you want now, after that."

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"What sort of life is it you want, then?"

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"One with you."


◦ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀❖⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ◦ ⠀


She was mad. This was something Kaelyn had immediately decided the instant coin had left her palms and a key had replaced it, feeling like a thousand stones there within her hand for all it was just a tiny thing. Its twin had been given to Drathe, who was currently sliding key to lock and grinning as the mechanism turned with a hollow clunk of metal set in wood. He stepped in, and as she followed over the threshold the strangest of nervousness decided to bubble up thick and heavy in her chest. She had gone too far, she decided as she cast a look about the large flat with its cozy common area and the bedroom, separate, off to the back. Why, suddenly, was a cramped inn room not enough? Neither of them had ever been the sort for setting down roots or anchors or anything that held them to a place, and yet now... Here she was, of all people, trying to entangle them both in something stable.

Perhaps from an outsider's viewpoint, his grins and nods and chipper remarks as he moved through the flat and then settled on the bed would have been comforting. This is good, he kept saying with nods as they sat upon the bed - the first time he said it, she wanted to believe it. But then it became a forced mantra upon his lips.


⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀This is good.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀You did good.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I'm proud of you, girl.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀This is good...


Every repetition of those words was like a barb beneath her skin, doing precisely the opposite of what such words were meant to do. She watched him, keen and guarded as he sat aside her, trying to thread herself between the lines of words stuck on loop. Like a child trying to convince himself that all was well, that there were no monsters in the shadows. Every echo of himself, a cover for something unsaid, and she felt the weight of it. She decided in a moment of silence as they sat in the room that this was a matter of one thing or another.

He was not realizing that in her giving him the key, she was inviting him to claim this palace as his, as theirs.
Or the fears that had always sat skin-deep within her were justified, and he was looking to escape any chance of something that dare tie him, tie them down to something... More.

"Right, I'd best be off. Don't want to outstay my welcome just yet. End up a servant or a footman."

Ah. There was her answer.

Before Drathe could rise and make his well-excused escape, Kaelyn held him with a look as she refused the parting kiss he offered her. Her heart was racing strangely in her chest and every part of her wanted to reach for him, hold him there before he could have the chance to run. Fingers curled into fists sat there upon her thighs, loose and a subtle reining in of that desperation as she spoke softly.

"And what if I want you to stay?"

"Do you mean right now? Or at the palace?"

Of course he would liken this two-room flat to a palace. She knew the gravitas in such a seemingly inane question though, and there was not a moment's hesitation as her answer breathed from her.

"Both."

So many times of late, he had likened her to a queen of sorts, played even into this moment. A queen and her castle, he had said, and she had played it off. Now though, as his hand settled upon her cheek and held there, as gray eyes locked keen and careful upon brown, she found a chance to turn those words back around on him. Her chin tilted, cheek pressed to the calloused, familiar palm laid upon it as she spoke. "What's a queen without her king? Liberated, maybe... By some accounts. But reckless, and with a palace too empty." A careful smile hinted at her lips, and then she finished off with a faint, familiar thread of coyness. "Besides... This bed's cold."

Those were the words that finally took proverbial blade to rope and cut the tension that had been slowly wrapping itself around them. There was something, a look in grey eyes she couldn't quite parse, would have to chase another day, as he moved for her suddenly. She let those unspoken things go, let them rest for another night, another moment as hands tangled into hair and lips chased unseen patterns over skin. Thus was his hold on her, able to quiet and put to rest every storm she threatened to stir up by a mind too quick to sabotage every good thing it dared to see upon the horizon.

By the dawn's break, tangled as they were in blankets upon a bed, within a palace that could be theirs for the taking, she could only wonder. Were they once more merely in the eye of the storm, grey clouds unseen over the horizon, or had they finally, after so long, weathered the storm to its passing?

[Drathe]

‘You said no one was going to get killed!’ Growled Drathe, fist thumping down on the well worn table top he stood before. It caused the quill and ornate ink pot upon it to jump. The sound and spoken words having the hint of an echo about them as they played off the stone walls and ceilings of the Flicker Swale.

‘Accidents happen.’ Replied Arno, sat on a wooden chair the other side of the table, casually dismissive in his deep set tone. Both hands were offered out, palms up as if letting the words go like pigeons. ‘The job was done, I have what I need and the two men the merchant hired, well, who cares for a couple of scrotes they are two a copper. Don’t tell me you’ve grown a conscience? Drathe, really?’ The stocky, pale faced man mocked him with a look, a smirk before easing back into the wooden chair. Despite common thought the man did indeed have one. Rare as it was to show its face, it would however relish in the chance to spite him at critical or definitive moments, quite literally an attack of conscience that never ended in fame or a fortune that he could recall. But if people though he lacked one, well, it suited.

The rogue glared back. ‘You make a plan, we stick to the plan, every one knows where they stand.’ He jabbed the air in Arno's direction with an index finger, each point adding emphasis.
The forger began to chuckle as his head bowed on an angle. ‘You know what Marikus is like, he gets caught up in the moment, gets excited. Besides did he hit you with that wooden hammer? No! Now…’ He took a breath through his nose as he leaned forward to stand, weight pressed down through his knuckles set upon to the table top. ‘Is there something you want or are you here to berate me like some old priest on morality?’ Though spoken like easy conversation the question was given weight by the look he gave the rogue through his brows.
‘To get paid!’ He growled again not shying away.
‘But you’ve been paid, by the merchant I set you up with. That was the deal. A clean and honest line of payment for you, the merchants silks for me.’
‘Marikus took everything the merchant had, even the coin on his persons. I got nothing!’
The bald man’s eyes held the rogues own, an intense if not intimidating look. Silence grew…
‘Alright.’ Came Arno, seemingly satisfied. He sat back down in the chair, twisting his stocky form to reach into a sturdy wooden box on the floor. He pulled out a dark glass bottle, set it on the table and pushed it towards the man. ‘Payment.’
‘What am I going to do with a bottle of, of, wine?’
A thick set finger tapped the cork protruding from it’s top. ‘This is the finest red wine money can buy. Hard to get. It is a drink of nobility, of royalty and worth a good deal of coin. In payment I am giving it to you. Drink it, sell it, I don’t care.’

Drathe stood looking at the bottle a moment, hands set on hips, arms akimbo. ’It better taste like Sirani’s own breast milk!’ He snatched it up and thrust it into a pocket before casting a look about the tables.
’What did you want that merchants silk for anyway? You aint going to sell it now you’ve cut it all up into strips.’
‘Certain documents need certain silk ribbons to lay under the wax stamps. Just as certain documents need to be stained and aged with authenticity, hence the wine you now have.’ He enlightened in a casual manner, attention down in the box at his side again.
‘Huh.’ Is all the rogue remarked, indifferent as he turned to leave.
‘Oh before you go.’ The forger’s hand ceased its rustling in the box, head twisting to have the man in his sight again. ‘I have another little job for you. Come back tomorrow and see me about a bird.’

A couple of nights later he was at Runewicks town hall. Watching, listening, waiting as he sat in the library looking over books that held no interest, other than feigned purpose to be there. He noted the comings and goings of people until boredom had the black ink of words merged into the ivory sheets as his mind wandered to issues more meaningful than ‘The gods of Illarion Volume One.’



‘She’s got the coin for good wine too.’ Drathe said with a bright eyed grin. He and Kae having just crossed paths with Aleytys. Kae always seemed poised when Aley was around him. Always pleasant and well mannered but alert and keen to their conversations, their mannerisms. A cat pawing closely, curiously around something it wasn’t quite sure of. Kaelyn let her head list slightly toward a shoulder, watching him with a hint of amusement, something telling in her look as she muttered. "Rich, is she?"
‘No.’ Replied the rogue, the word drawn out, a humour to the tone as he waved a finger at her to make the point definitive. ‘It's not like that.’ And it was true, Aley was so far removed from a “Rich bitch” the comparison was, well there wasn’t one. It was Kae having a testing little paw at the itch she had about the woman and their relationship. A relationship he had been neglecting of late. Kae’s grin turned wry and catlike, a teasing sort of disbelief on her face, an exaggerated nod given. Aley was a friend, confidant and ally. It was an odd paring. A respected, loved and well known Knight and a gambling, womanising rogue liked but not especially trusted. But as odd as it was, it was. They could end up in a good old scrap and know the other would stand fast next to them. Both were never backwards in coming forward with what they needed to hear, even if that was a dressing down and respected each other to never play one for a fool. If one ever needed the other provided.

‘You think I still play that game?’ He asked as they walked back to the apartment.
Kae absently pursed her lips for a moment, worrying the lower one at the corner. She looked him over before answering. "I never asked to properly know." That was true and it surprised him. Why though? Did it come under the unwritten ruling of them never asking about the past when they were not together? Hmmmm. Or was it simply best to let sleeping dogs lie rather than wake an answer not wanted to be heard? Possibly. Maybe a case of mutual assumed omission, one balancing out the others miss deeds if any? What foundation was that to build upon though? What future decisions would be made on assumptions of unknown answers?

Kae opened the door to the apartment and was about to step through when his arm bared her path, those keen grey eyes on her. 'I don't. I've not played that silliness since, well. Since before we were together last time.' Kaelyn fixed him with a similar look, careful and curious as he kept her there against the door. She leaned back an inch, brown eyes searching grey before she nodded.
‘I think you know that.’ He said plainly. ‘Your not one to share your prized things. But it’s said and known now.’ She blinked, head canting ever so slightly at his turn of phrase. ’You're more than just a prized thing, you know.’



It was late, the sun having given up its reign of the sky and taken refuge for the night. Overhead was a darkest dark. Overcast, rain yet to fall. Lamp light flickered over the walls of Runewicks town hall. The flames danced with the wafts of light breeze that made their way into the glass and metal cages they resided in. Having spent a couple of days getting a feel for peoples movements, tonight was the night. The rogue perched on a crate left at the end of the small river side dock outside, in the shadow. Most of the people had left for the night. He had seen and counted each one out, just one more to go. Torina Scibrim.

Ahhh, to be back with Kae right now. Perched on his lap beside the fire in the apartment, comfortable in the simple touch of each others company as they toyed and talked. Much as they had done the other day, drinking in each others words and becoming heady on the emotion they stirred. The thought was broken by the sound of a heavy door closing, piquing his ear up. The sound of keys rattling, parchments hitting the floor and being scraped up followed by footsteps clunking down wooden steps held his attention. He pulled the hood up around him just an inch more, head turning within it, watching Torina walk on. Her arms were filled with a pile of parchments that seemed to somehow stay in her care despite the hurried pace she had set herself.

He waited a beat, walked to the building, up the wooden stairs lightly on toes and onto the upper level. The rogue took a quick glance around then a knee was taken before the two large doors. Hood was pulled back and ear pressed to them… silence, save for the thumping of his heart. The beat a drum drum drum chanting for the thrill of risk, all be it a calculated one. From coat pocket a fawn-skin roll was set down beside his knee, untied and rolled out with a swift, single handed action. An odd collection of tools - not at all a master locksmiths set. More like small home made but eloquent metal picks with differing ends. A diamond, a hook, a ball, two pieces of differing lengths shaped like an ‘L’ to describe a few. Also two small vials, one full of dark oil and another of a grainy looking sand.

He employed a pick in the keyhole. One hand applied a little pressure to the handle while the other worked the tool… Damn It! It wasn’t picking. Again he tried, again he failed to find the mechanism needed to set the lock free. It was as if, as if it wasn’t there? Must be a fine lock, magic maybe? Drathe growled in mild frustration, leaning forward to gently thunk his forehead to the door. The action caused his weight to pull down fully through the handle. The door gently opened, seemingly having not been locked. Now Drathe did not believe in gods but he did in fate. Sometimes, the little things just seemed to work out for him. Little things often leading to the bigger that pulled him down. Like small sips of strong spirit, easy and warming to drink until drunk and spinning not quite in control.

Inside, he made his way to Torina’s desk. The room illuminated by the blue glow of the constant portal there. He wasted no time and rummaged through it, the draws and then under parchments. It’s not here, damn! He tossed a scroll down in frustration which in turn frustrated a clay ink pot, causing it to tip from a copper stand and spill its contents over the table. SHIT! He snatched it up and set it back before swiftly picking up the open ledger the inky pool was heading for. There, under it, having been used to prop it up was a small, plain wooden box. The book was set down, ink cleared with an already ink stained blotting cloth and box opened. Inside was a wax seal stamp, the press face of it a bird. A hawk to be precise, in the style of Runewicks coat of arms. One seemed to be missing though, the space left in the box the appropriate size to accommodate a twin. He pocketed it. Made good the table and placed the ledger back in its spot, hand returning to make a small adjustment to its position. Just then, the door handle squeeked. Fruk! His heart pounded a beat, a strong thump like a punch to the chest. It was divine. Heart pumped blood, pulsed fear and thrill, surged life through his veins. He dropped to his knees and crawled under the tables, making his way to the deepest center of them...

…Time had passed. For the love of gods. He cursed in his minds voice. He had been huddled under the tables for what felt like hours. All thrill and interest in the situation had evaporated as cramp and discomfort niggled him. Torina was sat at her desk, the glow of oil lamp about her as she fussed over scrolls late to have been dispatched or signed off. Burning the midnight oil as the saying goes. He sighed deep and silently as eyes closed, thoughts wandered.



They had settled by the fire in the apartment, sitting opposite each other. Kaelyn relaxing into the chair, into the silence of the moment as she watched him. A thoughtfulness over her face as she nudged his leg with her own once, twice absently. ‘Things have been... Quiet of late, haven't they?’
Drathe having sat sideways on the chair, set an elbow to the table the other to the top of the chair back, fingers of both hands knitting for arms to hang and bridge the gap. 'Have they?' He smiled at her, his look as warm as the fire that cracked lightly beside them.
‘It feels as if they have been. Leaves me nervous.’ She admitted absently as her arms folded loose over her belly, the top she was wearing hitching up just enough that the ink over navel was slightly visible. She wrinkled her nose in a soft look of distaste as her eyes lingered on him, a warmth in them countering the slight expression. The rogues head listed as he held her with an easy, comfortable gaze. ‘Why?’ He asked, as simple and short of a question as the word.
Her shoulders hitched in a gentle shrug as one of her feet moved aside, bare as ever to absently nudge against his ankle. ‘Quiet always feels like that pause before a storm, doesn't it?’ Her gaze dropped to watch her foot.
‘Do you think?’ Again, the short prompt. Was she leading up to something here or simply conversing her inner thoughts? Despite their familiarity with one another, things were often said between the lines that were never given breath to touch the ears. This for him was of intrigue and fatigue. A simple conversation could be anything but, where as it could very well be its face value. Kae could be incredibly open and honest at times, where as others guarded and if pressed on something too far or not wanted, the talk would be curtly dismissed else temper roused. Maybe a time ago, dare he say he would have enjoyed stoking her anger, baiting her much as she would him. But things seemed different, she seemed different these days.

The woman from the desert grinned slightly, wryly he thought. Her only response a soft hum, an idle "Mm..," non-committal in its tone as she absently ran her foot up along his shin.
They talked on, until she asked, ‘Then what do you do during these times of quiet?’
‘Not worry about the storms that ~might~ follow if that’s what you mean?’
Kaelyn gave no immediate reaction to that, though after a pause she nodded, gaze lowering to look over her palms, slender - once delicate, now scarred with all sorts of stories.



A scroll fell to the floor, it’s wooden handle thunking hard and giving the rogue a stir. He scrunched up a cheek, eye narrowing as he watched, waited. Heart thumping again only without the sweet high of it all, it pumped simply to surge blood, make ready escape. A slender arm reached down, plucked up the scroll and set it back on the table out of sight, followed by a soft curse wrapped in a yawn. He exhaled a measured breath, cheeks and shoulders easing. He was getting tired, legs and back stiff and painful. He settled himself, chin resting on chest, eyes closed.



‘I-ah, I seem to end up in these ~storms~ through poor choices and shit luck. You chase or make them. Impulsive as you are.’ Drathe said in reply to Kaelyn’s question. He was not talking about the risks and thrills, the lets go cause trouble or usual shenanigans. But the life and death choices, choices being a loose term, more reckless impulses or gambles. That is where they seemed to strongly diverged in his mind. Life was about the fun of taking a risk, where as she took the fun from the risk of her life. Now the semantics of that could be argued but the ideology of it was clear enough to him. Her eyes closed, a soft wince tugging at her face as his words hit true to home… ‘Mm’… … ‘Blue. Can I ask you something, on promise you'll give me the whole truth of it?'
‘Go on.’ He smiled lightly, eyes closing and staying so. The smile a mask, the closed eyes better than looking away and betraying his worry. Inside he felt a twisting, only no good could come of this laying of kindling. With her own eyes still closed, a sort of guardedness against it all. She sat there a moment in silence, it growing with expectation. Then, with a thumb idly rubbing at the deep scar set in her palm, she opened her eyes and spoke. ‘So many times since I've... Come back, you've made it clear you don't want or expect me to -change-. Clarify for me, please. Do you not -want- me to change, whatever that means to you? Or is it just… That you don't want to end up the cause, the hand that forces it?… Because of what happened. Last time.’

Drathe’s chest rose with a deep, slow filling breath of air. Eyes opened, head a brief and angled bow, something akin to a boxer rolling with a glancing punch. The held breath was then exhaled through nose, the last of it given to respond. 'Quite the question, Kae, and we are not even drunk yet.' He needed to buy a little time, gather his thoughts from the surprise of it. A pinch of humor did that. Kae was not one to just come out with, open up with something of deeper concern like that, as extroverted as she was. The desert woman’s lips tugged into a dry sort of smile as she glanced briefly up to him. Her head listing toward the bottle upon the table. 'Drink up, if you need it.' He shook his head. No, no. This needed clarity of mind, absence of distraction. The wrong things said or implied here would have her dismissively end the conversation, dis-satisfaction would lead to frustration which would probably manifest its self in tempered spite or feigned indifference. That said, there was also the chance she was bored with the “quiet” and reverting back to tried and tested ways to alleviate it. The rogues eyes settled on that familiar face with the moon tattoo. A sharpness of focus to them, just the hint of narrowing. 'Are you seeding a storm here? Or are we just talking? Throwing off weighted stones?' A blunt response but he needed to know where she wanted this to go.
'Just talking,' she said, tone unflinching. ‘I'm not after a fight. I'm just... Trying to understand something.’ Drathe glanced to the woman’s hand, it's movement toward him drawing attention. His own taking to it for their calloused working hands to warmly hold as one. Something in the woman's expression relaxed as her fingers threaded between his.

The rogue studied her for a moment. The shape of her lips, they were cut so perfect in angle, sculpted with a clean defined line between their colour and her skin. That nose, just right. Those brown eyes, so expressive, if you took the time to watch them, you could almost discern her thoughts, so you would think. His head set upright, shoulders relaxed but squared, filling the space between chair and table. 'That is a hard question to answer, Kae. How do you answer that and to what purpose does the answer benefit if it causes the opposite? But…’



A chairs feet screeched over the wooden floor boards as it was pushed back from a desk in Wicks town hall. The sound harsh and jarring Drathe from a half doze under the table. Eyes blinked open, heart giving flutter as beat was missed then caught upon. Torina was now standing at the desk by the wall. The bottom of her brown trousers and well polished shoes to be seen there. ‘Just go home,’ he spoke without breath, frustrated and needing to move, to risk a floor board creaking or scabbard scraping. He couldn’t feel his legs, cold and heavy as they were. Gingerly, he eased one out from under him, more sliding it over the floor, it being too stiff and heavy to lift. Now the other one. Clink. The scabbard had rolled, metal loop on the leather belt tapping against another. Every muscle that still had blood in it froze, face scrunching up tightly more in annoyance than fear. Scrolls continued to rustle, no sudden movements… good. He continued, slowly does it until at last both legs were drawn up before him. That was the easy part, as blood found its way back into the cold starved muscles of his legs, the pins and needles were like nothing he could remember. A fist was pressed to his mouth, teeth set into finger. Distraction, distraction, think of something else…



His shoulders eased down an inch as he physically felt the weight of the moment upon him. He didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to sit here and say a truth that risked her resenting him or worse pretending at something to try and appease him in some way. He felt trapped, stuck with bad choices.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What if he just said nothing, didn’t answer? Would that make her feel the fool for asking? Something she was not. What had they spoken of not so long ago? Courage? A small exhale if not a sigh grew into a rush of air before a taken breath replaced it, shoulders rising square again - taking up the weight. Kae let her fingers still in his as palms pressed together. She didn't push him to continue. Just sat there with a stillness about her, a quiet even as she watched him.

‘...Yes. I want you to change.’ He said frankly. Not that he wanted that tone. But by the gods how hard it was to say those words and set them free. The seal had been broken now, let the truth pour fourth and fill glass to be drunk to her fill.
‘...In so much that, I want you to understand your life is not something to be thrown care free to your every impulse. I just wish you'd stop, think a moment. It has value, worth!’ His free hand rose, fingers curling into a tight fist, knuckles turning white at the grip as if he were holding that which he spoke of. 'You are something the like of which I have never seen, not only that, you ~came back to me~, for this.’ The fist taped a few times to his chest over heart. ‘You have it.’ He pressed the flat of it firmly then at her sternum between the rounding of her breasts. Raw emotion started to bubble up in his throat. If courage and truth were having their time on stage then so to were their companions. His eyes started to wet as he cleared his throat, voice breaking some. ‘It’s not just you any more.’ The weight of his fist against her eased away, the hand opening, gesturing at her. 'Not just this body. It’s us, it’s my one and only thing I have left of any worth of meaning, my heart, in there with you.’

Kae held fast and still throughout his revelation. Her eyes locked upon his face, each word taken in. 'I um - I don't even know what I am saying now.' He said, hand rising for finger and thumb to press into the sockets of each eye, rubbing, trying to hold back the push of tears, keep them at bay. He was not an overly emotion person, never a tear shed or much of a care given to others. Not because he was born without such ability, he was far from sociopathic. But the life he grew up in taught that such was weakness, a tell in the game if you will and as such could be exploited. He himself exploited them. “One day you’ll cry Drathe and never stop.” A rich bitch had shouted at him from a window as he had run down the street, hands full of riches, shirt smelling of her perfume. It had never happened until, Kaeyln. This woman, this singular, unique priceless treasure had gotten blood from the stone twice since her return.

Kae sat there, her lovers words settling upon her. The expression she held had softened to something vulnerable, stripped bare and perhaps overwhelmed. Yet she didn’t look from him, no sudden avoiding of gaze. Instead she rose from her chair closing the distance between them to straddle his lap. As the rogues hand fell away from his face hers took to it, cupping along stubbled jaw, coaxing him to look to her...

'…I felt a lie every time you insisted you wanted nothing more than the girl I used to be, willing to throw it to the wind. Damn the consequences. But Gods, if every time you said it, it didn't make me fear what would happen if I said.. I didn't want that. I would be happy. Like -this-.’ She tipped her chin aside in gesture to the flat.
‘No more chasing storms. Because too many times, it's nearly cost me everything. Including you. If I am your heart, embodied... You are mine.' She spoke the last part softly as her eyes lingered on his, a faint tremble to the hands that held to his face.

With his arms around her and her hands on his face as she straddled him, they spoke on. The glow of the fire bathing them in gold and orange hues.The colour of precious metal, sought after and coveted. He knew she too had lived a life where emotion left unchecked was to invite opportunity to those un-favorable or cause conflict with needed aims. As such he understood and relished these moments where her true depth of tenderness and understanding bloomed.
‘I'm trying, Drathe. Trying to learn how to slow down and match you step for step. Leave the river for the oasis, the cliff's edge for solid ground... Whatever metaphor you like.’Her eyes, that raw stare into his never left, never broke contact to give any doubt of honesty. ‘I never thought I would grow old, but with you? There's never enough time, so if -we- can grow old and fat together. So be it.’ Her head tiped forward to touch her brow to his softly for a moment, eyes closing before she backed off just slightly enough to hold those brown eyes to his grey.
‘I always though you had a death wish of sorts. Jumping into things that flirted all to heavily with that aim.’
Her look, that lingering hold on his finally wavered, her eyes dropping to settle on his lips as a slight, helpless wryness played her. She swallowed, lips pursing before her head shook. ‘Not anymore. Not if I carry something so valuable as your heart.’
‘I thought this time, the way you said about marring you so soon, never leaving me again. This was going to be your sawn song. And in that...How could I hold you back, bridle you as we seem to say these days. Not after last time. I know you'd just fight against me, maybe grow to resent me having wasted our time on fruitless arguments.’ His breathing juddered, that emotion making another play for freedom. ‘I didn't listen though did I? I just expected things to be as they were before.’ The desert woman’s hold slid from his jaw, tracing down to settle about the man’s neck as she kept her gaze from his. A swallow, pushing back against her own emotion as her thumbs slid along his neck, tracing idle patterns. A soft, breathy chuckle devoid of any real humour slipped from her as her eyes took back to his. ‘I've hardly given you reason to expect otherwise.’

He met the return of her gaze with one of vulnerability. A look as rare from him as her, his temper having always been the vanguard of his emotions or weakness. A tear welled and rolled from his eye, a small pearl leaving a trail. He blinked at the sting of it only for another to dare an escape, curving around cheek. 'What the hellbriar is all this? Love? Real love? Is this what it’s about? Honesty and trust! It’s over whelming.' And it was. The rogue had only ever known love other than what he felt for Kae as a tool, a weapon and a means to an aim. Love before her was not a feeling and it never garnered much of an emotional response. Kae was not new to him, nor the feelings she stirred, but the intensity this time, the new found depths of it and her were at moments like now, overwhelming. Those suffocated and under experienced emotions fighting to rise in him under her banner.

Kaelyn tilted her head slightly as she watched the tear, then the other trace down his cheek. Her chest roses on an unsteady breath, again she swallowed down the rise of her own as thumbs lifted to brush both of them away, banishing them. His words drew a bubble of a laugh from her, quiet, hushed but no less cathartic - the sort of laugh one gives after emotions leave them raw. Her hands on him trembled, as did her voice. ’Aye... Who'd have guessed we had it in us?‘ Another breathy chuckle, but the sound hitched. She blinked against the sting of tears. ‘Hope for the world after all, maybe…’ She took a slow, deep breath chest and collar rising, before adding softly, 'I am yours. And I am listening now. Slow me down.'



A snored nasally breath woke him and just for a moment he thought he was sat on the floor in the apartment. That was until realisation has his eyes widen, darting to look for the alerted woman at her desk. But, no, she wasn’t there. Lamp light still glowed, but she was nowhere to be seen. He took a breath, calmed himself and listened… she was in the other room. The rogue took the offered opportunity post haste making for an open window. The heavy door being far too noisy to open. He cocked a leg over the ledge, straddled it,then swung the other over ready to lower himself only, the damn scabbard and weapon hilt caught either side of the stone work. It left him dangling half on the piss. Fruk, Fruk, Fruk! He couldn’t get back into the window nor could he make his escape. He stuck a knee into the wall and pushed, rocking him self, hoping to free the clattering scabbard. Finally it gave in. Like a man falling from a window, he crashing into and through the thick bush below. ‘For the love of gods,’ He wheezed. ‘Why is nothing ever frukin’ easy in life.’

[Kaelyn Ianale]

Galmair always got so bitterly cold at night, during the winter months. The sun had sank beneath the city's encapsulating mountains some two hours ago, which made the chill all the more bone-settling. Off between the narrow alley of two buildings, a figure leaned haphazardly against a stone wall, a cloak draped heavy about herself and hood drawn. Her breath played visible, pale tendrils in the air with the night's chill, and she shivered despite the heavy wool wrapped about her as she watched the last remnants of the night's crowd mill about the sprawling market across the way. A small gang of children, pickpockets the lot of them, were playing at more honest folks' purses, and one particularly brave boy had stolen at least three sweet rolls from one of the bakers in the span of the past hour. She had a running bet on how many more he could get away with before either his luck ran out or his stomach rebelled on him.

She hadn't intended to linger quite so long in Galmair, yet a quick visit to the shops had ended with her in the kitchen surrounded by familiar and important faces. Galmair's and Cadomyr's leading councils had gathered for an unofficial, downright casual talk among the warmth of the nearby ovens, and her curiosity had refused to let her simply leave. So Kaelyn had found herself there amid it all, listening to talk of the cities as she cradled an infant to her chest, coaxing Oxiana's newborn son to sleep with a rock. It was the most ideal of reasons to linger, and so she listened with keen ear and watchful eye.

It ended with a confirmation of the creeping suspicion that had been playing at the nape of her neck for some time now. There was a power vacuum happening amid the three cities, a shift of equilibrium that risked dangerous things with Mas practically at their doorstep. Something was at play underneath the thin veil of casual affairs, though she had yet figured out how she could turn it all to her advantage. To their advantage.

"Sunrise aside, let me ask you. Say you get somewhere with this hero's folly. What if you're offered something unexpected, something too good to turn down at what you think is face value?" Drathe's voice, ever present as the conscience there in the back of her mind echoed, and she couldn't help but chuckle into the dark of the night. He was catching on to the game she was considering, as much was evident by the look of knowing he gave her over the mask of a thin smile. "Political power? What a sight that would be, mm? The two of us, all proper powerful in some city or another. Wouldn't know what to do with it." She'd played his question off, brushed it aside.

And yet.

Running her tongue along her teeth, Kaelyn eased off of the wall and slid in among the stream of folk making for their homes and respite for the night. Weaving through the last of them, she made for Galmair's gate and the ever-kept fire beyond it, now abandoned by the farmers with the sun's disappearance. Winter wheat was growing in one of the fields, half-to height, another month before it would be ready to harvest proper for the animals. There was a sharpness to the air as she escaped the cluster of the city, promising snow on the horizon. Gods, she hated snow...

Settling before the fire near the fields, Kaelyn busied herself with stoking life into embers, chucking a large log atop it all. The heat soaked into bones and she languished back near the fire, reaching for the small wood pipe in a bag. She'd not sat and smoked in ages it seemed, and as she lit a kindle to the tobacco within the pipe's bowl, she leaned back. Chill breath and pipe smoke mingled as she blew rings up overhead, studying the lay of the stars. In the silence, broken only by the steady clamor of the city at her back, she let her mind wander.


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"I'm listening, now. Slow me down."

She and Drathe had spent the night locked away in the flat tucked in the far reaches of Runewick. He had reacted to the place with marked hesitation at first, but so quickly it had become a sanctuary for them, a place to lay masks aside and emotions bare at one another's feet. They had spent the better half of the evening sat there at the table, a barely-touched bottle of cheap mulled wine between them playing some symbolism to the shared moment. He had returned irate from some job gone awry, and she had returned weary of too many talks with too little said, flirting not with the obvious danger this time but with politics. An itch of suspicion sat right there beneath the skin.

She had intended to keep the talk between herself and her rogue light hearted. Intentions had a way of being like water cupped in fingers with her though, and in an instant she had lost hold of it. It was the echo of a certain priestess's words that coaxed the question from her. Does he not want you to change? Or does he not want to change you?

So she had asked, and the silence that stretched between them felt nearly too heavy to hold for a moment. He stalled, reached for some excuse of we aren't even drunk yet. But then finally he gave her truth and like a person half drowned breaking the surface, she felt she could breathe again. It took every part of her not to actually gasp for that breath, having been half holding it through his quiet.

"... Yes, I want you to change."

He would never truly comprehend how desperately she had needed to hear those words. It was like a permission given, some distant part of her psyche finally allowing itself to rest with the knowledge that he wouldn’t resent her for being... Less than she was? No. Not less, only different. A soul at least trying to walk the quieter path rather than constantly racing the wind to the cliff’s edge. The toxic, cancerous doubt that he would stay there with her was cut away with every word that followed, his hand pressing to her sternum, over the heart that beat steady and strong beneath it. His heart, embodied, as he had put it.

”It’s not just you anymore. Not just this body. It’s us, it’s my one and only thing I have left of any worth of meaning, my heart, in there with you.” In other words, stop trying to throw it away as an afterthought, a consequence, an ante up to a poorly judged gamble.

They spoke, and in doing so they stoked emotions neither of them were so used to facing. She and Drathe had always flirted at the coy and indifferent, an aloofness having so long defined the deeper parts of them, not only to the outside world but to one another. Years, they had spent at the game long before they had ever fallen in with one another as lovers, and still after - it had proven a nearly impossible habit to break. Yet now, as they took turns pulling from the depths of cold and walled-off hearts the truth of their emotions, laid them out bare not just for one another but for themselves, she found it a heady, cathartic sort of rush.

"Do you remember the river?" Drathe asked suddenly. The river... a memory burned like a violent brand on both their hearts, simultaneously loved and loathed for what it was. The first time they dared to make oaths and promises to one another. The first time she had taken such an oath and utterly shattered it at his feet. "Of course," she replied without hesitation, expecting some further reminiscence.

Drathe said nothing more, though. Gray eyes held her fast as she sat against him, their hands having found one another amid their talking. Calloused palms pressed close, his hands so much larger, so much stronger than her own, scarred in similar ways - ill-gotten tales of wrongly picked pockets and too many plays with a knife’s edge told in them. He drew close, lips playing on hers a sinful sort of distraction as the gentle hold he had of her hands turned. Fingers wrapped about hers, firm at first and then properly tight. She thought nothing of it, not at first, until the pressure grew enough to hedge along this side of painful.

Perhaps she should have pulled away from that pain. She would have, had it been anyone else’s fingers wrapped like vices enough to grind tendon to bone about her like that. That it was him, however, always seemed to make the meager inconvenience of pain worth it. The strange symbolism of the moment wasn’t lost on her as she held fast, watching him with curious eyes until at last he relented. Her fingers tingled slightly as he softened his hold and then drew their laced hands up, tracing kisses along her hands.

”Stupid, I know, but... I just wanted to, to see if you’d pull away.”

”I’m not letting go. Never again.”


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”Miss. Ah, pardon. Miss?” A woman’s voice stirred Kaelyn from her idle recollections of the evening, causing her to blink and look aside. It was Bre, Galmair’s astute guardian of the gate in all her four foot form of metal and glory. She looked on Kaelyn with no small amount of concern, a tight smile on lips as she motioned toward the gate. ”Ain’t safe to be staying outside the gates after sunset these days. Best come in, there’s room in the inn if you’re not wantin’ to go home.” There was an odd hint of knowing in the dwarven woman’s tone, pity almost.

A soft chuckle escaped the desert woman, her breath trailing visible through the chill night air as she realized something uncanny. So many times in her life, that pity had been spot on. She’d found herself in situations so often that she wanted to be anywhere but wherever “home” was that night. The uncanniness was found in the realization that perhaps for the first time in... Ever, Kae’s gut reaction was that home was the only place she properly wanted to be in that moment. Or how when she heard the word “home”, it wasn’t the deserts of the deep south she envisioned but a little flat in Runewick of all places, complete with its ridiculous stuffed horse head over the mantle.

She wanted to be home, but it would be empty tonight- Drathe had some game of his own up his sleeve that he had kept close to chest, working a handful of jobs under the guise of "helping pitiful merchants for an honest coin". She didn't know that he'd ever earned an honest coin in his life, yet it was some long-held unspoken agreement of theirs. She didn't ask, if he wanted to talk of his jobs, he'd tell her. It had saved her the heartache of hearing of his conquests back in the day. Now, though she knew that was no longer the angle he worked, it had become old habit. All she knew was that he wouldn't be home tonight, so there was nothing in that little building worth going back to. The place itself held no importance to her. Places never did.

Besides, she had some ironing out to do here, anyway.

With a nod to the lingering dwarfess, Kae pressed up to her feet with a murmur of thanks - better to go along with Bre than to try and explain why a Runewickian sort was lingering outside the gates. As she pulled her cloak heavily about her shoulders, the woman fell into step behind Bre back through Galmair's gates. "Bre," she said with a light affection, earning herself a mild look from the armed woman. "Would you send word to Councilman Oxiana? He still owes me a drink, and I would really like to cash in on that." The dwarfess mumbled an idle agreement and then waved her off, returning to the post she held by the gate.

Kaelyn chuckled, bowing with proper respect to the woman before she moved off. The market was all but abandoned now, save for a pair of lovers locked in some intimate embrace near the market fountain - Kaelyn didn't look close, knowing full well what lovers got up to when they thought there were no eyes about. A smile curled over her lips as she turned, making for one of the countless nooks and crannies of the city, slipping once more into an alleyway and to a door that led to the underbelly. Galmair was nothing if not defined by its underground, after all, and if there was one thing she had learned in her life, it was that the rats always knew what the cats were up to overhead.

While Oxiana was her source of proper and honest information, Kaelyn had never lived a life content without a spider's web of informants, and so she was making good on a trail of information she'd been pawing at of late. Making for the lower dens of the underbelly, she let herself slide into the comfortable skin of thief and beggar, blending just as easily into the likes of the filthy and downtrodden as she did the rich and well-wined. There was a man she'd heard of, a rogue king of sorts with a network that spanned through Runewick and Galmair both, and she had the creeping suspicion that he was a source she could milk if she played her cards right.

A coin crossed a palm, and she murmured softly to a grizzled old woman in a dark corner.

"Introduce me to this man of yours. Arno, was it?" The woman grinned a toothless beggar's grin and led her further still into the twisted labyrinth of the below, until she was left alone in a single small room with only one obvious way in or out. It was well-decorated despite being hardly bigger than a broom closet. With instructions that she would wait there, Kae found herself abandoned to the small room, choice of a high-backed padded chair or a simple stool for sitting. She suspected she knew which of the two she was expected to take. Choosing neither, she eases up against the wall and leaned back to stone, arms folded, prepared to play the game.

Rogue's courtesy. He'd try her patience, and she'd try his. Lucky him, she had nowhere to be that night.


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"Come on," Drathe had insisted as he slung a bag over his shoulder, his voice light and warm all at once as his free hand took hers. Her head was swimming deliciously with just this side of too much wine, and a giddy laugh slipped from her as she tripped after him into the chill night of a desert autumn. They had just escaped the festivities of Adras held in Cadomyr's tavern, Kaelyn finally forced to drag the man out by the collar lest they end up making a scandal of themselves in front of the whole group of folk. His hands had been wandering the night through, and she'd had almost enough to drink to throw inhibition to the wind. It was the last shred of sensibility in her that had recognized all the warning signs - fingers on thighs, lingering looks, flirtatious threats - that had her herding the both of them out of the door with the choice of going home... Or not. He had decided on the latter.

Let's look at the sky from the desert.

So they had tripped out of Cadomyr's gates and into the dunes, a death waiting for most folk that were punch drunk on wine as they were. Yet Kaelyn trusted her knowledge of a life lived among shifting sands - Cadomyr's dunes were not so different from those she was born upon, albeit a much more pleasant shade of soft tan rather than the rust red that could mix through the Iron Desert. And Drathe, well. Drathe trusted her, for reasons she would always wonder upon.

They had ended up somewhere along the coast, a small patch of soft sand tucked beneath two large palms with the ocean lapping at shoreline a stone's throw away. In his bag, Drathe had brought along a bedroll that he shook out along with a large swath of a blanket that would cover them both. A bottle of wine - no doubt filched from the festivities - and two simple wooden cups surfaced as well. He demanded she settle on the bedroll as he kicked off boots, and she couldn't help but laugh at the whole arrangement.

"You've had this in mind for a bit, haven't you?" she accused him fondly as she took in the sight of a clearly planned arrangement. The bottle of wine was in her hands and she was in the process of working the cork loose as he settled close aside her. "Not planned as such, but I had every intention of watching a sun rise from the sands with you," he explained just as the cork came loose with a hollow pop, and her smile warmed helplessly. Both the words and the gesture had taken her by surprise, and she voiced as much. "I never took you for that sort of romantic."

Neither of them had ever been keen to prescribe to the notions of romance. It went too hand-in-hand with the idea of love, which had always been something of a tainted ideal for them. Drathe - she knew his history, and how he had used the play of lust and emotions to work angles on wealthy women. He'd never been one for proper shows of... What would it be, affection? Nor had she, in truth. She'd had lovers, she'd even been betrothed a time or two, but romance had always been more a ploy of distraction than something heartfelt. The words felt wrong even as they were spoken, twisted into some idle tease that he picked up on almost immediately.

"Romance, symbolic gesture, meaningful moment, I'll let you take it for what you feel."

Coy.

"I want to know what you take it for."

The wine had been poured between them, cups shared on a light toast to one another. Her words had him considering her over a drink, lips pressed thin in thought. She suspected she knew his answer, at least upon a superficial level, yet she watched him keenly nonetheless.

"Romance as a word, feels, mm... tainted. Feels like a thing done as part of a game I once played as a younger, foolish man. Meaningful moment, eh, well that's just what it says. Only, I feel it lacks the conviction of real emotion or attachment. For me, anyway. This is a symbolic gesture. This is me and you sat together as equals. Hearts beating calm and in rhythm. We can talk, maybe ask about past lives while the night has us, the dark can help hide what we don't want to show, if anything..."

His voice trailed off, and as he took a pause she realized the intention held behind the moment, the dark of the deep night around them. Her lips parted to ask, what did he want to know of her, then? She was stilled by a lifting of his finger as he turned a look to her, knowing all too well she was about to step over him.

"Then when the sun rises, we can leave uncertainty or hurt in the night that passed. A new dawn, new day, the light illuminating us to the other. Is that symbolic and meaningful?" He looked to her as the question was asked, and she had hardly managed a faint nod to his words when he did what he - what they - did best and stole the moment of its gravitas entirely with a grin and a shrug. "Or we can just get pissed on that bottle of wine there and sleep under the furs," he suggested, and she had to bite back the desire to cuff him upside the head. She chuckled softly, head shaking at the dismissive reflex.

"No," she said softly as he fell quiet, her head shaking once more. "Let's make this your symbolic gesture, then. Until the sun rises. Nothing unspoken."

He responded with only a single, simple word in turn.

"Our."

A syllable. A word that took such little effort to speak, and yet the way he said it, the implication behind it drew her up. She paused, silence settling between them for a moment before she nodded and spoke again, an effort made to correct herself. To learn, in so many ways.

"Our. Our symbolic gesture."


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The door of the miniscule room swung open, and a stout man with not a hair on his head stepped in with the easy confidence one bore when they knew their place on the food chain, and knew it to be higher than the rabble around them. He didn't immediately take note of the woman leaned haphazardly against the cool brick of the wall at her back, making his way toward the desk as he did. Doing so meant he had to put his back to her, and it was with sheer arrogance that he did so. The rogue sorts were like dogs in so many ways - not just in feral behavior and vicious bite, but in the unspoken conversations they held by body alone. That he put his back to some unknown woman off the streets suggested he thought her little more than just that - a doxy off the streets, likely. She was no threat to him, not yet, and she took note.

Fingers subtly slid a bit of material into the hem of her skirts at the small of her back as she leaned against the wall - a strip of crimson red silk she'd filched, lost in the corner of the room as it had been - and she softened every part of her that she could. Simpering was what she went for, letting him see her for the vulnerable woman he'd take her for. He turned, settling his stocky frame into the chair, and gave her a trailing once-over. He was a proper king of the rogue court, by stature and behavior both. Broad-built, rough-hewn, old enough to know his way around these parts, yet not so old that he was a target for the next young buck on the field. Presence, that was what he had. She'd seen his sort all through the likes of Gynk, Yr-Angur, Salkamar.

She'd have to play this delicately.

"What can I do for you?" he asked, and her suspicions were confirmed. He went straight to business, no lewd remarks or idle suggestion. He did not fear her, but he certainly didn't trust her at face value either. There was a thrill in that realization for Kaelyn as she looked to him and then dropped her gaze, playing at the submissive game. It wasn't often at all that she found herself up against people with proper sense that made them a challenge. Arno the rogue might be a rare exception.

[Drathe]

~A man and a woman dressed for adventure hold short behind some trees. Their attire bears the mark of magic inflicted burns. Their voices bicker over whose was the more agreeable course of action, the mixing of both having caused more risk than needed - a close escape. He had held the magic wielding foe for her to have fallen back but she had run close to lure them with her for him to retire. Both of good intent but a conflict of leadership or following.~

‘You’re in a strange mood, Drathe.’ Said Arno, voice deep set and graveled. ‘Coming down here at such an early hour ~telling me~ what job you’re taking, rather me offering it to ya.’ The robust man eased back in the chair, it’s wooden back-rest creaking some as it took his weight. The rogue forger set him with a keen and pointed look. A warning, despite his casual tone of talk.
‘Well?’ Drathe glowered back. The lamp lights of the Flicker Swale casting shadows about them.
Arno’s hands lifted from the table. The pads of stocky fingers pressing together as they were set down in a relaxed manner upon his thighs, shoulders back. His chin lifted. ‘I thought you weren’t into this line of work any more? Gone all straight and honest. Now, here you are again up with the crowing of the cock.’ His hands parted each other’s company to gesture outward before returning to their place. ‘Here to see me about a weasel.’
‘I need the coin and I want the job. Stop fruking about.’ He shook his head. Drathe was in no mood for this. After last night with Kae, he felt uncomfortable in his skin and needed a release. An outlet for his ill mannered mood to give way for clearer head.
‘Now, now, Drathe. Remember who’s estate your in.’ Arno, reminded him, relaxed in tone. The man didn’t need to raise his voice, didn’t need to make threats. His presence and eyes said everything that wasn’t. ‘We may be old acquaintances but don’t forget your place now. You walked away from what could have been years ago.’ He lifted his right hand languidly, a gesture of the man before him of being just that.

In the odd and subtle world of “professional” roguery, the more organised and career minded rogues often formed small groups referred to as “clinches.” These were not bands of petty criminals but organised crime. In these clinches the more trusted amongst them were referred to as a right or left hand and acted accordingly to their skill sets. The right hand was a striking hand. These hands wielded the weapons, the lock picks, the goods for fencing. They did the deeds and the dos. Whereas the left was the holding hand, these hands held the knowledge, forged the documents, gathered the information, passed the notes and gave out the lies. They did the words and the whispers. Now almost anyone could turn a hand at those trades and did so, but it was a mark of respect in one’s trust and ability to be referred to as such.
‘...Alright.’ Agreed Arno. The raised heavy hand rubbed over his lower face to pinch at his lips before it fell away. ‘Get this done and we’ll forget the bird, the missing stamp from Runewick.'
‘Bu-’
‘Ah.’ Cut in the stocky rogue, pointing his index finger at Drathe. Both men held each other’s pointed look. Then the index finger folded away, thumb rising for wrist to be rolled and thumb the smaller man away to his task.


The sleepless night before, Kaelyn had been standing by the table in the flat, he sat upon his leg casually on a chair next to it. A mild tone of argument to the talk she had just conceded to abruptly. Drathe regarded her with a light, amused upturned smile. ‘...That’s it?’ He looked around before settling back on her. ‘Just, that’s it?’
‘Wanting a row?’ The desert woman retorted, a soft threat at his reaction as she arched a brow grinning wryly.
‘Well, no. But-ah, yes!’ Grinned the rouge broadly, bright eyed. ‘That felt like a hollow victory.’
Her brow remained arched at his reaction as she leaned slowly off the table, stepping around in front of the man carefully. Slinking closer like a cat sizing up its prey, taking the measure of him.
She reached up suddenly and with surprising force, shoved at his chest with flat palms.
‘What are you doing?!’ His grin faded some, still there but the bright eyes were replaced with a questioning, a surprised narrowing. She remained keenly watching him. A pointed look, a heat to it. ‘Truth of it, then? You fruking need to trust me and not be so afraid of me getting hurt. Heroic, Blue, aye. Fine. You made sense.’ She verbally stabbed at him, then again and again.

He knew she was baiting him, stirring his temper. Call it intuition. Call it history being a fair teacher. Why though? He was in a good mood, she seemed reasonably so despite the day’s events. Clearly he had been teasing about the hollow victory and wanting an argument, yet the spite she spat back was, cutting, pointed like a spear to do immediate and deep insult. Heroic Blue. Never had he thought or said himself to be, never even called it so when he had been. Likewise he believed he had never treated her like some glass doll, save for when logic and odds dictated the play so. What shit! So she wanted his temper, despite all she had said before about leaving that game behind. About not playing him for thrills anymore. Old habits die hard.

The rogue pulled a face at her. That grin ever fading under glowering eyes. 'Are you being serious here or?'
‘Deathly.’ She riposted softly, hushed even as she moved to step away from him.
He let his temper flame from the sparks she flinted. He could have just said nothing, smiled and stayed sat at the table with the upper hand. Instead he willingly let her goad him.
‘Don't spout your shit at me then walk off!’ He shoved out at her shoulder, much in the same way she had him. She took a half-step forward then paused, turning partly back to him.
‘Or what?’ She dared, meeting and challenging his look on her. Drathe stood from sitting on his folded leg upon the chair. He pushed it with a force to bang it into place under the table and strode to her. Kae turned fully at him as he did. That keen attention to the man holding fast as she kept her ground, a brow cocked up arrogantly. She went on with her words, finger prodding at his chest as they argued. He swatted a hand at her jabbing. The other then gripping the top of her trapezius, thumb pressing closely to her throat as he pushed her back, firmly walking her until she struck the wall behind with force.
What arrogance, what petty shit talk but worst of all, that betrayal of her word. He let it all fan the flames, that’s what she wanted wasn’t it? A deep seated muscle tensing anger that made his heart hammer. But unlike times before, it birthed something far more visceral and consuming. ‘Go on, teach her this time! Hit her, see her eyes widen with shock!’ Rage filled him and played it’s twisted logic, it’s vengeful reasoning.
‘No.’ He made the absolute demand at the inner voice. A furious and broiling voice bringing with it a promise of sweet tasting power from the fruit bore of anger, if he just let go to it.
‘She’s playing you like a mark. Look at her, so damn cock sure she can dance around the fire she starts for fun. Damn her! Grab that delicate throat and squeeze it, choke a little breath out so she can’t spit that venom at you.’
‘No!!’

Kaelyn‘s breath hitched visibly in her chest. The look in her gaze all temper and burning embers and something just a bit more. A subtle look he was familiar with, that twisted thrill caused by the stoking of each other's tempers. She stared at him, silent a beat then chuckled breathily on a near sneer of a look. ‘Aye, then, Fruk me for being concerned and holding off for you. Do as you're told, kae. Aye sir. -Yes- sir. Tell me to run and I'll -run-. Without looking back.’ Her words lowly, a growl. A purr? But they were venom laced, baiting him on.

His forehead pressed to hers, rocking left then right rolling with the curve. His eyes big, intense, out of focus for being so close. Noses touched and pressed alongside each other. Like two large cats of the desert plains nuzzling with teeth drawn. His hand touched her face holding it captive. Then pressed on around her ear, fingers pushing up and through the hair at the back of her neck, winding into it and pulling with force difficult for her to resist. It’s dominant action made to lift her face, raise her chin up and reveal the delicate neck and throat below. The thumb that had been there from the holding of her shoulder had already eased around for hand to assert it’s dominance over her breath and pulse beneath it. There it paused without press or weight behind it.
‘She’ll won’t stop and then next time she’ll do it again, when will you learn.’ Spat the reasoning of rage. ‘No!!’


Drathe stepped through the threshold of the Hempy. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust as he paused to cast a keen eye about. He had seen Borgate outside by the barrels working his cider apple press, otherwise the room was empty save for a couple of guests and Hook Gowan, the man with a hook for a hand. Good. The trader smiled as the rogue entered, looking aside the doorway ensuring it clear.
‘Drathe.’ Came the warm response. ‘Hook.’ He greeted plainly, walking through the tavern.
‘We playing dice this week?’ The trader inquired with a hopeful tone, hook holding down a small parchment he had taken pause from marking with charcoal. Drathe twitched his head to the back door a few times and strolled to it, boots thunking heavily over the wooden floor. The man with the hooked hand paused a moment, then followed as bid.
Hook was a likeable, jovial man. Always happy to chat his tall tails for an offered drink and just as open of ear when his gums stopped flapping. He plied his trade selling weapons for hunting at his permanent stand in the Hemp Neck Tie Inn. But his real money was made forwarding weapons and tavern whispers to Arno, and maybe the occasional lasony. He was a weasel about a clucking hen house. Only, of late, in a bid to raise his value the weasel had been threatening to seek relations with Gray, Jefferson Gray. He, seemingly a dominant force in the area. A fool's play he knew nothing for the consequences of.
It was still early in the day as Drathe stepped outside and around the back of the tavern. He checked over shoulder to see Hook behind him. The rogue felt angst, irritable and conflicted. The feelings of shame and excitement of the night before not balancing well if at all. They see-sawed his mood into a funk that he felt needed a tonic of a similar if not measured libation of that which had caused them. Hair of the dog if you will. Never had he let her get him so riled up as that, worst being, he knowingly let her, played to it in fact. All over such, nothing, such petty reasoning to rile against genuine good intention. Was he just as bad? Maybe that was why it felt so uncomfortable. Sure he had a temper, that was known. Easy to stoke with the right provocation but just as swift to settle with remedy or Kae’s hand commanding at his jaw, as she did. A storm in a tea cup. But that was not what it was last night. What if she did it again, really did it again? Would he hold himself to measure or let her have what she sought? A difficult, conflicting and uncomfortable question... Yes, yes!, yes? and yes!

He paused short of the thin wooden bridge and turned. Hook drawing up before him as he did. ‘I’m not here for dice, now or next week.’ Drathe said, blunt and direct, matching the look he set upon the trader.
‘Is something wrong?’ Came Hook, with a concerned look about him.


The night between Kae and himself had been hands on and forceful from both sides. Fuelled with a barely restrained temper and spiritful lust. Like the coming together of the angry, vengeful, raging Mars and the strong, sensual, lusting Venus, both of them a melding of the two. Gladiators sparing in the arena of the apartment. Each claiming a selfish visceral and physical reveling in what was inflicted upon the other. Both took what pain was given for the reward of pleasure with it. All the while, Drathe having to pull on the reins of a bestial rage, holding it to compromise. An edge was played upon by both, that by morning light had them aching and marked with cherished red marks and bruises alike.


The rogue took a deep chest filling breath as he cast a look down, hand clenching into a tight fist. The breath was then exhaled sharply through his nose. He twisted just slightly to his right. ‘I’m sorry, Hook. This isn’t personal. Arno, said to wind your neck in, know your place under -him-. This is your only warning.’ With that, the rogues fist came lashing up and into the traders face, knuckles hitting the unsuspecting man clean in the jaw. Hook, caught by surprise and startled by the blow fell sidelong into the wall of the tavern. Drathe followed up with a hand to the scruff of the neck, pulling him across the stone work to accept another punch to the face. The trader ducked. Drathe’s fist cracked into the man’s head scuffing over his hair and into the stone of the wall behind. He felt the skin scrape off his knuckles, the bone bruise.
‘Just take it and be done with.’ He growled through clenched teeth as he again stuck at his target. A blow landing to the hard skull, then to the cheek, then one last one to make good on the message. A black eye it’s intention. The weasel raised his hands out from covering his face. ‘Alright, alright, I’ve got it!’ Came his appeal to the rogue. He shook the man forcefully, before letting him go, the trader sagging against the wall and sliding down it. Drathe stood there, his heart pounding, chest rising and falling in heavy rhythm. ‘Good, make sure people see your black eye, if he knows I went easy on you we’ll both be in trouble.’ The rogue exhaled a sighed breath, shoulders rolling deeply and relaxing some before turning to leave over the bridge. He paused. 'Don’t say a word about this to Borgate! A bad customer, that’s all it was.' With that he strode off shaking out his throbbing hand, feeling somewhat lighter. He headed to the flat, to “home” where she was. ‘Eh, woman, what you do to me!’ he chuckled roguishly, head subtly shaking.

[Drathe]

‘You saw them?’ Asked Arno gruffly. The flickering flames of the oil lamps in the Flicker Swale casting a glow about him. Drathe nodded a few shallow times. His gaze coming away from the hatchet embedded in the table to look upon the thick set face of the man.
‘They were laying there hacked up like a butchers lot.’ He sniffed hard, nose wrinkling briefly. ’Marikus and whoever the red head lad was were stripped naked, nothing left on them save for his broken wooded hammer. Raspot was tied at the wrists, throat cut. They played with him.’
Arno growled a lingering deep throaty rumble. His large hands forming fist upon the table top. ‘Ratty little shits! I’ll extirpate them!’ A fist thumped down hard on the table like a judges gavel passing sentence. ‘And all the fool Marikus for looting bodies after Mas. I damn well told him!’ His look flicked to Drathe, face a show of anger, eyes glowing with heat. Drathe eased from his perch on the table, sat as he was on it’s edge, back never fully given to the man on the other side.
‘Well, if that’s all you needed.’ He said calmly, slowly starting to walk to the door.
‘Where you going?’ Barked, Arno. Thick finger pointed agitatedly at the rogue.
‘I know what your temper’s like. I’ll not hang about to be it’s bearer.’ He countered, turning to face the forger taking a few backward steps.
‘For the best!’ Arno agreed gruffly as he looked aside, his attention on an array of ink bottles and droppers. Each one with a curl of parchment and dark stain under it. ‘Come and see me tomorrow, I’ve got rats and a mole that need sorting.’
‘You know I don’t do ~that~ work any more.’ He replied casually, almost at the door.
‘You do now.’ Came Arno’s reply. His gravelled, deep voice a demand with every expectation of it being fulfilled. Drathe said nothing as he left.

Mas had been tough on everyone from the nobles to gutter snipes. This had not excluded the Rogue and the Desert Wind. Things had been their usual ebb and flow between them as was in their nature, though Kaelyn had become quieter if such a thing could be said. A little more reserved and quicker to irritation. The abdominal wound she had taken during the fighting was now a handsome scar and her arm seemed to have healed well, though he had seen her stoically nursing it after good use on many an occasion. She had never given satisfaction to questions asked about it. Nor had they spoken much of that night. Stood before Sirani’s alter, two lovers unified in the fate they imagined bestowed them. Kae would dismiss the inquiry with change of conversation or busy herself with prep for glass blowing, something she had taken to with a passion of late and no less skill in its art. She was still very much her, only, a little distant from him, from everyone, keeping to herself. It worried him.

The way Kae had held his hand on that last night of Mas. Tight, secure, a bond of fingers and palm never to let go as they stood silently under a night sky of darkest inky blue. The not too distant horizon aglow with mana induced fires, the sky swarming with magical embers fluttering from the forking tongues of flame and drifting on the hot breeze like orange glow bugs. The sands of Cad under foot moved with the shadows cast as the shouts and screams, the clashes of metal and breaking of bones filled the air. One could close their eyes and still hear it with the clarity of a scribe having turned spoken word to ink on parchment to be recalled.

He and Kae stood watching the futility of the fighting, tired, worn and wounded. They had pitched in to battle against the skeletons that emerged from the portals. Fought in the skirmishes against the animated bones only to be forced back by the weight of reappearing numbers and wayward bolts of magic from the litches. It was desperate. The safety of the strong walls of Cad were unreachable, the gates having been blocked by fires trapping people both inside and out.

Kaelyn, like others had been toyed with, shown visions by Prea. Drathe had been supposedly poisoned by dagger. A simple but effective ploy to get at what the woman cared for the most. It was time to make a choice, see if they could make a difference, cause distinction, something, anything but watch the sweat and action of people turn to blood and stillness as they fell.

The two had turned from the clashing of the dead and living and moved away into the night. She leading him hand in hand and he trusting her to do so. Such weight upon her shoulders in the choices to be made, the game to be played with a half deck of cards. Sirani would have been proud at them that night as they stood before her alter despite it being tainted with an insidious presence. A dark humour to it being there. Love and death, what a game. And so it was and concluded for a time, Inara the keen eyed archer having unexpectedly closed the portal. An arm for an arm was the unintended conscience. A lucky escape for two, or a galvanising to unification?

‘Drathe!’ Senka caught his arm in passing. A plain looking woman with blond hair, always in black and always with hat on. Few knew that it hid an ugly bald streak aside her head where the hair had been cut away and scared scalp left. ‘Did you find them?’ She asked, eyes a little wider and shimmering with the dancing reflections of torch light. He nodded solemnly before giving a subtle shake of head, a brief close of eye. Her head dropped as she looked to the small boat beside her.
‘Arno told him not to go out. Bloody idiot.’ She said despondently, hands up and scooping blond tendrils of hair back under her hat. ‘He’s put us all in danger, a weaker state.’
Drathe scrunched a cheek as he followed her look and continued up and over the underground river to the alter on its opposite side. ‘He was an arsehole, too capricious. I don’t see it as a loss. It is a damn shame about the others though.’
‘It was’t just Marikus’ lot we lost.’ She responded, eyes meeting his as the rogues attention returned to her. ’I heard him’ Senka flicked a look and nod of head towards the direction Drathe had come from. ‘Shouting at that Halfling message runner. Mortikai and his partner we also killed. I don’t know how but that leaves us thin. Not many of us left.'
Drathe’s head dipped forward and for a moment nothing was said… ‘I liked him, always quick with a joke or humorous wit.’ His lips pressed thin and flat. ‘You stay safe alright, aint no one else around here that would care for a lump of stone like you.’ He smiled lightly, hardly one at all.
‘That lump of stone is an alter! And it would do you good to lay an offering or two once in a while!’ She returned, head on angle, eyes wider.
He had already started walking away as he spoke over shoulder. ‘Didn’t do the others much good did it!’


The ale was thin but he supped at it, good enough as it was to quench a thirst. Wick's tavern was a tidy well kept place. Not an ale house or back alley bar where working people frequented for dice and sloshing ale over sawdust strewn floors. It was always quiet save for the odd pair of scholars discussing magic or old scripts over wine. Maybe a couple of farmers easing the days hard work with a tankered, but even they seemed to always be reserved in temperament. It was dull as he sat alone save for the bar and innkeeper. He played the pad of a finger around in a small spillage of ale upon the bar top, tracing wet idle lines. This whole thing with Arno was threatening to drag him in, pull him back to old ways and wiles. He had changed, grown from who he was back when he used to work with the clinch. Especially now Kae had returned. There were times when conflicts of interest or emotions pulled him in both directions at once. Where as before something would have been a sure direct, clear definitive choice. He now sat many a time at proverbial crossroads having to consciously choose which path to take, or as it seemed more to him, skirt the edges of both for the satisfaction of none. Emotions and morals, two things he could expertly play at but now to feel them, to actually have a tangible sense of them. This was troublesome as much as intriguing. Kae had stirred things, dragged out and set free emotions long ago bottled up and forgotten. As for morals, well, he had been riding that seesaw for the past couple of years trying to be a better man in his older, wiser age. A thought played him.

The camp fire crackled and spat as the flame took to the fresh wood added to it.
“You know me, I am not an emotional person, right?” Drathe replied casually, implied more as a comment than the questioning tone it was said in.
Aleytys’ face brightened with a grin. ‘You want a honest answer to it? As always?
He nodded. “Of course.”
“You are full of emotions my dear, but you hide it between sarcastic words and a boyish grin. You need this wall to pretend and be content with yourself.”
The rogue pulled a face at her. The mix of a grin and wince. Closed eye, cheek scrunched up.
She gave a light chuckle at that. “Truth is hard to bear aye?”

The tankered was set back on the bar as he swallowed deeply. Yes, it was. The truth of it got in the way of simple decisions, easy life choices now made complicated by it. Morals could be circumnavigated like islands in the sea, but emotions he was finding, well they were the unavoidable weather that at times had to be sailed through. The metallic clink of a coin set down on wood caught the barkeepers attention. She moved toward him, cloth in hand sliding over the counter to the small stain of spilt ale. ‘Ay Keep, I read a book the other day about the emotional struggles of a rogue, said each emotion was like falling down the stairs… The ending was pretty con-descending.’ He grinned boyishly and bright. The barkeeper simply looked on him blankly as the coin was slide off the counter into open hand. ‘Aye, well, think on that, you might get it later.’ He waved a hand as if to push the moment away. ‘For now, I’ve got to see a man about a mole.’ With that he left.

[Drathe]

The tournament had begun. Names of the eclectic mix of contestants had been pulled from a vase and the first pair were taking their place on the sand under the beady, watchful eyes of the Cadomyrian S’rrt the lizard umpire. Drathe felt a sense of excited calm, a simple clarity in the understanding of what was to come and a heart quickening thrill from it all. It wasn’t a fight to the death so unless the gods were feeling cruel or fate dealt a truly bad hand of cards, minor injury and lost pride were an easy wager for a chance at the prize. The plan was easy, take the beating and beat them back harder and smarter. He was no warrior, no graceful swordsman, simply a brawler good with a sharp blade through necessity. The crowd and other waiting combatants sat on simple wooden chairs around the sand square watching, jovially calling out wagers and bets to one another. He did not.

Drathe cast a glance to his right, the chair beside him empty. The rogue’s shoulders sagged an inch as he sighed through his nose. She had not come. Kaelyn had been falling ever inward into what drove her to spend all waking hours spinning, moulding, shaping and crafting glass. Forms and colours he had never before seen or thought possible. The beauty in their craftsmanship a juxtaposition to their seemingly twisted nature and design. But what did they represent? What even were they? The local traders refused to take them, even for free and so the apartment slowly filled with them, second only to charcoal sketchings and scribbles of designs.

His gaze shifted back to the fight that had begun, eyes briefly casting down to tie the ends of a red silk ribbon to his forearm. Then he relaxed, easing back into the wooden chair. Noting each fighter in turn. Small things, like which was their striking hand, how long were their arms, did they roll with a blow or take it, did they announce their attack with their shoulders, balance on their feet or kick about. If the weapons and armours were the hand of cards dealt, then these tells were the ticks of the players. Little things to give the advantage if noticed. Then came his turn.

He rose from the chair casually. Doffing his coat and folding it in half he laid it over the back rest and took to the sand. The man fought good against a well matched opponent. Drathe’s blunt and direct approach while lacking grace, won him through against the more flamboyant style of his challenger. He took back to his chair setting his coat neatly aside him on the floor and waited once more.

The rogue looked up and around the crowd briefly for any sign of Kaelyn. None. She hardly spoke to anyone any more, keeping her self away from the crowd, from the apartment, from him. Occasionally he would return home to find a new glass sculpture discarded somewhere as if not good enough to take a place worthy of easy sight. Sometimes she would leave honey cakes or a poured glass of drink for him, a brief little note with words of trust me only more verbose though short to read. Little signs that he was still in her thoughts. He did, trust her that was, but he worried something had changed in her dearly missing her close companionship.

Next round and a close call. Aggressive and heavy hitting. No punches were pulled by either opponent, every weakness exploited, every strike a hard won en-devour. Drathe held his ground, feet shuffling flat to the sand making circles in it as his aggressor tried to catch him off side. This combatant had bested the knight Alytys Lamar in the previous round. No small feat as he himself had spared with her many a time, good friends that they were. Years of brawling in and out of taverns over cheated dice games and broken hearts had taught him well. So to had paid work where a heavy hand was needed. All those misspent years culminating in a man of quiet reasonable fighting skill. And skill enough it was that had him win this round too.

Again he took to his seat aside the sand, looking down at the grains that fell from the tops of the toes of his boots back to the rippled, dimpled sand under foot. He had followed Kae one night, curious as to why she stayed away from the apartment and people. Cloaked in the dark of night and keeping distance, he walked behind the Desert Wind as she lead on, lamp held up in hand and glowing about her. Through Wick they went and along the old roads out to the deserts of Cad, where close to some old stone ruined buildings he lost her. ‘Shit.’ He cursed softly turning and walking a pace in the sand only to come face to face with her.
‘Good job I’m not a bandit on the rob else you'd be trying to pull a knife out of you right about now. Why you following me?’ She spoke with a short matter of factness.
‘I just wanted to know you were safe, that’s all. ‘ He replied, hands up in a gesture of surrender.
‘I was until some rogue started following me in the dark.’ She said curtly, irritation in her eyes only for it to ease with a light but genuine smile. ‘I’m fine Blue.’ She continued, softer of tone. ‘Like I said before, just trust me and let me be until I’ve figured it out.’
‘Figured what out?’ The rogue questioned, his turn for a rise of irritation.
Kaelyn reached out, fingers and thumb taking opposite side of his jaw line and holding it.
Grey and brown eyes met and held, the faces of their surround pale in the full moon light that bathed the desert. Her face, those eyes, they could speak, could convey literal words and meanings unlike anyone he knew. Drathe sighed through his nose, relaxing some into the hold of her hand. Then she closed the space, head lifting to kiss him. A warmth and firmness of press that reassured him. They spent the night together quietly in the desert, a secluded spot she clearly had been coming to often, a bed roll and bag of more charcoal scribblings already in situ. The next morning she had gone and her reclusiveness returned.

‘Drathe, take your place.’ Called the lizard umpire impatiently. The rogue was pulled from thought only to groan. There waiting from him on the sand was Drugar. A Dwarf of indomitable reputation and the champion of previous fighting tournaments. It was the final round and it was going to hurt no doubt about it…

The crowd cheered as he took to the sand at the end of the tourney to collect his prize. The hint of a wince in his eye as he limped some from a painful knee. A cup was given, handsome in it’s simplicity. Second place winner of the mirror tournament etched into it’s face. That would do and so would the prize money. After all no one hunts the jackle for sport, but plenty are a lions head upon a trophy hunters plaque. More so, and the true prize and point of the game, his game, was to step in from the peripherys of life and stand full view and in sight. A man always sat at the side of the table never it’s head, always on the outside edge of a crowd or just off the shoulder of a conversation.

Wick was changing, opportunities opening, people and the games they were playing starting to show. Now was the time to be known and put his weight behind intentions. The second place here at the tournament meant people would know that to cross him, you’d best be a heavy hitter.

[Drathe]

Drathe stood before Alysa’s trade stall in Runewick, a small bread bloomer in hand, still warm from the oven. Behind him, a pair of children played as their mother and father conversed with the councilor. ‘So you want to rent a room ay.’ Drathe sucked in the air through his teeth, lips pulling over them into a grin. ‘Wick is an expensive place to live you know.’ His head cocked just a little as his brows rose over wider eyes. The rogue had worked his skills to get a position of somewhat importance on the council of Runewick. More importantly to him, he had worked himself into the role of governing the rent and it’s flow of coin. The perfect venture for a man of his talents. Extortion and rent skimming could have him easily put aside a tidy sum of gold each year for minimal effort and keep him in the loop to the coming and going of things.

The woman pocketed her hands and after a moment of rummaging pulled out a meager sum of coins. She offered them up. ‘This all we have, truly. We have debts you see. We lost our crops in Mas. We will pay whatever the rest is in time, we promise! We couldn’t afford to live in Galmair or Cad, we had to move.’ She looked to the man at her side. Thin, but broad shouldered, a working man with an honest face. Drathe gazed on them both with a magpie like eye. ‘…Well, how does 50 gold sound?’ Their faces sank along with their shoulders. ‘Tell you what then.’ Drathe continued with a boyish grin. ‘You pay 40 total and we put it down on the ledger as 30. I keep 10 gold, you get the place 10 gold cheaper and we all win.’ His attention turned to the bread he held, giving time for the offer to sink in.

The scuffling sound of the children playing behind stopped and was replaced by the crying wail of one calling out for his father. Drathe ignored it as the fresh bread was lifted to his nose, the sapphire ring Kaelyn had given him sparkling on his finger and a long, slow inhale of it’s aroma was had. The rogue savoured it, eyes closing as it’s comforting smell unexpectedly soaked through him and under a locked door into the dusty room of old memories.

‘Father! FATHER!’ Cried the young lad, arm out and reaching for a man dressed in bakers garb being held by two armed guards. The boy’s mouth was covered then and held closed by a leather gloved hand, he too being held against his will aside his mother, all of them in the street before a tired and meager looking bakers shop with stall.

The baker, a lithe man, grey of hair with dark set, tired eyes pleaded with a noble looking woman. She snorted a breath through her sharp and pointed nose as her delicate chin rose pressing her thin lips together. She waved an exorbitantly ring clad hand as if wafting away a bad smell and with that gesture, the baker was dragged away, his pleads ever louder and frantic yet still falling on deaf ears.

The young lad sobbed as he trembled, tears running down his boyish face and staining the worn leather glove uncomfortably pressed over his mouth. Again, the noble woman waved her hand and with it, he was shoved harshly into his mother. A thin and plain looking woman, flour from the days labour over her stained pinnie and hands. She clutched him too her with a protective embrace as she cried, her chest jerking with spasms of despair. ‘We have nothing! NOTHING!’ she shrieked, voice breaking with emotion. ‘We gave everything we have, every copper.’

The noble woman looked at the bakers wife with a smirk. ‘You did, yes, but that does not pay the debts you owe on rent.’ She said in a voice that toyed like a cat with a mouse. ‘You’ll work off his debts for the rest of your life else I’ll take the boy, bread does not make the coin you’ll need to satisfy my return of monies.’ She gestured the bejeweled hand once again, a brief, impatient flick of fingers for the woman and child to be gone to the bakery.

A few days later the young lad and his mother stood aside a ship in port with nothing but a bag of bread and the clothes they wore. ‘I won’t let that rich bitch take you, Drathe. Never!’ She squeezed his hand in hers tightly, looking down to him with a mothers reassuring smile. They waited in line for what felt like days to his small legs, then, just as they were about to embark, his worn and hole filled boots thunking a single step onto the gangplank, his arm was snatched and yanked back with a force that sent him sprawling over the ground. The Rich Bitch had found them. There was screaming, crying, violence and words of threats and promises.
The boy and his mother never made it on board, never took passage to a life new, a life to start a fresh story and make a fortune fit to live in luxury. No, they were sent to a whore house, his mother to work off their debt under the watchful eye of the madam with her only asset left to her and he to sweep the floors and empty piss buckets. There they lived a life as old as time, a stale finish to a story, to make pittance fit to live in all but squalor. His father, never seen again.

‘Drathe, sir? Sir? Are you alright?’ Asked the woman beside him, hand over a child’s head now pressed to her body in a comforting manner. He blinked a few times coming back to the now. He shook his head subtly, hand rubbing at his wet eyes threatening to shed a tear and betray his reputation. ‘Eh, aye, just, got some flower in my eyes or something.’ He swallowed deeply before cleaning his throat, regaining composure. ‘5 gold, call it 5 gold all in. It’s a decent room with space and comfort enough for you all.’ He said plainly with a warm and simple smile, an honest and generous offer.

That night he had gone to the spot in the desert where he had followed Kaelyn too some time before. Her simple little camp where she seemingly spent her time away from the crowds was deserted. No bedroll, no bags, the circle of fire stones filled with sand. The rogue felt empty, like a broad and sturdy tree trunk hollowed out of it's heartwood and alone like a pup lost of its pack. He sat upon the sand a moment then laid back to look up at the stars with his only companion, a bottle of rum. Tears slowly pooled in the corner of his eyes, the stars above blurring and casting long twinkling rays through them, as the warm burn of spirit drink ran from the sides of his mouth staining his stubled cheeks.

[Drathe]

He had marched with haste through the under ground tunnels. Dim, lamp lit passages of stone walls under the town of Galmair. Damp dirt and loose stones were trod under foot as torches flickered and licked like snake tongues in their holders as he passed. Finally, with a cautious look over shoulder, he was there.

The air was still and close feeling in the Flicker Swale. Drathe stood before the forger’s table, hands braced upon its top, taking his weight as he leaned in towards the larger, broad shouldered man sat behind it. ‘You called?’ Asked Drathe, brow raised in annoyance. ‘I aint your gutter snipe to beckoned at will.’

Arno carefully set the quill to rest upon the parchment it marked, with a smooth and deft motion of hand - surprising for its size. Slowly, his large, stocky, bald head rose, the skin a glow of orange hues from the lamps that gave light to the chamber ‘Yet you still came post haste.’ He smiled with just a hint of sarcasm. His keen eyes on the rogue as he filled his chest with a languid inhalation and paused… ‘So, you want a little division between the towns, Drathe.’ Spoke Arno. Gruff, stern and matter of fact. The weight of the words heavy in the air. Silence followed as the two men locked their gaze, challenging, daring, sizing each other up. Cyote and Jackal. The flickering shine of lamp light danced in their eyes as if each pair were it’s own respective stage. A flame giving spark and setting alight the inflamatory notion put forward… ‘I’ve, been working on it.’ Replied the rogue. His eyes narrowing. Tone a little unsure as to the forger’s intentions.

Arno leaned back in the chair, the wood creaking its discontentment at taking the shifted burden of the man’s bulk. ‘I know.’ He said simply, eyes never leaving Drathe. ‘And I wa-’
The rogue shook his head subtly, hand rising from the table in a gesture to cut into the talk. ‘You know?!’ He asked, temper soaking his words. Arno’s large hands opened out as if to show his innocence, though the wry grin that toyed with his lips was in contrast. ‘It’s my job to know Drathe. I might reside in the dark but I am never ~in~ the dark. Broth when still goes thick and burns. Now with Jefferson Gray gone, there is no spoon to keep it stirred.’

Drathe growled quietly. ‘What’s in it for you then? I assume ~this~ here,’ the raised hand motioned a circular finger between them. ‘Is to let me know, ~you~ know and keep me under thumb?!’
‘Please.’ Came Arno. Calm and measured. ‘We’ve known each other too long for such superficial games. You’re going to need help and I’ve got my own dealings.’ The forger looked to a small chest and a pile of folded parchments, all manner of coloured silk ribbon tails poking from them. ‘What help can you possibly give me, you don’t even know my opening move?’ Drathe asked as he stood upright.

Arno’s bald head flicked a curt nod to a large, brown muslin wrap at the side of the table. Drathe held still, eyes on it. ‘It wont bite for fruk sake, Drathe. Open it.’ The forger’s voice never rose in volume but carried all the weight of the demand. The rogue did so, reaching over and pulling the package closer. He undid the string and slowly eased back a fold to reveal what was beneath. Cloth, lusty and bold in its red colour. ‘I believe you already have their counter parts.’ Spoke Arno, as he took up the quill and dipped it into the ink pot. A broad and genuinely pleased smile about him.
Drathe said nothing as the bundle was tucked under arm. He turned and after a few paces away paused. ‘Are you going to fruk me, Arno?’ He asked without looking back over shoulder.
‘Not while there are dogs on the street Drathe.’ Came the reply, followed by the tapping of quill against ink pot. The rogue’s lips pressed into a thin line, he nodded a few subtle times then left.

[Drathe]

A woman stood on the crest of a sand dune, a sky of purest blue above her as Drathe scaled the sand behind. Tendrils of dark hair flicked and waved about Kaelyn’s shoulders, played with by the dry wind that blew about her. Folds of the skirt she wore pressed around her legs and rump revealing their shape and form, lapping over them like waves on sand banks. A scarf of silk billowed out from around her neck, rolling through the hands of the wind to flick its tails. ‘Kae!’ He called, reaching up and out to her and she turned with a smile as warm as the sun for him and for a moment, he felt it, he felt warmth again.

‘I see the old man is sitting on a bench warming his belly in the sun!’ Came the voice of Aleytys Lamar, Knight of Cadomyr. It pulled Drathe from the daydream, sat as he was, slouched on the wooden bench in Wicks street - eyes closed. ‘Eh, it's you.’ He replied with the partial offering of a smile, anything more was held back by a rising feeling of sadness. Actually, it wasn’t a rising feeling, not like the tide coming in with its ebbing waves. This was the opposite. A drawing out of the sea, a taking away of the rolling swell and possibilities to ride it. This was hollow, an empty tankard, a harp with no strings, a deep, dry well with not even an echo to be had from it. He wished for temper, to be angry at Kaelyn for disappearing and at Aley for disturbing the day dream. The heat of that would at least be something, a feeling of fullness. But -this- feeling, this was draining and cold.

‘No, it’s a toad in disguise!’ She riposte in a pithy tone. ‘You just come here to pester me, mm?’ The rogue questioned casually with a wave of hand at her, eyes still closed. The knight tilted her head some as she watched curiously a moment. ‘You have the spirit of a snail my friend.’ The sound of liquid swilling within a bottle piqued his interest begging an eye to be opened. There she stood, in an ensemble of black clothes, well made and tailored to fit nicely. Not eccentric or boastful but well made in the current fashion and comfortable. Quite a change from the fine, well cared for and expensive armour she usually wore. In her languidly outstretched hand, a bottle of rum. His favourite.

A grin touched his lips as a sharp sniff of air was taken. He drew himself up from slouching and patted the empty bench beside him. ‘So you do have a little life in you yet.’ She jested lightly, taking the seat beside and setting the bottle atop her thigh. ‘How are you holding up?’
Drathe nodded a few subtle times, lips pressed. Then his head bobbed a little. ‘...I'm good.’
‘Sure... why do I even ask.’ She grumbled, pressing up against the backrest. ‘You could lie better!’ The rogue reached out a hand to give her thigh a light and playful squeeze. 'Because you're a true friend and you care. That’s why you ask.’ He replied softly. Aleytys’ face was unreadable as she looked on him and he gazed keenly back at her.

Aleytys was a painters delight. A balance of the sexes that made both man and woman alike look on her with admiration. She had a masculine strength about her, a square jaw line, strong shoulders and firm posture all in balanced harmony with feminine pride, athletic proportions, small nose and a smile that shone through eyes often accentuate with dark smokey eye shadow.

‘Drathe?’ Aleytys called to him softly as she tapped the bottle to his arm. ‘Let’s drink, you need it.’ They had walked from town out to the coast, a fallen log making for a bench and the rustle of leaves from the plentiful trees in the light afternoon breeze a pleasant background noise. Theirs was an odd friendship. As people they could not be more opposite if they tried. She was honourable, honest, virtuous and steadfast. He was unscrupulous, devious, devilish and ungovernable. But despite that, she had always been there, never left, never turned away, she was the only true genuine constant in his life and yet he had always kept her at a distance, always kept her guidance on his life passive. There were reasons for that, her reputation for one. No good would come of it for her to be closely associated with him and then there was that something else, something more tangible, a connection that would do them both no good.

They worked their way through the bottle sharing it turn for turn. Talking as slowly the familiar glow of rum worked its way into the blood. Her gaze settled on his face, studying it a moment before she looked out through the tree line. ‘You still love her?’
‘I've always loved her.’ He replied simply. ‘I don't know why. She drives me fruking mad. We fight like cat and dog, she loves to push my coat buttons, but,’ he chuckled silently with a shake of head, no joy or humour to it. ‘I just do.’ The knight reached a hand towards the bottle and took it from him with a snatch. Her brow lifted as the bottle was tipped to her lips, the rum inside it making a swilling sound. The talk deepened and the rum shallowed in the bottle. They sat closer now, facing each other, straddling the log as if it were a rough barked chessnut mare. Their eyes caught each others and held, only this was different, like the thirsty reaching for water, the hurt craving for poppy milk. The gap between them had grown smaller still. ‘Someone will get hurt.’ He warned, his voice soft in volume, a raised whisper. The tone though was in clear juxtopositon. A genuine telling of caution, of prophecy… …Their lips met.

Months later, in the court room of Runewick with is stuffy air, heavy with the smell of the woods from the chairs and tables, nervous sweat and the passing waft of herbal perfumes one would attribute to the wealthier of those attending. Drathe sighed deeply as he adjusted himself in the chair. It gave a little creek or two at the movement. Never, NEVER would he have thought he would actually find himself in a court of law, not that the miss-adventures through his life had not brought him close. Broken laws and accusations were being thrown around and contested by those that prosecuted and defended. People bickered quietly in the crowed at what they heard as he watched through weary eyes, shoulders sagging. If he cocked an ear and listened hard enough, he was damn sure he could hear the gods laughing at this, this beautiful comedy of calculated circumstance. The briefest hint of a smirk crept over his lips, eyes narrowing by the smallest of margins. It all fitted, it all pulled together the pulling apart perfectly.

Councillor Caswir nudged his arm. ‘Drathe, I agree with Deanna, uphold the objection raised.’ Drathe nodded subtly, raising a finger towards the front benches of the court room where the well versed Avaroth, confident in his abilities and fluency, paused in prosecuting the unfortunate Aswe. Who, despite her admirable attempt, was eloquently outmatched. He could feel that smirk playing his lips again. A rogue and a gambler now sat at the top bench. Head judge of three. The beautiful irony. He had worked hard to gain a seat on the council, for the most part doing an honest job and currying favour. Now arguably at a pinnacle of this path, he did his duty as required. It was just a shame it was so boring. The court room drama played on as his mind wandered in-between interruptions.

Kealyn, the Desert Wind danced before him. Her bare legs smooth and toned, catching the glow of fire light. She looked incandescent, warm and deep in rich golden hues. Her hair waved out like black ribbons of silk as she bowed her head and turned, moving to an unheard music. She smiled wide and fondly before the sound of her laughing in the joy of the moment filled him… Then it faded away.

As the days of Kaelyn’s unexpected departure turned to weeks then to months, that lush orchard of hope he had nurtured for her return, for her touch, her smile, her guidance and rein had started to wither and die. What had started out as the smallest touch of anxiety, a speck of rot, had grown and spread from tree to tree. The rich soil they grew in, made of her promises now dry and effeted gave no resilience. Each plant full of the fruit of memories made and futures to be had withered and contorted, until he had pulled them apart with a sickle of rumination and frustration at history repeating before finally casting them from possibility. With the pruning of each branch of hope, at the pulling of each root of possibility, the world around him and its connections, its hopes and joys and futures drew his ire.

Always on the outside of the crowd, the edge of a conversation, within reach but not touching. That was how he had played his life. Known to be trouble yet warm of heart and distant enough to never truly be shunned or anathematized. Well, now that changed. Now he would be right in the thick of it all pushing and pulling until it looked like his ruined orchard, tearing it apart like his now effeted heart. Nothing deserve to be loved or cherished or cared for. All of it was built on promises never kept, lies to achieve passing wants. Yellow, red or blue, love, body or mind it fostered only cold contempt behind those warm and keen grey eyes.

‘Objection!’ The call drew the Rogue back from thought to the court room. He waved his hand dismissively for the debate to continue. The outcome of the trial was of no consequence, but the very action of the spectacle pulled at the threads which held friends and foes together. With minimal effort and gentle guidance, said threads were being tugged at and freyed, the gaps appearing in the tapestry. Dogs were let off the lead to run as they wished, barking and growling, even biting as they hunted their own agendas and all beautifully under the veil of the laws of the land. The events in Cadomyre recently were almost too good to be true, self seeding in fact. He had stood there watching it all unfold at the hands of others. The only input he need give was a smile and a gesture of an authoritative hand for it to continue. Aleytys though had been there, watching him in surprise at his lack of perceived commitment to satiate the situation. But, why have dogs and bark yourself when you can sit by the fire with your feet up. Until that is, you needed a job done good. Every man and his dog knows, if you want it done that way, you’ve got to do it yourself. Still, he was getting bored of sitting around, time to truly get stuck in.