Post by Joliette Thorne on Jun 8, 2007 3:44:11 GMT -5
Jabari blinks, giving a mis-trusting glance at the woman, "Wolf.... In sheepskin?" Said aloud, though mainly to himself as he starts to sit, not taking the offered ale, but just seating himself, rigid and tense.
Tenebrae shook her head. "Not any more, pet. Rather attractive vampire in.." She glanced down to her skirt. "Naga-hide. Just trying to run my pub, like."
Jabari looks her over a bit, shrugging, "Don't know if that is a... Compliment or an insult.." The assassin blushing gently, "I tend... To think most women are very attractive." His gaze lowering as he gives in, buying an ale.
Tenebrae nodded again, as Steadman slid the tankard over to the stranger. "So...," she said, pursing her lips a bit. "Are you new to the lands, pet? You look a bit unfamiliar with it all."
Jabari looks down at the ale, instead of Tenebrae, nodding as he inspects the liquor, sampling it gently, never verbally answering her.
Tenebrae offered him a gently maternal look. "Ah, well, you'll settle in soon enough." She turned aside, as though to continue caring for the deathly still and unkempt bird she'd lain down before. And, with a quick flick of wrist, threw a silver coin toward the man at a velocity that'd give him a decent bump on the skull were he not lively about it.
Jabari snaps his arm upward, catching it deftly in his palm though he tosses it back to Tenebrae, not saying a word.
Tenebrae caught the coin, with equal dexterity, a tiny smile curling the corners of her lips. "And what is it that you do, stranger?" She made the enquiry as though nothing at all had happened, tucking the coin back to her waist-pouch.
Jabari looks down at the liquor, "Before the refusal... What I was told." His head shaking, "Could not.... hurt that woman."
Tenebrae frowned a little. "Refusal..?" He'd said enough for her to get a loose picture of a man disobeying commands, in some way. "Who was it you served, then?"
Jabari shrugs his shoulder, "'Whoever I was given too... That is... Till the crown heir took over his blessed colosseum . Then, he used us as his own personal firing squad, can't say I minded then though..."
Tenebrae stooped to take up her feathered burden which, far from being utterly lifeless, stirred a little, its beaking gaping and fish-scale coloured eyes blinking open. "Oh..?" Joli enquired ingenuously. "You were a hired sword, then.. or a soldier?"
Darian came into the lighted tavern from darkling world, his eyes like a painting of the temporal night sky, wreathed in a curl of nimbus with meteoric flames bloodshooting across like the slats in a prison’s highly vaulted windows, through which could be seen flickering the multitudinous, starry reflections of the many candles about the room. Darian rustles in a crook-shouldered stalk through the bar, hair tucked beneath his grime-besotted trenchcoat as an inundation of river cascading into the deep recesses of immemorial caves. His face, smooth as a pebble subjected to endless years of a rapid's ministry, is craggy beneath a week's accumulation of gravedust, blood, mud. He comes, noiseless as a thunder-pealing tempest dampened by dark and distance, known only for the revelatory shimmering of sere Lightning. In a motion of ergonomical succinctness he sat upon a stool and hook’d a wrung. “Steadmen. Now.” He enunciates with his fingers working over his tightened brow, bent forward with a carefully closing set of eyelids. He can hear the imbalanced and uneven tread of the mawkish creature, limping to the back room. Silence. Glass chink. Cork rupture. A moment of unplaceable sounds. In a jostling stretch of rapidity his arm has shot from his brow, body still and head weighing upon his remnant, kneading knuckles, to capture a neighboring patron’s bottle, vexing the nameless vampire as he does so. With a swill and a snarl like the lightning’s crackle through each and every fiber of incendiary oaks, long dead and waiting to burn, he turns the neighboring patron aside; as well, just as this is done he can hear through his closed eyes the returning shuffle of Steadmen. When the butt of the bottle has been heard on the countertop, he reaches one knuckly, gnarled, hooked finger outward like a chisel destined for the emptiness of a tombstone, sliding the bottle to his left, eyeless all the while. The patron, by way of recompense, accepts the token; drinks. One moment, two, three, four, gargling, knees viciously slamming into the underside of the bar with their shaking, a writhing fall to the floor, a dying vampire’s barely managed last words “...dragon’s blood...” Steadmen is breathing heavy, the tonnage of worldly fears landing square upon his unshruggable shoulders. Darian is chuckling. “I haven’t fed the rats since they nibbled on your eyeball, Steadmen. Pluck up that corpse and drop it in the gutter. When you’re done, Return.”
Jabari shakes his head, "Soldiers kill openly... The ones I killed... Barely got the chance to know they were dead.... I was... A master of d... Why am I telling you this?"
Tenebrae shrugged toward Jabari and opened her mouth to reply, when through the door came the King of Roads, fascinating and infuriating, the crackle about him as terse as a bitter wind, sere as a winter oak. Joli wrinkled her nose lightly to find him as filthy as the night he'd taken and returned her life in the burial-ground, and despite herself found a wry smile twitching up the corners of her mouth. That she still disapproved the man's treatment of her barkeep, as unsavoury as that man ever was, was apparent as once more the man was ordered to act, in a tone that promised the direst consequence were he not to comply. "Uh.. I see...", she mumbled to Jabari, in an attempt to seem unaffected by the vampire's arrival. "That's most interesting, pet." The vampiress wrenched her gaze from Darian, turning to the human. "So.. you were an assassin for nobility, is it? And looking for something to do...?" She couldn't help but let her attention drift back to Darian, as a compass needle must by nature move toward the Pole. Still, she remained blase, or tried to. And it was working pretty well, until her customer fell writhing, to his death on the floor. Joli sputtered as she watched the last motions shuddering through his stilling form, wheeling to point an accusatory finger at the protagonist. "Alright, that's it!" Her tone was sharp as a hail of elven arrows. "That is enough, Sire, no more will you amuse yourself by taking bites out of my business, like a slimy pike. No, this is your last opportunity. Get out. Get OUT of my pub." She was literally shaking with rage and, having forgotten about Maladroit, held the hapless bird by the tail, swishing him about to punctuate her every point.
Jabari eyes over Darian, muttering to Tenebrae, "Something like that...'
Darian swirled his half empty bottle with a shrug and kept his gaze forward, taking a moment for the great effort of a slight yawn. “I’m afraid I will not leave. Especially as you’re requesting that I do so on the basis of your barkeep being the Heavenly Blunder that he is, and mixing up my Poisoned bottle with our dearly departed once-Damned fellow. Unless,” his gaze in an owling swivel to Tenebrae, eyebrows arced in a periphery of feathers, “you are so enraged at the poison’s mark falling one vampire too short. Even still, it could be that you’re compensating ridiculing your hapless keep, who cannot even fulfil a simple poisoning to a proper execution, by infuriating yourself with me, instead. As such, I would rather drink.”
Tenebrae 's lips were thin as string as Darian spoke, compressed to a white line, and Maladroit flapped in outrage at his treatment, sinking a needle-point beak to her hand in an effort to force his release. She dropped him, alright, with a little cry of pain, drawing her hand up to her mouth to sup the welling blood there. "Mfastarth", was mumbled through her mouthful of flesh, and her glare spoke the rest. Hand lowered again, she drew a deep breath, and looked to Steadman, who was just returned from his grisly task. "Oaf!" There was a rage in her that was erupting as naturally as a Vesuvius, seeking only an avenue of escape, a focus, for its release. Casting a withering look to Darian, as he finished speaking, she snapped, "Just your presence is trouble." And turned on her heel toward the southern end of the room, apparently developing a sudden desire to berate the dwarven miners digging her cellar.
Tenebrae said to Jabari, "As for you.." This was called back over her shoulder. "I'm willing to talk hire, but business is for the morrow, I fear."
Darian wearily hefts his shoulders, the slight action sending pinpricks of spinesnaps resounding through his olden joints; the sort of bones that splinteringly jag through flesh and ooze marrow to the bloodstream, waiting for the tranquil thrall of Eternity to proffer reprieve. As Steadmen made his shaky pass by Darian’s stool, he caught his arm, shiftily crackling the blood encrusted on his dried and wasting lips with a smile of desecration. “Let’s Try This Again.” Limp shuffle. Glass chink. Cork rupture. Limp shuffle. Bottle in hand, Darian vaulted the counter, oversailing the numerous trinkets atop it, as a Fey god might dance over the moon on wintry nights in need of joy and pleasure. He swooped up two gilt and engraven glasses, before inciting the pendulous sway of his body back around counter, easefully transferring one priceless to his other hand translating his disappointment with Steadmen’s lack of tact in executing him with a fistful blackening of his eye. He came up to Tenebrae, lightly gripping her at the shoulder, as a child would the hand of her father in the throng of a panicking crowd – soft yet intentional. He slowly pulled her, his stride leading them to the piano bench, which he sat her down upon, and from whence she was gazing with a supple fury to his distracted orbs. Evenly filling each glass, lithely passing one to a silent and speculative Tenebrae, glancing with a chuckle to Steadmen, he at last drained his wine with a sigh.
Even in her fury, his touch – chill as a black-frost morning, setting her a-shiver- had her halt, the rage abating to a thin lava-stream, than a brittle crust, until only her venomous pride was left to seethe below it. The deflation of her anger left her quieted, sullen, and so it was she let him lead her to the instrument’s seat like a lost little girl, and accepted his wine, after she saw him drink his own cleanly. “You’re impossible.” Her tone was cracked, in the manner of one speaking their own doom. “I should have you killed.” And was less convincing, by the moment. As if the creature might read minds, and thus discern her fondest wish at that very moment, her once-goblin familiar waddled indignantly into view, beak opening and closing with a soft ‘snick-snack’, and eye two with something greater than his usual baleful glare. “Maldroit, I shall put you in the fire, for my hand…” The hideous corvine clacked and shuddered, waddling toward the door before turning back toward them. Thinking it only the consequence of a rot-addled brain in a too-long-animated corpse, the vampiress returned a frozen gaze to Darian. “Look who has come home.”
Darian looked into the translucent distance of his refilling wine glass's dregs, counting the continents, archipelagos, shark teeming reefs and baleen sieved oceans as swift as he may, before letting himself smile as he place the bottle back on the sill and spoke to the person sharing his Baby's bench in a straddle. "Steadmen poisoned the bottle, but I made the switch. So I did kill the patron; however, no purse was jangling in all that shaking he commited through his posthumous life. He couldn't of paid his fare. Twas a favor, of sorts, then; you see." and he went back to his wine, now fuller and more opaque, as though his astral observations had been dappled with a pour of clouds over his view. "As for your creature, though: he wants something to come to your attention. Best forget about murdered patrons for now, I think. Look there." he mumbled, gesticulating limply to the creature.
Tenebrae wondered, as she had several times since meeting the wanderer, what was in his fully opaque mind and might have, at another time, asked him. But his subsequent confession had her roll her gaze ceiling-ward, hovering there until it settled back on him again, and did as bid. Maladroit indeed seemed eager to communicate –something- and by the odd bee-like dance he was executing, as best his decomposing body would allow, toward the door and back she guessed it might be that he wanted her to follow. “Indeed, I think you may be right.” Peering at the crow, she frowned. “He’s not done anything like this, since he led me to the treasure caves of the leviathan.” She gave Darian a hasty glance. “That was fun. I still bear the scars, and the jewels.”
Darian tipped a glassfull into the gilt cup occupying Tenebrae's palm. "Perhaps, then, follow you should." And he rose and offered his hand. "I'm sure I can hold down the fort without a veritable slew of patron corpses filling the gutters. I do not glut the rats, you know; still, they must be fed on occasion..." and he chuckled. "I'll have Steadmen prepare you a parcel for the road; wine and all, seeing as you won't be able to dine with me." And he splayed his fingers in his customary summons, too which Steadmen gruntingly scampered to appease. "Wine. Your finest foods. Bandages. Quick and thorough, if you wish for your mistress's health to remain intact, so she may continue to hoard your life, in all its virulence.
Tenebrae scowled and refused his hand, by tucking her own under the opposite arm. “I’ll go.” She glared at the frantic once-goblin, who was pecking spasmodically at the front door’s jamb. “Though I’m loath to leave my customers and staff to the likes of you.” Placing the wine down on the piano’s top, she rose and made move to fetch her pack, beside which was already the provisions Darian had ordered. The sound of a song, reminiscent of the swell of seas on a calm day, lilted over the tavern and she wondered how it was a man who had it in him to play with such an ear to delicacy and beauty could at once be such an unconscionable brute. Gathering up her things, she cast a last long look toward his back and stepped toward the door.
Tenebrae shook her head. "Not any more, pet. Rather attractive vampire in.." She glanced down to her skirt. "Naga-hide. Just trying to run my pub, like."
Jabari looks her over a bit, shrugging, "Don't know if that is a... Compliment or an insult.." The assassin blushing gently, "I tend... To think most women are very attractive." His gaze lowering as he gives in, buying an ale.
Tenebrae nodded again, as Steadman slid the tankard over to the stranger. "So...," she said, pursing her lips a bit. "Are you new to the lands, pet? You look a bit unfamiliar with it all."
Jabari looks down at the ale, instead of Tenebrae, nodding as he inspects the liquor, sampling it gently, never verbally answering her.
Tenebrae offered him a gently maternal look. "Ah, well, you'll settle in soon enough." She turned aside, as though to continue caring for the deathly still and unkempt bird she'd lain down before. And, with a quick flick of wrist, threw a silver coin toward the man at a velocity that'd give him a decent bump on the skull were he not lively about it.
Jabari snaps his arm upward, catching it deftly in his palm though he tosses it back to Tenebrae, not saying a word.
Tenebrae caught the coin, with equal dexterity, a tiny smile curling the corners of her lips. "And what is it that you do, stranger?" She made the enquiry as though nothing at all had happened, tucking the coin back to her waist-pouch.
Jabari looks down at the liquor, "Before the refusal... What I was told." His head shaking, "Could not.... hurt that woman."
Tenebrae frowned a little. "Refusal..?" He'd said enough for her to get a loose picture of a man disobeying commands, in some way. "Who was it you served, then?"
Jabari shrugs his shoulder, "'Whoever I was given too... That is... Till the crown heir took over his blessed colosseum . Then, he used us as his own personal firing squad, can't say I minded then though..."
Tenebrae stooped to take up her feathered burden which, far from being utterly lifeless, stirred a little, its beaking gaping and fish-scale coloured eyes blinking open. "Oh..?" Joli enquired ingenuously. "You were a hired sword, then.. or a soldier?"
Darian came into the lighted tavern from darkling world, his eyes like a painting of the temporal night sky, wreathed in a curl of nimbus with meteoric flames bloodshooting across like the slats in a prison’s highly vaulted windows, through which could be seen flickering the multitudinous, starry reflections of the many candles about the room. Darian rustles in a crook-shouldered stalk through the bar, hair tucked beneath his grime-besotted trenchcoat as an inundation of river cascading into the deep recesses of immemorial caves. His face, smooth as a pebble subjected to endless years of a rapid's ministry, is craggy beneath a week's accumulation of gravedust, blood, mud. He comes, noiseless as a thunder-pealing tempest dampened by dark and distance, known only for the revelatory shimmering of sere Lightning. In a motion of ergonomical succinctness he sat upon a stool and hook’d a wrung. “Steadmen. Now.” He enunciates with his fingers working over his tightened brow, bent forward with a carefully closing set of eyelids. He can hear the imbalanced and uneven tread of the mawkish creature, limping to the back room. Silence. Glass chink. Cork rupture. A moment of unplaceable sounds. In a jostling stretch of rapidity his arm has shot from his brow, body still and head weighing upon his remnant, kneading knuckles, to capture a neighboring patron’s bottle, vexing the nameless vampire as he does so. With a swill and a snarl like the lightning’s crackle through each and every fiber of incendiary oaks, long dead and waiting to burn, he turns the neighboring patron aside; as well, just as this is done he can hear through his closed eyes the returning shuffle of Steadmen. When the butt of the bottle has been heard on the countertop, he reaches one knuckly, gnarled, hooked finger outward like a chisel destined for the emptiness of a tombstone, sliding the bottle to his left, eyeless all the while. The patron, by way of recompense, accepts the token; drinks. One moment, two, three, four, gargling, knees viciously slamming into the underside of the bar with their shaking, a writhing fall to the floor, a dying vampire’s barely managed last words “...dragon’s blood...” Steadmen is breathing heavy, the tonnage of worldly fears landing square upon his unshruggable shoulders. Darian is chuckling. “I haven’t fed the rats since they nibbled on your eyeball, Steadmen. Pluck up that corpse and drop it in the gutter. When you’re done, Return.”
Jabari shakes his head, "Soldiers kill openly... The ones I killed... Barely got the chance to know they were dead.... I was... A master of d... Why am I telling you this?"
Tenebrae shrugged toward Jabari and opened her mouth to reply, when through the door came the King of Roads, fascinating and infuriating, the crackle about him as terse as a bitter wind, sere as a winter oak. Joli wrinkled her nose lightly to find him as filthy as the night he'd taken and returned her life in the burial-ground, and despite herself found a wry smile twitching up the corners of her mouth. That she still disapproved the man's treatment of her barkeep, as unsavoury as that man ever was, was apparent as once more the man was ordered to act, in a tone that promised the direst consequence were he not to comply. "Uh.. I see...", she mumbled to Jabari, in an attempt to seem unaffected by the vampire's arrival. "That's most interesting, pet." The vampiress wrenched her gaze from Darian, turning to the human. "So.. you were an assassin for nobility, is it? And looking for something to do...?" She couldn't help but let her attention drift back to Darian, as a compass needle must by nature move toward the Pole. Still, she remained blase, or tried to. And it was working pretty well, until her customer fell writhing, to his death on the floor. Joli sputtered as she watched the last motions shuddering through his stilling form, wheeling to point an accusatory finger at the protagonist. "Alright, that's it!" Her tone was sharp as a hail of elven arrows. "That is enough, Sire, no more will you amuse yourself by taking bites out of my business, like a slimy pike. No, this is your last opportunity. Get out. Get OUT of my pub." She was literally shaking with rage and, having forgotten about Maladroit, held the hapless bird by the tail, swishing him about to punctuate her every point.
Jabari eyes over Darian, muttering to Tenebrae, "Something like that...'
Darian swirled his half empty bottle with a shrug and kept his gaze forward, taking a moment for the great effort of a slight yawn. “I’m afraid I will not leave. Especially as you’re requesting that I do so on the basis of your barkeep being the Heavenly Blunder that he is, and mixing up my Poisoned bottle with our dearly departed once-Damned fellow. Unless,” his gaze in an owling swivel to Tenebrae, eyebrows arced in a periphery of feathers, “you are so enraged at the poison’s mark falling one vampire too short. Even still, it could be that you’re compensating ridiculing your hapless keep, who cannot even fulfil a simple poisoning to a proper execution, by infuriating yourself with me, instead. As such, I would rather drink.”
Tenebrae 's lips were thin as string as Darian spoke, compressed to a white line, and Maladroit flapped in outrage at his treatment, sinking a needle-point beak to her hand in an effort to force his release. She dropped him, alright, with a little cry of pain, drawing her hand up to her mouth to sup the welling blood there. "Mfastarth", was mumbled through her mouthful of flesh, and her glare spoke the rest. Hand lowered again, she drew a deep breath, and looked to Steadman, who was just returned from his grisly task. "Oaf!" There was a rage in her that was erupting as naturally as a Vesuvius, seeking only an avenue of escape, a focus, for its release. Casting a withering look to Darian, as he finished speaking, she snapped, "Just your presence is trouble." And turned on her heel toward the southern end of the room, apparently developing a sudden desire to berate the dwarven miners digging her cellar.
Tenebrae said to Jabari, "As for you.." This was called back over her shoulder. "I'm willing to talk hire, but business is for the morrow, I fear."
Darian wearily hefts his shoulders, the slight action sending pinpricks of spinesnaps resounding through his olden joints; the sort of bones that splinteringly jag through flesh and ooze marrow to the bloodstream, waiting for the tranquil thrall of Eternity to proffer reprieve. As Steadmen made his shaky pass by Darian’s stool, he caught his arm, shiftily crackling the blood encrusted on his dried and wasting lips with a smile of desecration. “Let’s Try This Again.” Limp shuffle. Glass chink. Cork rupture. Limp shuffle. Bottle in hand, Darian vaulted the counter, oversailing the numerous trinkets atop it, as a Fey god might dance over the moon on wintry nights in need of joy and pleasure. He swooped up two gilt and engraven glasses, before inciting the pendulous sway of his body back around counter, easefully transferring one priceless to his other hand translating his disappointment with Steadmen’s lack of tact in executing him with a fistful blackening of his eye. He came up to Tenebrae, lightly gripping her at the shoulder, as a child would the hand of her father in the throng of a panicking crowd – soft yet intentional. He slowly pulled her, his stride leading them to the piano bench, which he sat her down upon, and from whence she was gazing with a supple fury to his distracted orbs. Evenly filling each glass, lithely passing one to a silent and speculative Tenebrae, glancing with a chuckle to Steadmen, he at last drained his wine with a sigh.
Even in her fury, his touch – chill as a black-frost morning, setting her a-shiver- had her halt, the rage abating to a thin lava-stream, than a brittle crust, until only her venomous pride was left to seethe below it. The deflation of her anger left her quieted, sullen, and so it was she let him lead her to the instrument’s seat like a lost little girl, and accepted his wine, after she saw him drink his own cleanly. “You’re impossible.” Her tone was cracked, in the manner of one speaking their own doom. “I should have you killed.” And was less convincing, by the moment. As if the creature might read minds, and thus discern her fondest wish at that very moment, her once-goblin familiar waddled indignantly into view, beak opening and closing with a soft ‘snick-snack’, and eye two with something greater than his usual baleful glare. “Maldroit, I shall put you in the fire, for my hand…” The hideous corvine clacked and shuddered, waddling toward the door before turning back toward them. Thinking it only the consequence of a rot-addled brain in a too-long-animated corpse, the vampiress returned a frozen gaze to Darian. “Look who has come home.”
Darian looked into the translucent distance of his refilling wine glass's dregs, counting the continents, archipelagos, shark teeming reefs and baleen sieved oceans as swift as he may, before letting himself smile as he place the bottle back on the sill and spoke to the person sharing his Baby's bench in a straddle. "Steadmen poisoned the bottle, but I made the switch. So I did kill the patron; however, no purse was jangling in all that shaking he commited through his posthumous life. He couldn't of paid his fare. Twas a favor, of sorts, then; you see." and he went back to his wine, now fuller and more opaque, as though his astral observations had been dappled with a pour of clouds over his view. "As for your creature, though: he wants something to come to your attention. Best forget about murdered patrons for now, I think. Look there." he mumbled, gesticulating limply to the creature.
Tenebrae wondered, as she had several times since meeting the wanderer, what was in his fully opaque mind and might have, at another time, asked him. But his subsequent confession had her roll her gaze ceiling-ward, hovering there until it settled back on him again, and did as bid. Maladroit indeed seemed eager to communicate –something- and by the odd bee-like dance he was executing, as best his decomposing body would allow, toward the door and back she guessed it might be that he wanted her to follow. “Indeed, I think you may be right.” Peering at the crow, she frowned. “He’s not done anything like this, since he led me to the treasure caves of the leviathan.” She gave Darian a hasty glance. “That was fun. I still bear the scars, and the jewels.”
Darian tipped a glassfull into the gilt cup occupying Tenebrae's palm. "Perhaps, then, follow you should." And he rose and offered his hand. "I'm sure I can hold down the fort without a veritable slew of patron corpses filling the gutters. I do not glut the rats, you know; still, they must be fed on occasion..." and he chuckled. "I'll have Steadmen prepare you a parcel for the road; wine and all, seeing as you won't be able to dine with me." And he splayed his fingers in his customary summons, too which Steadmen gruntingly scampered to appease. "Wine. Your finest foods. Bandages. Quick and thorough, if you wish for your mistress's health to remain intact, so she may continue to hoard your life, in all its virulence.
Tenebrae scowled and refused his hand, by tucking her own under the opposite arm. “I’ll go.” She glared at the frantic once-goblin, who was pecking spasmodically at the front door’s jamb. “Though I’m loath to leave my customers and staff to the likes of you.” Placing the wine down on the piano’s top, she rose and made move to fetch her pack, beside which was already the provisions Darian had ordered. The sound of a song, reminiscent of the swell of seas on a calm day, lilted over the tavern and she wondered how it was a man who had it in him to play with such an ear to delicacy and beauty could at once be such an unconscionable brute. Gathering up her things, she cast a last long look toward his back and stepped toward the door.