Post by Joliette Thorne on Jul 21, 2007 20:16:23 GMT -5
Blood trickled from lacerated toes over the forgotten husks of long dead limpets, a man stood atop a cornerstone more relic than masonry as his cruel pulpit drank of his feet. Not wary of the minor abrasions prickled into his soles, a man played sweet music in contest with the wind and spindrift. Clothes having seen fairer times, skin raw and red from exposure, piebald patches of dried salt upon his cheeks, chapped lips and tangled hair; a man fed an audience of barbarians with a liquor that held them fixed. His crowd, so unusual a huddle, Hobgoblins and lizard-dogs, more comatosed than entertained. The fiddler or the spoof.
Tenebrae had wandered this far south rarely; her tracks usually touched the far eastern shore, business and pleasure or a mix of the two taking her to Rynvale and the cove where Eternity lurked like a great red-sailed sea-beast waiting restlessly for action, in a predatory crouch. But today, the vampiress had much on her mind; dragons, of various character, the problem of gold, the rumbling wheels of war, and her aching side where knitted a broken rib among the number of things that would cross her mind as newly unbooted feet left small prints in white sand. She wasn't far from the ruin of a castle, the half-crumbled walls rearing high in her field of vision, when she heard music lilting from behind the stone. So pleasing was it that she picked up pace... musicians were infrequently murderers, the good ones at any rate, and her heavy heart and weighted mind could do with soothing. Perhaps the player would take a coin or two, to continue the tune while she rested... But, on poking her head about the corner of the wall to peek toward the source of the sound, she'd reconsider.. a bloody man, ragged of clothing and dishevelled in appearance, played to an audience of goblin-ish and stranger creatures. She'd make a mental sound that was a bit like 'tsk', chiding herself for believing anything in her existence might prove, now and then, to be a bit more normal than highly peculiar. Still, it was a lovely tune, so peridot eyes would continue their surreptitious watch.
Archetto leapt ostentatiously from his rostrum to the sand before him, delving into the pit with a flourish of foot and dainty pirouette. He winces as grains explain themselves in the scarlet crescents with their blurred abundancy upon either foot as his landing carves a mould for each. For he was tender, he was newborn; he was not accustomed to pain, it had not been woven into his repertoire. Devotion to a task when passion lines every twitch of finger and flutter of lash could easily suffuse this flickering moment of pain, a stab becoming a nagging throb balled in frozen flannels laid down by his mind. As he continues his playing, oblivious of the arrival of another, the dour crowd begin to shudder, shifting to life at command of their new earl. His marionettes encircle him as his own steps leave indented puddles of diluted blood and water marooned by the sea in the great porous sponge that the beach became near times of high tide. Notes fly like toucans from his instrument as his horde begin to sway and hum; brilliant in their explosive appearance, heavy as they pronounce themselves against the decrepit walls of the ancient stronghold.
Tenebrae, too, was not long to fall under the same rapture as the hobgoblins and their oddling companions. Perhaps a symptom of her time with the Wanderer and his piano, or by virtue of the apparent mortal's own skill, or a mixture of the two, the former necromancer found herself ignored the discomfiting ache in her ribs to take up a gentle dance on the sands, silent feet tracing arcs and lines as they swept over the sands in graceful steps that knew no order. But Chaos isn't always unbeautiful, nor without its own logic, and the weave of her arms through the brine-scented air, the sway of her hips and elegance of stretching limbs would be mute litany to the wonder of the stranger's song. Unwitnessed, too, unless he was not so caught up in the playing that he would miss a tiny, black-clad vampiress in a tattered and greying cloak that ribboned in the air like the remnants of some ancient, weathered flag dedicated to a faded and forgotten nation, or the manner in which she moved, resembling nothing more than a marble statue come to fluid and inexplicable life. Tene was lost in the music and the moment, and was all too happy, for now, to be so.
As halcyon days of innocent slumber in the golden wheat-fields of generic childhood, notes fluttered a maudlin of tranquility with the rumbustious slush of stuttered notes. For the sounds would travel from the walls of this crumbling amphitheatre, rolling over one another as echoes met their newfound comrades only to be felt and swallowed by ancestors. There is definite order to the madness, though, and the sharp strings chattering above the rising thrum of black tongues and scaled gullets scream. No extra violence was applied the instrument by her handler, though he was as buried in the developing growth as the glazed corneas of the Hobgoblin throng. It simply grew, with only the pullulation of notes to herald it. They streaked quickly, disrupting silence in their wake as particles fell into mad vibration, the high tones scoring thin threads across the sands, the low striking in the veins of throat and temple. This was sound as it could be; sound laced with emotive intention, tangible and powerful. The thralls begin their exodus towards the waves, the nude illusions of their carnal trulls bursting to flaunt their triumvirate promises to the goblin-kin upon the beach. Their silence is shattered as they dash towards the water, chasing false promise of pleasure and warmth, the roisterous beast-men running out to drown themselves in the arms of fictitious lovers. They had found him, dragged him to this lair, bound him and intended to rape and eat him. The two-as-one of man and violin thought their mercy bountiful in allowing them death paired with imagined ecstasy.
Tenebrae was led, as were the fell gathering, toward the waves. At first, the sea remained the sea, that great fathomless nightmare she dreamed of when rocked to sleep in its briny arms, divided from her deepest terror only by the four inch-thickness of tempered oaken planks that made Eternity's hull. But soon the lapping waves would fade, shimmering, and shift to a wondrous mirage-- the fortress of her people, freed of Darkness and taint and faced in niveous marble; standing at its cleanly gate, a whitely-grinning Leoxander, black dog at his heels, waved her welcome as she danced toward his waiting arms. Such blissful visions of domesticity beckoned her weary heart as rats to a certain piper might come, at least on this troubled day, and so it was that her feet crossed the sands, dipped into the waters tonguing the shoreline, and carried her thigh-deep to the ocean. She might have continued that fatal path, were it not for the snap of an irritated eel, clamping its jaw on her toe. Blood threaded the water, only fuelling the long-fish's ire, and it clamped and re-clamped, until the pain wore through the song, and the vampiress awoke to find herself up to her middle in water, in agony, with a writhing moray gnashing at her foot. Eyes widened, mouth followed in suit, and she'd back out of the waves as fast as the eel allowed, dragging the miscreant fish with her. Ripping through the music's airy fabric like a knife through a silk blouse, her curses - learned at the side of her most beloved ruffians, Garath and Leo - would sound harsh as a flock of panicked gulls. As the last of the hobgoblins tripped off to its happy demise, she planted her behind to the sand, and began punching at the gilled head of her foe. So much for elegance..
The last note fell with her rump, the man frozen as he wallowed in the faded amber half-light that sun through eyelids afforded his retinas. Peace. His hunger fell as a grim knot in his stomach as he slowly eased himself from the introverted womb of creation. His feet hurt, the cuts and scratches clogged with sodden specks of sand. His underlip bled as he ground away a flake of salted flesh with his incisors. It took a minute or so for him to open his eyes to the emptied basin of the walled sands. Emptied save for one. It had been neither of their intention to draw in a spectator, as he judged by the bedraggled state of her lower portions indicative of her having been coaxed as were the beast-men. C'est la vie, neither cleft space for woe in moment passing their daily union of finger and string. The bow rested limp in dangling hand, nib crowning the ridge of his foot as the body of his violin was drawn to cradle between bicep and chest. He spoke, "Trip trap; seems..." he was cut out by his own splutter, doubling as he heaved spittle and retched above the sand. Rising, he continued, "Yes, well, your throat is not dependant on water... I know you want a bath, salt does not become you... Yes, me neither." To whom it was he spoke would remain a mystery for the present, as he stood alone in his pauperised garb and crowned by ravelled coif.
Tenebrae had succeeded in convincing the moray to relinquish her foot, largely through depriving it of water to breath moreso than the violent beating she'd given it, and the bruised sea-creature was currently wriggling its way back to the water. That ill-fated appendage was bleeding freely and covered in the fine grit of the beach; she wasn't long in rising to hobble toward her pack for a bandage and something to clean it with, and action that was abbreviated by the musician's words. Of course. Of course, the man was mad, as well as prone to murdering hobgoblins en masse with a violin. The day was just getting better, wasn't it? She afforded him a scathing stare, hooking up the strap of her pack where it lay, by the wall, with tender and new-healed fingers. "You, over there.." Taking a seat upon a fallen block of cut coral, the vampiress scrabbled for a bottle. "What did you just do?" The clear glass was unstoppered, pure springwater tipped to her injured foot, which she'd raised to rest on the opposite thigh. Once free of sand, she set the water down, and a second search found further clear liquid, this time vodka. One might have expected the liquor to be used to quell infection; instead, she drank it, and waited for a response.
Greedy eyes had fallen to the flailing sliver of oily eel that wrestled against fate in it's attempt to survive. He was famished. Turning, he set his instrument down gingerly atop the barnacled knuckle of masonry that had been his stage, affectionately patting the obsidian splinter before striding towards the meandering gash the eel was carving in it's travel. Her question reaches broad back as he bends and takes the writhing creature in hand, gripping it firmly where the throat might be assumed to lie. The entire length of the thing might be a stretched throat for all he cared, the snapping of it's neck and cessation of it's shuddered spasms rousing a terse cry of triumph. He turned and strode back towards where he had left his violin, the bow raised to rest upon his clavicle, tapping lightly against the side of his neck as the limp body in fist swung with his paces. He had no qualms to eating it raw, the task of gathering any driftwood dry enough to ignite was quarrelsome with the pang of imagined starvation searing through his mind and belly. Teeth overbit, gum lanced by a thoracic barb, the man spitting blood and eelskin flaps as he set his bow down to lean against the side of the pedestal. Hand now freed, it raised to wipe across his mouth, clearing it of blood and flesh from his luncheon as he leant against the broken pillar that held his love at crown. It was only now that he actually paid any attention to the woman as she tended her injury, sweeping back matted hair with his forearm to show a variety of bruises upon his forehead in their own purple blood-barrows. "Do? I did nothing. Nothing but make a suggestion."
Tenebrae swigged at the flask until the vagrant strangled her irritable attacker and proceeded to devour the thing raw. The flask then stilled in its motion from lap to lips and back, paused to hover halfway between both while she gaped at him anew; less wonder than sheer disgust stamped on pale features this time. "Ugh." This soft exclamation was followed by another pause, in which she'd listen. "Suggestion..." she echoed. Made sense, in light of the King of Roads and his Universe-in-a-mouthful-of-ale trick. So there was the how; the why could be presumed, given his battered look and the nefarious nature of goblinkind. "I've got some stuff in my bag, bit more appetising than.. that." She eyed the spit-out eel-remnants. Briefly. "Sandwiches. Cold meat." Bait, she might have added, for the mortals she preyed on, men for whom an offer of a secluded picnic with a lovely and apparently lonely female was as tempting as those visions in the waves; but she didn't. "Help yourself." Items were placed on the rock beside her: paper-wrapped victuals and a brown bottle. "Ale's a bit warm by now, I'd imagine." Any other woman might have been fazed, or shrunk from the company of such a man, quailed at his .. suggestions, not to mentions their results. But Tene was Tene, and she was also Cabal and therefore too inoculated against oddness to consider him more than passingly curious. The flask was raised to her lips again, bright, jewelline eyes fixated on her erstwhile acquaintance.
Archetto did take a step, without hesitating, before he froze. There was something behind either eye; not fear, but absence. He seemed fixed and focused, listening intently to private words at a level not fond of exploration. He turned and looked at his instrument, speaking towards it in a lower tone than the one used to address the woman, "It is only food... Don't be so gauche. Would you that I cut slot and sported you beneath my trouser? ... I thought not... I only take tones when you lay the board..." He paused, apparently a little taken aback by whatever had been said to him, or whatever he imagined said to him as the spectacle would certainly scream mental deficiency. "That's a tad crude..." He looks to the waves as a single note sounds from the resting instrument. She could never play herself, the bow was an extension of him; his pestle to her mortar; but there was nothing to prevent stumming of chords a varying pitch, as if a miniscule splinter of a harp viewed through a pinprick. One of the beastmen that had washed back onto the beach rose, held aloft by invisible strings, mouth agape and pupils dead to light. "Who taught you that... Well, it's a little pointlessly macabre." He looks towards Tenebrae for a second, pointing at her with thick arm and thin finger, though whether his phantasmal conversational partner could see in a visual sense one could only wonder. "She has water... Fine, I appreciate the effort." He broke from his slouch and walked over to the dangling corpse of the drowned hobgoblin as limp limbs bore it up the beach towards him. Freed from submersion, however, and under whatever occult power that might hold it aloft, fresh air and upright stance was enough to rekindle the dying spark of life within the creature. However sodden the tinder, eyes flickered as it remained held by her distanced grip, a waterfall of water expelled from it's mouth as lungs fought desperately for air. Archetto broke into a brisk run towards the now flailing goblin, taking the crude dagger from it's belt and promptly slitting it's throat. With his frame blocking view of the woman with her picnic, he cut free a rudimentary flask from the creature's belt as it fell once again to cold barbs of death, turning to flash crimson as his face lay greased with dark blood. He jogged back up to where his violin lay, discarding the dagger along the way, his tone heated as he spoke against her inanimate frame, "You call -that- art? Who taught you that? .... Yes, yes, I'm sure your secrets are plentiful." He began to clean, or rather smear, the blood upon his face with the shredded rag of a shirt that he inhabited, toned and tanned stomach bared as he drew cloth to skin.
Tenebrae had wandered this far south rarely; her tracks usually touched the far eastern shore, business and pleasure or a mix of the two taking her to Rynvale and the cove where Eternity lurked like a great red-sailed sea-beast waiting restlessly for action, in a predatory crouch. But today, the vampiress had much on her mind; dragons, of various character, the problem of gold, the rumbling wheels of war, and her aching side where knitted a broken rib among the number of things that would cross her mind as newly unbooted feet left small prints in white sand. She wasn't far from the ruin of a castle, the half-crumbled walls rearing high in her field of vision, when she heard music lilting from behind the stone. So pleasing was it that she picked up pace... musicians were infrequently murderers, the good ones at any rate, and her heavy heart and weighted mind could do with soothing. Perhaps the player would take a coin or two, to continue the tune while she rested... But, on poking her head about the corner of the wall to peek toward the source of the sound, she'd reconsider.. a bloody man, ragged of clothing and dishevelled in appearance, played to an audience of goblin-ish and stranger creatures. She'd make a mental sound that was a bit like 'tsk', chiding herself for believing anything in her existence might prove, now and then, to be a bit more normal than highly peculiar. Still, it was a lovely tune, so peridot eyes would continue their surreptitious watch.
Archetto leapt ostentatiously from his rostrum to the sand before him, delving into the pit with a flourish of foot and dainty pirouette. He winces as grains explain themselves in the scarlet crescents with their blurred abundancy upon either foot as his landing carves a mould for each. For he was tender, he was newborn; he was not accustomed to pain, it had not been woven into his repertoire. Devotion to a task when passion lines every twitch of finger and flutter of lash could easily suffuse this flickering moment of pain, a stab becoming a nagging throb balled in frozen flannels laid down by his mind. As he continues his playing, oblivious of the arrival of another, the dour crowd begin to shudder, shifting to life at command of their new earl. His marionettes encircle him as his own steps leave indented puddles of diluted blood and water marooned by the sea in the great porous sponge that the beach became near times of high tide. Notes fly like toucans from his instrument as his horde begin to sway and hum; brilliant in their explosive appearance, heavy as they pronounce themselves against the decrepit walls of the ancient stronghold.
Tenebrae, too, was not long to fall under the same rapture as the hobgoblins and their oddling companions. Perhaps a symptom of her time with the Wanderer and his piano, or by virtue of the apparent mortal's own skill, or a mixture of the two, the former necromancer found herself ignored the discomfiting ache in her ribs to take up a gentle dance on the sands, silent feet tracing arcs and lines as they swept over the sands in graceful steps that knew no order. But Chaos isn't always unbeautiful, nor without its own logic, and the weave of her arms through the brine-scented air, the sway of her hips and elegance of stretching limbs would be mute litany to the wonder of the stranger's song. Unwitnessed, too, unless he was not so caught up in the playing that he would miss a tiny, black-clad vampiress in a tattered and greying cloak that ribboned in the air like the remnants of some ancient, weathered flag dedicated to a faded and forgotten nation, or the manner in which she moved, resembling nothing more than a marble statue come to fluid and inexplicable life. Tene was lost in the music and the moment, and was all too happy, for now, to be so.
As halcyon days of innocent slumber in the golden wheat-fields of generic childhood, notes fluttered a maudlin of tranquility with the rumbustious slush of stuttered notes. For the sounds would travel from the walls of this crumbling amphitheatre, rolling over one another as echoes met their newfound comrades only to be felt and swallowed by ancestors. There is definite order to the madness, though, and the sharp strings chattering above the rising thrum of black tongues and scaled gullets scream. No extra violence was applied the instrument by her handler, though he was as buried in the developing growth as the glazed corneas of the Hobgoblin throng. It simply grew, with only the pullulation of notes to herald it. They streaked quickly, disrupting silence in their wake as particles fell into mad vibration, the high tones scoring thin threads across the sands, the low striking in the veins of throat and temple. This was sound as it could be; sound laced with emotive intention, tangible and powerful. The thralls begin their exodus towards the waves, the nude illusions of their carnal trulls bursting to flaunt their triumvirate promises to the goblin-kin upon the beach. Their silence is shattered as they dash towards the water, chasing false promise of pleasure and warmth, the roisterous beast-men running out to drown themselves in the arms of fictitious lovers. They had found him, dragged him to this lair, bound him and intended to rape and eat him. The two-as-one of man and violin thought their mercy bountiful in allowing them death paired with imagined ecstasy.
Tenebrae was led, as were the fell gathering, toward the waves. At first, the sea remained the sea, that great fathomless nightmare she dreamed of when rocked to sleep in its briny arms, divided from her deepest terror only by the four inch-thickness of tempered oaken planks that made Eternity's hull. But soon the lapping waves would fade, shimmering, and shift to a wondrous mirage-- the fortress of her people, freed of Darkness and taint and faced in niveous marble; standing at its cleanly gate, a whitely-grinning Leoxander, black dog at his heels, waved her welcome as she danced toward his waiting arms. Such blissful visions of domesticity beckoned her weary heart as rats to a certain piper might come, at least on this troubled day, and so it was that her feet crossed the sands, dipped into the waters tonguing the shoreline, and carried her thigh-deep to the ocean. She might have continued that fatal path, were it not for the snap of an irritated eel, clamping its jaw on her toe. Blood threaded the water, only fuelling the long-fish's ire, and it clamped and re-clamped, until the pain wore through the song, and the vampiress awoke to find herself up to her middle in water, in agony, with a writhing moray gnashing at her foot. Eyes widened, mouth followed in suit, and she'd back out of the waves as fast as the eel allowed, dragging the miscreant fish with her. Ripping through the music's airy fabric like a knife through a silk blouse, her curses - learned at the side of her most beloved ruffians, Garath and Leo - would sound harsh as a flock of panicked gulls. As the last of the hobgoblins tripped off to its happy demise, she planted her behind to the sand, and began punching at the gilled head of her foe. So much for elegance..
The last note fell with her rump, the man frozen as he wallowed in the faded amber half-light that sun through eyelids afforded his retinas. Peace. His hunger fell as a grim knot in his stomach as he slowly eased himself from the introverted womb of creation. His feet hurt, the cuts and scratches clogged with sodden specks of sand. His underlip bled as he ground away a flake of salted flesh with his incisors. It took a minute or so for him to open his eyes to the emptied basin of the walled sands. Emptied save for one. It had been neither of their intention to draw in a spectator, as he judged by the bedraggled state of her lower portions indicative of her having been coaxed as were the beast-men. C'est la vie, neither cleft space for woe in moment passing their daily union of finger and string. The bow rested limp in dangling hand, nib crowning the ridge of his foot as the body of his violin was drawn to cradle between bicep and chest. He spoke, "Trip trap; seems..." he was cut out by his own splutter, doubling as he heaved spittle and retched above the sand. Rising, he continued, "Yes, well, your throat is not dependant on water... I know you want a bath, salt does not become you... Yes, me neither." To whom it was he spoke would remain a mystery for the present, as he stood alone in his pauperised garb and crowned by ravelled coif.
Tenebrae had succeeded in convincing the moray to relinquish her foot, largely through depriving it of water to breath moreso than the violent beating she'd given it, and the bruised sea-creature was currently wriggling its way back to the water. That ill-fated appendage was bleeding freely and covered in the fine grit of the beach; she wasn't long in rising to hobble toward her pack for a bandage and something to clean it with, and action that was abbreviated by the musician's words. Of course. Of course, the man was mad, as well as prone to murdering hobgoblins en masse with a violin. The day was just getting better, wasn't it? She afforded him a scathing stare, hooking up the strap of her pack where it lay, by the wall, with tender and new-healed fingers. "You, over there.." Taking a seat upon a fallen block of cut coral, the vampiress scrabbled for a bottle. "What did you just do?" The clear glass was unstoppered, pure springwater tipped to her injured foot, which she'd raised to rest on the opposite thigh. Once free of sand, she set the water down, and a second search found further clear liquid, this time vodka. One might have expected the liquor to be used to quell infection; instead, she drank it, and waited for a response.
Greedy eyes had fallen to the flailing sliver of oily eel that wrestled against fate in it's attempt to survive. He was famished. Turning, he set his instrument down gingerly atop the barnacled knuckle of masonry that had been his stage, affectionately patting the obsidian splinter before striding towards the meandering gash the eel was carving in it's travel. Her question reaches broad back as he bends and takes the writhing creature in hand, gripping it firmly where the throat might be assumed to lie. The entire length of the thing might be a stretched throat for all he cared, the snapping of it's neck and cessation of it's shuddered spasms rousing a terse cry of triumph. He turned and strode back towards where he had left his violin, the bow raised to rest upon his clavicle, tapping lightly against the side of his neck as the limp body in fist swung with his paces. He had no qualms to eating it raw, the task of gathering any driftwood dry enough to ignite was quarrelsome with the pang of imagined starvation searing through his mind and belly. Teeth overbit, gum lanced by a thoracic barb, the man spitting blood and eelskin flaps as he set his bow down to lean against the side of the pedestal. Hand now freed, it raised to wipe across his mouth, clearing it of blood and flesh from his luncheon as he leant against the broken pillar that held his love at crown. It was only now that he actually paid any attention to the woman as she tended her injury, sweeping back matted hair with his forearm to show a variety of bruises upon his forehead in their own purple blood-barrows. "Do? I did nothing. Nothing but make a suggestion."
Tenebrae swigged at the flask until the vagrant strangled her irritable attacker and proceeded to devour the thing raw. The flask then stilled in its motion from lap to lips and back, paused to hover halfway between both while she gaped at him anew; less wonder than sheer disgust stamped on pale features this time. "Ugh." This soft exclamation was followed by another pause, in which she'd listen. "Suggestion..." she echoed. Made sense, in light of the King of Roads and his Universe-in-a-mouthful-of-ale trick. So there was the how; the why could be presumed, given his battered look and the nefarious nature of goblinkind. "I've got some stuff in my bag, bit more appetising than.. that." She eyed the spit-out eel-remnants. Briefly. "Sandwiches. Cold meat." Bait, she might have added, for the mortals she preyed on, men for whom an offer of a secluded picnic with a lovely and apparently lonely female was as tempting as those visions in the waves; but she didn't. "Help yourself." Items were placed on the rock beside her: paper-wrapped victuals and a brown bottle. "Ale's a bit warm by now, I'd imagine." Any other woman might have been fazed, or shrunk from the company of such a man, quailed at his .. suggestions, not to mentions their results. But Tene was Tene, and she was also Cabal and therefore too inoculated against oddness to consider him more than passingly curious. The flask was raised to her lips again, bright, jewelline eyes fixated on her erstwhile acquaintance.
Archetto did take a step, without hesitating, before he froze. There was something behind either eye; not fear, but absence. He seemed fixed and focused, listening intently to private words at a level not fond of exploration. He turned and looked at his instrument, speaking towards it in a lower tone than the one used to address the woman, "It is only food... Don't be so gauche. Would you that I cut slot and sported you beneath my trouser? ... I thought not... I only take tones when you lay the board..." He paused, apparently a little taken aback by whatever had been said to him, or whatever he imagined said to him as the spectacle would certainly scream mental deficiency. "That's a tad crude..." He looks to the waves as a single note sounds from the resting instrument. She could never play herself, the bow was an extension of him; his pestle to her mortar; but there was nothing to prevent stumming of chords a varying pitch, as if a miniscule splinter of a harp viewed through a pinprick. One of the beastmen that had washed back onto the beach rose, held aloft by invisible strings, mouth agape and pupils dead to light. "Who taught you that... Well, it's a little pointlessly macabre." He looks towards Tenebrae for a second, pointing at her with thick arm and thin finger, though whether his phantasmal conversational partner could see in a visual sense one could only wonder. "She has water... Fine, I appreciate the effort." He broke from his slouch and walked over to the dangling corpse of the drowned hobgoblin as limp limbs bore it up the beach towards him. Freed from submersion, however, and under whatever occult power that might hold it aloft, fresh air and upright stance was enough to rekindle the dying spark of life within the creature. However sodden the tinder, eyes flickered as it remained held by her distanced grip, a waterfall of water expelled from it's mouth as lungs fought desperately for air. Archetto broke into a brisk run towards the now flailing goblin, taking the crude dagger from it's belt and promptly slitting it's throat. With his frame blocking view of the woman with her picnic, he cut free a rudimentary flask from the creature's belt as it fell once again to cold barbs of death, turning to flash crimson as his face lay greased with dark blood. He jogged back up to where his violin lay, discarding the dagger along the way, his tone heated as he spoke against her inanimate frame, "You call -that- art? Who taught you that? .... Yes, yes, I'm sure your secrets are plentiful." He began to clean, or rather smear, the blood upon his face with the shredded rag of a shirt that he inhabited, toned and tanned stomach bared as he drew cloth to skin.