Post by Joliette Thorne on Jul 27, 2007 5:39:14 GMT -5
She'd waited for nightfall again; though the winds still blew hard, they held the bone-chill of the desert night and the double layer of cloak that kept pale flesh searing in the sun when she could not avoid it now served as a barrier against the biting sands battering the fabric, hurled in waves by the gale's scouring force.
It was her third journey in search of the Wanderer, rumours of him fuelling the hunt. What drove her to endure such harshness for his sake, she could not have said, and did not know. But it drove her onward, deeper into the char-blacked sands that lit now and then, in the distance, sparking the flattened dunes abruptly blue and brilliant gold as lightning forked down from starless, blasted skies. To the south, the strikes seemed less frequent.. she considered making a wide arc around the place, westward, but the revenant crow tucked deep in a pocket in the confines of her cloak for shelter shoved its beak hard against still-painful ribs with each step she took toward lesser peril. His insistent nudging goaded Tene east, and it was with faltering steps, not only hesitant against that malefic blast of winds, that she'd continue, into the heart of the storm.
It was as though the lightning knew where she'd next step... thrice now, she was forced to fling herself to black sand, small frame hurtling from the path of a bolt that left the ground where she'd stood, moments before, a puddle of dirty glass and smoke. Now, her mouth filled with grit from the cry she made when her cloaks slipped open and skin was exposed to those vicious projectile grains carried on the wind, Tene hastened to rise, hurrying as best she could, still eastward. But she had not travelled more than ten paces when the sky cracked with fire again, and she knew to make yet another split-second leap, landing heavily once more to sand. Maladroit was quiescent.. the borrowed flesh of the corvine he inhabited was not faring well under the vampiress' forced landings. He lay in the pocket of Tenebrae's cloak, battered and quite forgotten, as she rose unsteadily to her feet, a pang of despair falling like a lead weight in her aching belly.
The path seemed impossible.. she would risk another trident of fire to stand and gather her wits. Nothing could be heard above the deafening whine of the maelstrom; the agonised roar of the unfortunate desert-beast that now skulked and staggered blindly through the night was lost in the din of it, but she could not miss the manner of its death-- the first strike, a near-miss; the great hulking lizard could be seen in the brief glare, balking, bolting in panicked flight-- the second hit home, and the stench of its fire-flayed carcass was discerned, mixed with ozone and terror, even in the hurricane-like winds. Motion.. it had to be what triggered the lightning, which she'd already suspected to be not entirely natural. She was out of the frying pan, thrown well and truly into the fire, as it were, too far in to afford any safe path back. A possibly fatal experiment ensued: she would let her legs buckle, huddle in her cloaks, and wait on her knees for death, or reprieve.
The winds did not still, but the lightning shifted southward, an occasional extra fizz and spark of its landing-- observed through a crack in the folds of cloth affording her brief vision, with her back to the gale-- suggesting it had focussed on different, less canny prey. Motion. Tene stood, gathered her flagging will and strength, and bolted as fast as the shifting sands under booted feet and headlong wind allowed, ten paces, and a sudden, skidding change of direction.. sure enough, where she'd come to a near-halt, jagged fingers of electric blue touched down and walked a short path across the sand as though groping for her body. But she was ten paces south of it, and once more zig-zagged, northward. Strike! But it missed, and the air itself whined as though in ire and disappointment. Thus it was she travelled the cursed distance east, slowly, exhaustingly, but ever onward in the deepening blackness of pre-dawn until the strikes faded once more, as if the sentience forging them had come to the end of its tether, jerked by the throat and snarling in impotent rage. The wind had not abated, however, and she forced her way through the opposing air and grit blindly, praying to whatever deity would listen that there be no treachery at foot, until her progress was once more halted, this time by a sudden blow of cedar-board to her body. Shocked, she'd back up a pace, almost battened back to the timber by a surging gust, and squint from out her cloak to discern a darkness in the darkness, a regular shape that suggested the incongruity of a man-made shelter. She'd step to it, press her palms to the boards and grope for the handle of the door, if there was one. Fingers soon found what felt like a latch and, in something of a desperate hope, she sprung it, tugged the door open and fell inside.
Baubles assumed personas in the fluttering pulsation of glimmer and shadow exuding from candlewicks, lining like lost souls beneath a scaffold with a kerchief o'er each eye, while the candles themselves were a motley of towering figures, crossbows in hand, bolts knocked, butterflies on the strings like picks on guitars as they were levelled on men with a penchant for taking Life and a sentence of the same. The strewn atlases of foreign lands upon the walls were nude like refugees lined for slaughter at the marauding hands of soldiers - The tempest had sound and fury and endless splinters of unbreaking woods while the sands exacted their toll. A hovel of moaning, dead Nature that the living world sought to vanquish in its righteousness. Its innards were a monument to dead ideas, a reliquary wherein the bones of saints intermingled with gypsy bangles and barbarian headdresses. Bits of peaceful eons and years that shriveled with war to the paltry moments of a soldier's last breath, shrouded in inadequacy. On a desk, one of three cleared surfaces, the other being a cot and a stool that a plump elf had left for pacing, Darian had hunched himself, quill in hand, like a God trying to eke one feather back into the dwindling plume of that great Phoenix, Time - the bits of waxen feather-hilt shaved in its sequential sharpening mottling the parchment the quill etched with ink like blood through wind-whistling pools of a reed-strewn pond. His back was stamped with an unsung fire that cast its net upon him and seared his spine, clavicle, shoulderblades like a desert parched and swilling sunbeams. The seeping cracks of when the skies had unfurled their plume of clouds like a banner upon which your death-sentence was scrawled and let the sun etch him as he now etched the olden parchments of a brighter demesnes known as the darkling Past. His chest bore an array of ink and long-dried bloods, one spattering onto his pectorals and the other flecking off as though they were paints on a masterly portrait of the sundown, at least succumbing to attrition and the incessant batter of the second-hand’s gusting whirl. Rolls of scrolls piled about him and Buckley paced and muttered.
Tenebrae lay on the floorboards for several ticks of a clock, catching breath, gingerly lifting from it and the sensation against her belly of the flattened lump inside her robe, which had been made more so in her fall. Shaking her features free of hood and tangled hair, thought the wind still gusted through the door, she'd not catch sight of the elf who bustled to close it behind her until his task was done; he'd be the first thing she saw as eyes adjusted to a steadier light and watered free of fine grit. The man scratching quill to parchment in the candle-light was the second, his cicatrised torso drawing her eyes first there, then upward to meet the slate of his own gaze, if it yet rested on her. She might have made her parched throat cough his name, over wind-withered lips, but it snagged there like a shred of ribbon on a twig, this sudden end to her seemingly endless search as shocking as the hut, and the elf, if not more so. So it was silently she rose to her feet and stood there, watching him.
Buckley had bent to help in the raising of the wayworn maiden, catching himself upon noting her stability, walking on the cushiony spread of a merchant's congenial caution as he shuffles off to the minuscule firepit, nestled amid the sprawling and mounting haberdashery of his wares, to take up a teapot along whose copper plating ran a spread of olden friezes, chiseled in the likeness of some long hell-sunk empire's remnant stamp upon the world, and crawling with the cracks of ages atop the flame and whistling jigs for glasses to clink to. His speech had begun at once, had carried on with zealotry for the cause of conversationalism, and babbled like a brook with orotund arrays of toadlings eyeing the swish of tadpoles contentedly from its banks. "Dear me, the sand has all but lifted off your skin! Up - up now, though you must be dreadfully worn. The storm is feeling fickle today, you see, or rather 'saw', I suppose. No matter, but all the same, what a woman you must be! Yes, quite a woman, quite a woman." he had uttered as he stepped from her form. "It almost recalls for me the ogress I met running a brothel in Larket some centuries off, though you are clearly softer to the touch, but with a similar gleam to the eye, perhaps. She killed half the men she took to soil her beddings." he trickled on, upsetting the kettle and reaching at glasses hung high enough to set him on toe-tips. "The beauty of it was that no one ever died of anything but exhaustion. Well, one was crushed, but gnomes are never so clever as they might appear to be. Gnome and 'n ogre! What a thought! Poor lad, though. Said he was rather preferential to the bottom and she shattered his sternum, which then, but of course, was driven inward to jab a hole in his wee little heart. But no - she was quite a woman..." He set the glasses, brimming with tea and steam and the crumblings of oriental leaves "And, in the end, they had to raise her to something more managerial, as half the married men were dying by her, and half the married women were dying of shame! Oh yes, trouble on wheels, by the end of it. Someone took a vigilante veneer and set her dress ablaze! Have you ever smelled ogre-flesh set ablaze? Musky. The mice asphyxiated. Dreadful, really. But she could still wheel-down anyone who seemed negligent toward their fare. Ah! Tea, miss, tea. Rest and relaxation, you know, begins, first and foremost, with tea." Solemn words from characters who soil solemnity with their joviality are really too much. It's like manuring a grave to help the flowers along. Darian scratched ever on.
Tenebrae stood aghast awhile, as the elf bustled and babbled about her, gaze fixated on The King of Roads. Her skin was, indeed, abraded in the many places the wind had caught flesh blown free of cloth in the bluster outside that could still be heard battering the boards as though it sought entry and shelter from itself; too, she'd smell vaguely of singed fabric and char, though it was her outer cloak that was the cause. This, she slipped from her shoulders, not a moment spent in looking away from Darian ,his obliviousness to her presence beginning to rankle, and held it outward for the elf to take, since he seemed so intent on providing her comfort. The ruined cloth was removed from her grasp lightly, and she'd listen to his tale of a whorish ogress impassively, poised as she was, and still stood as though suspended of animation, and waited. The story ran its course, and the elf's own silence would follow his question; Tene turned to him slowly, as if waking from a fugue. Tea was the last thing she wanted, but sered mouth and manners prevailed and, as reality settled back into some sort of semblance and her adrenalised flesh relinquished its wary hold on her tongue, the body slower than the mind to understand that desert-sky's murderous tridents no longer struck toward her, she spoke, "Of course. Thankyou." The environment slowly sank into her perception; the light, parchments, books, shelved and loose goods. A trader's hut. The elf.. By his demeanour and fleshiness, he was surviving well the dread lands beyond his door. The Wanderer. He looked somewhat at home, attention still consumed with his scribblings. Lips thinned, she'd return to staring his way and shook her head to the seat Buckley additionally offered. "I'll stand, if it's alright." Gloved fingertips would then press to that squashy lump that weighted in her pocket. Maladroit... She was glad of the gloves, when her questing hand closed around the broken bones, the loose feathers, the limp and split body that the once-goblin had obviously been forced to vacate. At last Darian was relinquished from her eyes, and she studied the crushed and stilly bird wit a frown, pinions drifting from it to rest on the boards below. "Sorry..."
Buckley, replacing the hut's lone stool at the sparsely clear space in the center, began anew, gesticulating at where to be random intervals of misplaced emphasis and skittering about the statuary Tenebrae, occasionally brushing her in the cramped nature of the abode. "Forgive the lack of space, dearie. You'll have to, really. Or perhaps you do not, though you Will, all the same. Room is a paltry enough commodity in my humblest of domiciles, but the sheer voluminousness of other such commodities more than doubly, or trebly, accounts for such meager notions. I have everything. Everything. Well, I do possess a certain distaste for mirrors and tea cozies, so none of those, to my knowledge." Stopping to flail a bit more, this time in place. "But, my child, I do mean Everything." Darian shifted as the plumage of a raven dwindled to the floor. Rising like onyx blood from a fountain of silver and tarnish, scrolls by number were set into his pockets, his belt-loops, the holes in leggings, the final parchment's inks were made to dry beneath his pupils, so it too might be rolled and set where it might hold. Upon his movement, Buckley stilled, as though a sky had been uttering forth in beams before a blackened dragon set across it in ecliptic beat of wing and bellow of acrid brimstone. Darian turned. Strode. Plucked a feather like a tooth from a body, ageless in a crypt, that one might keep in memoriam on a cord about your neck. He strode to Tenebrae, the feather brushing along his cheek like the winds the once bore it. His bared chest loosed its flecks of blood along her spine, stained her tatters of cloak with ink as he encircled her with his arms, fingers nimbly braiding the raven's plumage into her tresses, as though she were Night that knew not blackness til Darian had come with such bequest. While his fingers interwove the feather with her locks, as arms coiled about her neck, Darian hummed, and Buckley was glad at last there was something more than Silence.
Tenebrae breathed... the deep lungfuls of a mind relieved, a burden unburdened. Darian's wanton attention finally drifted her way, and she'd watch, it seemed she ever watched him, the scrolls put in their places, his rise and motion toward her, the way his hair fell forward when he stooped to the feather.. She breathed, though it caught and hitched when he neared, when his arms rose to brush shoulder and neck as his fingers worked the quill into her hair. Buckley once more was a noise in the background, a murmuring accompaniment to Darian's hum, though she'd acknowledged his words before the elf's vampiric companion stood, with a nod and weakling smile. Yes, Everything indeed.. Tene would file the thought away, for the now, but the soft clatter of gold to purse rang in her mind's ear, to fade at the Wanderer's approach. She couldn't meet his eye, at that proximity. "I brought your jacket." She coughed - it felt like half the desert's sand was a dune in her throat. "Got it on. The sun..."
Buckley gave a gasp, and a slight turn, as Darian began undressing Tenebrae, grey and holey cloak to floor and jacket to swirl about his form like Dark encircling a blood spattered globe that gleamed with the ink of Poets traipsing along its mountainous ribcages. Darian picked the feathers yet on the floorboards, walked about, one hand gathering items to plumpen his pockets and another tying the plumage to various dangling threads along his jacket. Stop. Turn. One Feather left as his eyes meet Tenebrae’s like fangs meet pores on a morning that withers with the hourglass, the rising sun an amounting mound of sandy granules. The last feather was knotted in his tresses, just along his cheek, as he held her gaze in a vice of lashes and retinas. When this was done, he strode to the broken raven, palmed it, set it in Buckley's palm as he uttered: "Now you have Everything." and the door closed behind him, with the winds whispering on.
He was impossible. And gone... again, into the tormented night she'd escaped. You'd think Tene might tire of the apparent perpetuity of incredulous pauses. When her lips could part, she stooped to take up her fallen cloak, grey as old webs and as worn-through and ragged, fasten it around her, and turned to the elf, gaze shrugging toward the seat Darian had occupied. "He been here long? And.. what was all that about, the parchments?"
It was her third journey in search of the Wanderer, rumours of him fuelling the hunt. What drove her to endure such harshness for his sake, she could not have said, and did not know. But it drove her onward, deeper into the char-blacked sands that lit now and then, in the distance, sparking the flattened dunes abruptly blue and brilliant gold as lightning forked down from starless, blasted skies. To the south, the strikes seemed less frequent.. she considered making a wide arc around the place, westward, but the revenant crow tucked deep in a pocket in the confines of her cloak for shelter shoved its beak hard against still-painful ribs with each step she took toward lesser peril. His insistent nudging goaded Tene east, and it was with faltering steps, not only hesitant against that malefic blast of winds, that she'd continue, into the heart of the storm.
It was as though the lightning knew where she'd next step... thrice now, she was forced to fling herself to black sand, small frame hurtling from the path of a bolt that left the ground where she'd stood, moments before, a puddle of dirty glass and smoke. Now, her mouth filled with grit from the cry she made when her cloaks slipped open and skin was exposed to those vicious projectile grains carried on the wind, Tene hastened to rise, hurrying as best she could, still eastward. But she had not travelled more than ten paces when the sky cracked with fire again, and she knew to make yet another split-second leap, landing heavily once more to sand. Maladroit was quiescent.. the borrowed flesh of the corvine he inhabited was not faring well under the vampiress' forced landings. He lay in the pocket of Tenebrae's cloak, battered and quite forgotten, as she rose unsteadily to her feet, a pang of despair falling like a lead weight in her aching belly.
The path seemed impossible.. she would risk another trident of fire to stand and gather her wits. Nothing could be heard above the deafening whine of the maelstrom; the agonised roar of the unfortunate desert-beast that now skulked and staggered blindly through the night was lost in the din of it, but she could not miss the manner of its death-- the first strike, a near-miss; the great hulking lizard could be seen in the brief glare, balking, bolting in panicked flight-- the second hit home, and the stench of its fire-flayed carcass was discerned, mixed with ozone and terror, even in the hurricane-like winds. Motion.. it had to be what triggered the lightning, which she'd already suspected to be not entirely natural. She was out of the frying pan, thrown well and truly into the fire, as it were, too far in to afford any safe path back. A possibly fatal experiment ensued: she would let her legs buckle, huddle in her cloaks, and wait on her knees for death, or reprieve.
The winds did not still, but the lightning shifted southward, an occasional extra fizz and spark of its landing-- observed through a crack in the folds of cloth affording her brief vision, with her back to the gale-- suggesting it had focussed on different, less canny prey. Motion. Tene stood, gathered her flagging will and strength, and bolted as fast as the shifting sands under booted feet and headlong wind allowed, ten paces, and a sudden, skidding change of direction.. sure enough, where she'd come to a near-halt, jagged fingers of electric blue touched down and walked a short path across the sand as though groping for her body. But she was ten paces south of it, and once more zig-zagged, northward. Strike! But it missed, and the air itself whined as though in ire and disappointment. Thus it was she travelled the cursed distance east, slowly, exhaustingly, but ever onward in the deepening blackness of pre-dawn until the strikes faded once more, as if the sentience forging them had come to the end of its tether, jerked by the throat and snarling in impotent rage. The wind had not abated, however, and she forced her way through the opposing air and grit blindly, praying to whatever deity would listen that there be no treachery at foot, until her progress was once more halted, this time by a sudden blow of cedar-board to her body. Shocked, she'd back up a pace, almost battened back to the timber by a surging gust, and squint from out her cloak to discern a darkness in the darkness, a regular shape that suggested the incongruity of a man-made shelter. She'd step to it, press her palms to the boards and grope for the handle of the door, if there was one. Fingers soon found what felt like a latch and, in something of a desperate hope, she sprung it, tugged the door open and fell inside.
Baubles assumed personas in the fluttering pulsation of glimmer and shadow exuding from candlewicks, lining like lost souls beneath a scaffold with a kerchief o'er each eye, while the candles themselves were a motley of towering figures, crossbows in hand, bolts knocked, butterflies on the strings like picks on guitars as they were levelled on men with a penchant for taking Life and a sentence of the same. The strewn atlases of foreign lands upon the walls were nude like refugees lined for slaughter at the marauding hands of soldiers - The tempest had sound and fury and endless splinters of unbreaking woods while the sands exacted their toll. A hovel of moaning, dead Nature that the living world sought to vanquish in its righteousness. Its innards were a monument to dead ideas, a reliquary wherein the bones of saints intermingled with gypsy bangles and barbarian headdresses. Bits of peaceful eons and years that shriveled with war to the paltry moments of a soldier's last breath, shrouded in inadequacy. On a desk, one of three cleared surfaces, the other being a cot and a stool that a plump elf had left for pacing, Darian had hunched himself, quill in hand, like a God trying to eke one feather back into the dwindling plume of that great Phoenix, Time - the bits of waxen feather-hilt shaved in its sequential sharpening mottling the parchment the quill etched with ink like blood through wind-whistling pools of a reed-strewn pond. His back was stamped with an unsung fire that cast its net upon him and seared his spine, clavicle, shoulderblades like a desert parched and swilling sunbeams. The seeping cracks of when the skies had unfurled their plume of clouds like a banner upon which your death-sentence was scrawled and let the sun etch him as he now etched the olden parchments of a brighter demesnes known as the darkling Past. His chest bore an array of ink and long-dried bloods, one spattering onto his pectorals and the other flecking off as though they were paints on a masterly portrait of the sundown, at least succumbing to attrition and the incessant batter of the second-hand’s gusting whirl. Rolls of scrolls piled about him and Buckley paced and muttered.
Tenebrae lay on the floorboards for several ticks of a clock, catching breath, gingerly lifting from it and the sensation against her belly of the flattened lump inside her robe, which had been made more so in her fall. Shaking her features free of hood and tangled hair, thought the wind still gusted through the door, she'd not catch sight of the elf who bustled to close it behind her until his task was done; he'd be the first thing she saw as eyes adjusted to a steadier light and watered free of fine grit. The man scratching quill to parchment in the candle-light was the second, his cicatrised torso drawing her eyes first there, then upward to meet the slate of his own gaze, if it yet rested on her. She might have made her parched throat cough his name, over wind-withered lips, but it snagged there like a shred of ribbon on a twig, this sudden end to her seemingly endless search as shocking as the hut, and the elf, if not more so. So it was silently she rose to her feet and stood there, watching him.
Buckley had bent to help in the raising of the wayworn maiden, catching himself upon noting her stability, walking on the cushiony spread of a merchant's congenial caution as he shuffles off to the minuscule firepit, nestled amid the sprawling and mounting haberdashery of his wares, to take up a teapot along whose copper plating ran a spread of olden friezes, chiseled in the likeness of some long hell-sunk empire's remnant stamp upon the world, and crawling with the cracks of ages atop the flame and whistling jigs for glasses to clink to. His speech had begun at once, had carried on with zealotry for the cause of conversationalism, and babbled like a brook with orotund arrays of toadlings eyeing the swish of tadpoles contentedly from its banks. "Dear me, the sand has all but lifted off your skin! Up - up now, though you must be dreadfully worn. The storm is feeling fickle today, you see, or rather 'saw', I suppose. No matter, but all the same, what a woman you must be! Yes, quite a woman, quite a woman." he had uttered as he stepped from her form. "It almost recalls for me the ogress I met running a brothel in Larket some centuries off, though you are clearly softer to the touch, but with a similar gleam to the eye, perhaps. She killed half the men she took to soil her beddings." he trickled on, upsetting the kettle and reaching at glasses hung high enough to set him on toe-tips. "The beauty of it was that no one ever died of anything but exhaustion. Well, one was crushed, but gnomes are never so clever as they might appear to be. Gnome and 'n ogre! What a thought! Poor lad, though. Said he was rather preferential to the bottom and she shattered his sternum, which then, but of course, was driven inward to jab a hole in his wee little heart. But no - she was quite a woman..." He set the glasses, brimming with tea and steam and the crumblings of oriental leaves "And, in the end, they had to raise her to something more managerial, as half the married men were dying by her, and half the married women were dying of shame! Oh yes, trouble on wheels, by the end of it. Someone took a vigilante veneer and set her dress ablaze! Have you ever smelled ogre-flesh set ablaze? Musky. The mice asphyxiated. Dreadful, really. But she could still wheel-down anyone who seemed negligent toward their fare. Ah! Tea, miss, tea. Rest and relaxation, you know, begins, first and foremost, with tea." Solemn words from characters who soil solemnity with their joviality are really too much. It's like manuring a grave to help the flowers along. Darian scratched ever on.
Tenebrae stood aghast awhile, as the elf bustled and babbled about her, gaze fixated on The King of Roads. Her skin was, indeed, abraded in the many places the wind had caught flesh blown free of cloth in the bluster outside that could still be heard battering the boards as though it sought entry and shelter from itself; too, she'd smell vaguely of singed fabric and char, though it was her outer cloak that was the cause. This, she slipped from her shoulders, not a moment spent in looking away from Darian ,his obliviousness to her presence beginning to rankle, and held it outward for the elf to take, since he seemed so intent on providing her comfort. The ruined cloth was removed from her grasp lightly, and she'd listen to his tale of a whorish ogress impassively, poised as she was, and still stood as though suspended of animation, and waited. The story ran its course, and the elf's own silence would follow his question; Tene turned to him slowly, as if waking from a fugue. Tea was the last thing she wanted, but sered mouth and manners prevailed and, as reality settled back into some sort of semblance and her adrenalised flesh relinquished its wary hold on her tongue, the body slower than the mind to understand that desert-sky's murderous tridents no longer struck toward her, she spoke, "Of course. Thankyou." The environment slowly sank into her perception; the light, parchments, books, shelved and loose goods. A trader's hut. The elf.. By his demeanour and fleshiness, he was surviving well the dread lands beyond his door. The Wanderer. He looked somewhat at home, attention still consumed with his scribblings. Lips thinned, she'd return to staring his way and shook her head to the seat Buckley additionally offered. "I'll stand, if it's alright." Gloved fingertips would then press to that squashy lump that weighted in her pocket. Maladroit... She was glad of the gloves, when her questing hand closed around the broken bones, the loose feathers, the limp and split body that the once-goblin had obviously been forced to vacate. At last Darian was relinquished from her eyes, and she studied the crushed and stilly bird wit a frown, pinions drifting from it to rest on the boards below. "Sorry..."
Buckley, replacing the hut's lone stool at the sparsely clear space in the center, began anew, gesticulating at where to be random intervals of misplaced emphasis and skittering about the statuary Tenebrae, occasionally brushing her in the cramped nature of the abode. "Forgive the lack of space, dearie. You'll have to, really. Or perhaps you do not, though you Will, all the same. Room is a paltry enough commodity in my humblest of domiciles, but the sheer voluminousness of other such commodities more than doubly, or trebly, accounts for such meager notions. I have everything. Everything. Well, I do possess a certain distaste for mirrors and tea cozies, so none of those, to my knowledge." Stopping to flail a bit more, this time in place. "But, my child, I do mean Everything." Darian shifted as the plumage of a raven dwindled to the floor. Rising like onyx blood from a fountain of silver and tarnish, scrolls by number were set into his pockets, his belt-loops, the holes in leggings, the final parchment's inks were made to dry beneath his pupils, so it too might be rolled and set where it might hold. Upon his movement, Buckley stilled, as though a sky had been uttering forth in beams before a blackened dragon set across it in ecliptic beat of wing and bellow of acrid brimstone. Darian turned. Strode. Plucked a feather like a tooth from a body, ageless in a crypt, that one might keep in memoriam on a cord about your neck. He strode to Tenebrae, the feather brushing along his cheek like the winds the once bore it. His bared chest loosed its flecks of blood along her spine, stained her tatters of cloak with ink as he encircled her with his arms, fingers nimbly braiding the raven's plumage into her tresses, as though she were Night that knew not blackness til Darian had come with such bequest. While his fingers interwove the feather with her locks, as arms coiled about her neck, Darian hummed, and Buckley was glad at last there was something more than Silence.
Tenebrae breathed... the deep lungfuls of a mind relieved, a burden unburdened. Darian's wanton attention finally drifted her way, and she'd watch, it seemed she ever watched him, the scrolls put in their places, his rise and motion toward her, the way his hair fell forward when he stooped to the feather.. She breathed, though it caught and hitched when he neared, when his arms rose to brush shoulder and neck as his fingers worked the quill into her hair. Buckley once more was a noise in the background, a murmuring accompaniment to Darian's hum, though she'd acknowledged his words before the elf's vampiric companion stood, with a nod and weakling smile. Yes, Everything indeed.. Tene would file the thought away, for the now, but the soft clatter of gold to purse rang in her mind's ear, to fade at the Wanderer's approach. She couldn't meet his eye, at that proximity. "I brought your jacket." She coughed - it felt like half the desert's sand was a dune in her throat. "Got it on. The sun..."
Buckley gave a gasp, and a slight turn, as Darian began undressing Tenebrae, grey and holey cloak to floor and jacket to swirl about his form like Dark encircling a blood spattered globe that gleamed with the ink of Poets traipsing along its mountainous ribcages. Darian picked the feathers yet on the floorboards, walked about, one hand gathering items to plumpen his pockets and another tying the plumage to various dangling threads along his jacket. Stop. Turn. One Feather left as his eyes meet Tenebrae’s like fangs meet pores on a morning that withers with the hourglass, the rising sun an amounting mound of sandy granules. The last feather was knotted in his tresses, just along his cheek, as he held her gaze in a vice of lashes and retinas. When this was done, he strode to the broken raven, palmed it, set it in Buckley's palm as he uttered: "Now you have Everything." and the door closed behind him, with the winds whispering on.
He was impossible. And gone... again, into the tormented night she'd escaped. You'd think Tene might tire of the apparent perpetuity of incredulous pauses. When her lips could part, she stooped to take up her fallen cloak, grey as old webs and as worn-through and ragged, fasten it around her, and turned to the elf, gaze shrugging toward the seat Darian had occupied. "He been here long? And.. what was all that about, the parchments?"