[Wyrmbreaker] Wyrmbreaker is tending the shrine of the totem tonight: that great anvil-shaped rock that bears a not-coincidental resemblance to those mighty thunderheads one finds over large continental masses. Embedded in the rock is an axe; wrapped around the haft of the axe, reaching down for sustenance, are the roots of a rapidly-growing oak sapling.
It is this that the Ahroun tends tonight. There are bodies by the shrine, slain enemies laid out, their chest cavities cracked open. Wyrmbreaker is laying the hearts and viscerae of unknown enemies upon the flat top of the rock in sacrifice to the storm-god. Oak spirits are normally peaceful things, but not the oaks of Perun. It's bloody, ritualistic work, which the Ahroun partakes in barechested, lounge pants rolled up to the knee, bare feet squelching amidst earth muddied with blood, bare hands red up to the elbows. It is at once jarring and utterly natural to see Wyrmbreaker, normally so civilized and reserved, like this.
When he sees Asha passing, he calls to her. "What are you up to?" he asks her, cheerfully enough -- blood and butchery all around.
[Asha Singh] Even under a failing moon, in the umbra, near the Caern's heart, amidst the shrines to the totems of Maelstom - pack totems, tribal totems, some fallen into a sort of elegant neglect, the remaining broodlings gathered about them drowsing, others - like that of Perun - covered in blood, grim reminders of the work at hand, the necessity of blood and sacrifice, the gruesome work of war - Asha is a bright thing. Brighter here than in the real world, here - where the breeding of her tribe is all the more evident, as if her black hair and black eyes and deep brown skin were all somehow moonlit from beneath, under, within.
In sharp contrast to Wyrmbreaker, she is not bloodied, not muddied. She is collected, in her dark jeans and crisp white oxford, recently pressed, so recently pressed that the hot scent of the iron on fabric touches the air around her. Her right hand is in the front pocket of her black jeans, the sunglasses (dedicated, those) are pushed back onto the crown of her head, holding back the elegant disorder of her black hair, the huge surfaces of the lenses gleaming with the reflected light of luna. Her feet are bare, though, the undedicated sandals abandoned somewhere admist the ruin that is the Caern in the Tellurian. Her share of last night's trophies are in her left hand. The least part of it, cliath that she is.
Wyrmbreaker calls out to her, and she looks up, sidelong, the lush line of her mouth a narrow sort of twist. Some of her rage has been spent; it leaves her feeling - not calm, not precisely - but emptied, just a touch. With more space inside her for words and other things. "Hey." - she calls back, her mouth pressing together, her nose wrinkling near the tip in thought; the hesitation is clear. Then, " - I was going to the graves."
Maudlin, that. What else do you expect from Silver Fangs, though? Madness and history, the history of madness, written back into the world.
[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas straightens up, flexing his shoulders back to crack his spine, looking in the direction of the graves.
"Let me finish here," he says, "and I'll join you."
It doesn't take him much longer -- precious viscerae torn out, stripped of gristle and fat, laid glistening onto to the shrine. The carcasses hauled off to the side for later disposal; dumped into the lake, perhaps, or fed to flame-spirits. When he's finished the air is thick with the scent of blood and organ-meats. He cleans his hands by rubbing sandy lakeshore dirt over them, then nods to Asha.
"Okay. Let's go."
[Asha Singh] Asha rocks back on her heels, watching as he finished the brutal work. She is unphased by the filth, by the gleaming fat tossed aside, by the glistening viscera looped and whorled atop the shrine - though she makes no move to interrupt, and does not offer her Alpha a hand.
The creature falls into step beside him when he finishes. Her legs are impossibly long given her slightness - she has the aspect, seen from the right angle, in long shadows - of a spider, some other insect - but the likeness is fleeting, passing. Still, she takes one and a half-steps for every two taken by her Alpha, though by a neat trick she does not seem like she is hurrying so much as stalking, precise and delicate and sure.
The graves are raw; a half-dozen still mounded, the earth not yet settled. "You have packmates buried here." It isn't a question; her voice is oddly subdued. There's an accent beneath it, which does not emerge under most circumstances. The failing moon casts the graveyard in a pale, cool light.
[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas nods again, quietly. Then he points them out: "Sampson," and then quieter, "and Mrena. Both of the Unbroken Circle, when we ran under the Talons of Horus.
"Walks-the-Tracks, too, though she never had a chance to formally bond with us."
His hand falls back to his side. He considers those graves for a moment: each still neatly tended, the pinwheel before Sampson's still spinning with the lake breeze, though the colors are fading now.
"Who are you here to mourn?"
[Asha Singh] "I'm not - " the girl cuts a look back at Wyrmbreaker's profile. There is a vicious sort of speed subsumed in the single gesture. Her voice is sharp, the natural sullenness undergirds her tone, curls at the edges of it like paper curling in a flame. " - mourning."
Away, then. Her narrow body stiff underneath the rather fine - if utilitarian - clothes, the white shirt stark against her dark skin. She's not mourning. It's something else that lacks a word; it's a half-dozen words shoved together, none of which she knows.
She's stopped, though. In front of sklora-Myrgen's grave, and stands there with her body held stiff, sideways to the foot of the mounded earth, her right shoulder toward the marker, her left toward the expance of the lake. Nearly diffident, she tosses her cleansed trophies onto the spent earth. There's a moment where she almost says something to the grave, but she looks up at her Alpha, abrupt, last minute, almost guiltily, and swallows whatever it might've been, quick-as-you please.
[Wyrmbreaker] She's not mourning, she says, a teenage sullenness underscoring that. It makes Lukas look at her curiously; mildly.
After a moment, "Why not?"
[Asha Singh] "Because mourning is stupid." - the girl replies, wiping her now-empty hand on her thigh. She has not looked back to the grave, not even to see where the trophies landed. She has not looked back at Lukas, either. Breathing deeply, evenly, her heart pounding fast in her chest, her dark eyes fixed on the calm, glittering expanse of the lake, darker than the city will ever be, its black mirror, but still shining with reflected light. "I'm just mad."
She doesn't stound it. Just sullen, that hint of reflexive anger, this sort of expectancy beneath it. "Dying's stupid, too."
[Wyrmbreaker] The truth is, Lukas is sometimes too damn perfect for his own good. Just listen to what the spirits say of him. So fucking glorious. So fucking honorable. So fucking wise. Ready to challenge for Adren already if he'd just step up and take it. So fucking clearsighted, so controlled, so apparently untouched by petty angers and jealousies and emotions.
It makes him seem harsh and uncomprehending of others' failings, sometimes. It makes him berate them for weaknesses and follies he does not seem vulnerable to, and therefore cannot be tempted by. It can make him seem self-righteous; superior; condescending: so quick to point out the flaws of others when he himself seems to not even understand what it is to struggle against failure.
That was a bone that lay between himself and the Silver Fang that now lies in the earth. Wyrmbreaker once berated sklora-Myrgen on the choices he made when Wyrmbreaker himself was not there to make them. Did not have to make those hard, bitter choices even when he relived that night.
That Lukas does not understand temptation, or failure, or emotion is not true in the end. Lukas hews to a clear, hard, straight path not because it's his nature. His nature is wild: is savagery and blood, is the ritual sacrifice of foes on the altar of his god. His nature is the wolf and the storm. Is domination and brutality. Is hotblooded instinct, is bestial. It's sheer control, sheer force of will, that keeps him to his path. And it's fear of bone-deep flaws like wrath, like pride, like avarice, that keeps him to his path.
All of which is to say: it's easy to expect Lukas to berate Asha now, then. To lecture her on mourning or grief or weakness or god knows what else. Or simply, by his goddamn impenetrable even-toned rightness, to make her feel diminished.
But he doesn't. He looks at sklora-Myrgen's grave for a while, letting silence settle between them and soothe the younger Ahroun's nerves.
Then, "I thought he was too proud, and full of the sort of Fang self-entitlement that drives me crazy. But I also thought he was a good warrior, one of our strongest, and willing to help those weaker than himself. Willing, at the end, to protect them." A small shrug. "I think it's stupid and frustrating that he's dead, too.
"Did you know him well?"
[Asha Singh] The silence extends, meant to soothe her nerves, to allow her space for her weakness. Except that her nerves are not soothed, not by what passes for silence here in the Caern's heart, surrounded by the constant hum of the spirits, not here, at the edge of the lake, the spirit of the wind singing a low northern song, the waters constant. The darkness does not sooth her either, not the expanse of the lake, nor the darkness of the tree inside her, the roots that draw her down toward the heart of the earth, the branches that extend above her head, all the way to luna, the lucency, the madness, the strength underlying it all.
The girl's arms are crossed low over her stomach, her body language tight, narrow - like a sailboat lashed down for the winter, the sails collapsed and rolled on themselves, tied tight underneath the canvas. When Lukas mentions Fang self-entitlement Asha cuts him a sharp, direct look, right over her shoulder, her black eyes sparking in the pale moonlight, her generous mouth twisted, peeling back from her teeth in the liminal suggestion of a snarl, swallowed in the next moment. The look, though, remains. Her eyes are older, too. The past echoes in her, the tree and the twisted branches, the deep, strong roots.
Once, there was no madness in the line.
Once, they ruled unquestioned, divinely blessed - her Chosen.
Now: a girl half-a-world away from her ancestral lands, from the spiny teeth of the world, the great heights, the impossible valleys, stands at the edge of the poorly tendered grave of a barely remembered cliath. He had no children. The line dies here. Ashes, dust.
"He gave up," she says this clearly, her voice whip-sharp, the anger a bright thing in it. Luminous. " - his klaive for Maelstrom and his ancestors for Athena."
She down at the raw mound of dirt. She hates the earth. Hates the mud. Hates the dead. She's jealous of it all, and kicks the soil in her frustration, her bare brown toes. "I met him before, in that stupid place he came from. With all those stupid servants, all dust and shadows, and all those crazy, stupid people." Her arms tighten around her torso, and she looks back out to the lake. "I'm gonna go back there. See if anyone's left to hear the news."
[Asha Singh] (pause!)
It is this that the Ahroun tends tonight. There are bodies by the shrine, slain enemies laid out, their chest cavities cracked open. Wyrmbreaker is laying the hearts and viscerae of unknown enemies upon the flat top of the rock in sacrifice to the storm-god. Oak spirits are normally peaceful things, but not the oaks of Perun. It's bloody, ritualistic work, which the Ahroun partakes in barechested, lounge pants rolled up to the knee, bare feet squelching amidst earth muddied with blood, bare hands red up to the elbows. It is at once jarring and utterly natural to see Wyrmbreaker, normally so civilized and reserved, like this.
When he sees Asha passing, he calls to her. "What are you up to?" he asks her, cheerfully enough -- blood and butchery all around.
[Asha Singh] Even under a failing moon, in the umbra, near the Caern's heart, amidst the shrines to the totems of Maelstom - pack totems, tribal totems, some fallen into a sort of elegant neglect, the remaining broodlings gathered about them drowsing, others - like that of Perun - covered in blood, grim reminders of the work at hand, the necessity of blood and sacrifice, the gruesome work of war - Asha is a bright thing. Brighter here than in the real world, here - where the breeding of her tribe is all the more evident, as if her black hair and black eyes and deep brown skin were all somehow moonlit from beneath, under, within.
In sharp contrast to Wyrmbreaker, she is not bloodied, not muddied. She is collected, in her dark jeans and crisp white oxford, recently pressed, so recently pressed that the hot scent of the iron on fabric touches the air around her. Her right hand is in the front pocket of her black jeans, the sunglasses (dedicated, those) are pushed back onto the crown of her head, holding back the elegant disorder of her black hair, the huge surfaces of the lenses gleaming with the reflected light of luna. Her feet are bare, though, the undedicated sandals abandoned somewhere admist the ruin that is the Caern in the Tellurian. Her share of last night's trophies are in her left hand. The least part of it, cliath that she is.
Wyrmbreaker calls out to her, and she looks up, sidelong, the lush line of her mouth a narrow sort of twist. Some of her rage has been spent; it leaves her feeling - not calm, not precisely - but emptied, just a touch. With more space inside her for words and other things. "Hey." - she calls back, her mouth pressing together, her nose wrinkling near the tip in thought; the hesitation is clear. Then, " - I was going to the graves."
Maudlin, that. What else do you expect from Silver Fangs, though? Madness and history, the history of madness, written back into the world.
[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas straightens up, flexing his shoulders back to crack his spine, looking in the direction of the graves.
"Let me finish here," he says, "and I'll join you."
It doesn't take him much longer -- precious viscerae torn out, stripped of gristle and fat, laid glistening onto to the shrine. The carcasses hauled off to the side for later disposal; dumped into the lake, perhaps, or fed to flame-spirits. When he's finished the air is thick with the scent of blood and organ-meats. He cleans his hands by rubbing sandy lakeshore dirt over them, then nods to Asha.
"Okay. Let's go."
[Asha Singh] Asha rocks back on her heels, watching as he finished the brutal work. She is unphased by the filth, by the gleaming fat tossed aside, by the glistening viscera looped and whorled atop the shrine - though she makes no move to interrupt, and does not offer her Alpha a hand.
The creature falls into step beside him when he finishes. Her legs are impossibly long given her slightness - she has the aspect, seen from the right angle, in long shadows - of a spider, some other insect - but the likeness is fleeting, passing. Still, she takes one and a half-steps for every two taken by her Alpha, though by a neat trick she does not seem like she is hurrying so much as stalking, precise and delicate and sure.
The graves are raw; a half-dozen still mounded, the earth not yet settled. "You have packmates buried here." It isn't a question; her voice is oddly subdued. There's an accent beneath it, which does not emerge under most circumstances. The failing moon casts the graveyard in a pale, cool light.
[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas nods again, quietly. Then he points them out: "Sampson," and then quieter, "and Mrena. Both of the Unbroken Circle, when we ran under the Talons of Horus.
"Walks-the-Tracks, too, though she never had a chance to formally bond with us."
His hand falls back to his side. He considers those graves for a moment: each still neatly tended, the pinwheel before Sampson's still spinning with the lake breeze, though the colors are fading now.
"Who are you here to mourn?"
[Asha Singh] "I'm not - " the girl cuts a look back at Wyrmbreaker's profile. There is a vicious sort of speed subsumed in the single gesture. Her voice is sharp, the natural sullenness undergirds her tone, curls at the edges of it like paper curling in a flame. " - mourning."
Away, then. Her narrow body stiff underneath the rather fine - if utilitarian - clothes, the white shirt stark against her dark skin. She's not mourning. It's something else that lacks a word; it's a half-dozen words shoved together, none of which she knows.
She's stopped, though. In front of sklora-Myrgen's grave, and stands there with her body held stiff, sideways to the foot of the mounded earth, her right shoulder toward the marker, her left toward the expance of the lake. Nearly diffident, she tosses her cleansed trophies onto the spent earth. There's a moment where she almost says something to the grave, but she looks up at her Alpha, abrupt, last minute, almost guiltily, and swallows whatever it might've been, quick-as-you please.
[Wyrmbreaker] She's not mourning, she says, a teenage sullenness underscoring that. It makes Lukas look at her curiously; mildly.
After a moment, "Why not?"
[Asha Singh] "Because mourning is stupid." - the girl replies, wiping her now-empty hand on her thigh. She has not looked back to the grave, not even to see where the trophies landed. She has not looked back at Lukas, either. Breathing deeply, evenly, her heart pounding fast in her chest, her dark eyes fixed on the calm, glittering expanse of the lake, darker than the city will ever be, its black mirror, but still shining with reflected light. "I'm just mad."
She doesn't stound it. Just sullen, that hint of reflexive anger, this sort of expectancy beneath it. "Dying's stupid, too."
[Wyrmbreaker] The truth is, Lukas is sometimes too damn perfect for his own good. Just listen to what the spirits say of him. So fucking glorious. So fucking honorable. So fucking wise. Ready to challenge for Adren already if he'd just step up and take it. So fucking clearsighted, so controlled, so apparently untouched by petty angers and jealousies and emotions.
It makes him seem harsh and uncomprehending of others' failings, sometimes. It makes him berate them for weaknesses and follies he does not seem vulnerable to, and therefore cannot be tempted by. It can make him seem self-righteous; superior; condescending: so quick to point out the flaws of others when he himself seems to not even understand what it is to struggle against failure.
That was a bone that lay between himself and the Silver Fang that now lies in the earth. Wyrmbreaker once berated sklora-Myrgen on the choices he made when Wyrmbreaker himself was not there to make them. Did not have to make those hard, bitter choices even when he relived that night.
That Lukas does not understand temptation, or failure, or emotion is not true in the end. Lukas hews to a clear, hard, straight path not because it's his nature. His nature is wild: is savagery and blood, is the ritual sacrifice of foes on the altar of his god. His nature is the wolf and the storm. Is domination and brutality. Is hotblooded instinct, is bestial. It's sheer control, sheer force of will, that keeps him to his path. And it's fear of bone-deep flaws like wrath, like pride, like avarice, that keeps him to his path.
All of which is to say: it's easy to expect Lukas to berate Asha now, then. To lecture her on mourning or grief or weakness or god knows what else. Or simply, by his goddamn impenetrable even-toned rightness, to make her feel diminished.
But he doesn't. He looks at sklora-Myrgen's grave for a while, letting silence settle between them and soothe the younger Ahroun's nerves.
Then, "I thought he was too proud, and full of the sort of Fang self-entitlement that drives me crazy. But I also thought he was a good warrior, one of our strongest, and willing to help those weaker than himself. Willing, at the end, to protect them." A small shrug. "I think it's stupid and frustrating that he's dead, too.
"Did you know him well?"
[Asha Singh] The silence extends, meant to soothe her nerves, to allow her space for her weakness. Except that her nerves are not soothed, not by what passes for silence here in the Caern's heart, surrounded by the constant hum of the spirits, not here, at the edge of the lake, the spirit of the wind singing a low northern song, the waters constant. The darkness does not sooth her either, not the expanse of the lake, nor the darkness of the tree inside her, the roots that draw her down toward the heart of the earth, the branches that extend above her head, all the way to luna, the lucency, the madness, the strength underlying it all.
The girl's arms are crossed low over her stomach, her body language tight, narrow - like a sailboat lashed down for the winter, the sails collapsed and rolled on themselves, tied tight underneath the canvas. When Lukas mentions Fang self-entitlement Asha cuts him a sharp, direct look, right over her shoulder, her black eyes sparking in the pale moonlight, her generous mouth twisted, peeling back from her teeth in the liminal suggestion of a snarl, swallowed in the next moment. The look, though, remains. Her eyes are older, too. The past echoes in her, the tree and the twisted branches, the deep, strong roots.
Once, there was no madness in the line.
Once, they ruled unquestioned, divinely blessed - her Chosen.
Now: a girl half-a-world away from her ancestral lands, from the spiny teeth of the world, the great heights, the impossible valleys, stands at the edge of the poorly tendered grave of a barely remembered cliath. He had no children. The line dies here. Ashes, dust.
"He gave up," she says this clearly, her voice whip-sharp, the anger a bright thing in it. Luminous. " - his klaive for Maelstrom and his ancestors for Athena."
She down at the raw mound of dirt. She hates the earth. Hates the mud. Hates the dead. She's jealous of it all, and kicks the soil in her frustration, her bare brown toes. "I met him before, in that stupid place he came from. With all those stupid servants, all dust and shadows, and all those crazy, stupid people." Her arms tighten around her torso, and she looks back out to the lake. "I'm gonna go back there. See if anyone's left to hear the news."
[Asha Singh] (pause!)
Post a Comment