“Well,” he began with a gentle sigh, brushing hanks of hair from his eyes and pushing them behind an ear, “I wasn’t always a teacher, for starters. I learned to fight from my father when I was but a boy, if only to be able to defend myself. Then when I grew older, I moved on to put those skills to use as a warrior in my own right. I suppose you could say I was a soldier, for a time…” None of this was a lie, of course. He simply left out that his father had been King of the Tuatha, that he had served as the Jack and general to his sister’s vast and formidable armies.
“But that’s all in the past. Serves me well enough when walking the roads at night, but other than that, I prefer to leave it behind. All that fighting and bloodshed makes for unpleasant memories. I’m sure you can attest to that. Most folks who have known battle can.”
He wasn’t just referring to his multiple deaths at the hands of the man he walked with. The most painful memory was that of Mount Ruon. That, he knew, was when he had truly lost everything. He was never the same after that.
Clearing his throat, he shoved that awful hurt down deep, and he fixed Hood with a searching stare. He had to keep up appearances, and a teacher was a curious creature, full of questions. It would do well that he pretend he didn’t already have answers to them all. “How long have you been ‘alive,’ then? Not a short time, I imagine.”
War had come to Albion many times in the last couple of years. Or...so he had heard. Hood tended to stay out of those sort of things. War was a dirty and nebulously moral place. If there was anything Hood feared, it was that. So he had kept to the woods doing what he did best. Avoiding human contact and hunting the things that thought they could hide there.
Which was amusing if you thought about the fact that’s what he was doing there in part.
“Ah well...” He made a few gestures with his gauntlet like he had something to say but it never seemed to come out. Instead of whatever he was trying to formulate in his mind through frantic thinking he just settled for a muttered “makes sense” before quickly pressing on.
“I dunno how long it’s been, really.” The clawed fingers of one gauntlet popped up as if he was counting, though his helmet wasn’t looking at them. “Stopped counting the centuries. After the threat of mortal death passed, kinda seemed redundant to keep time. I was a young man when Jack of Blades was defeated though.”
The first time anyway. He was in his thirties the second time around. Though, he supposed that was now “young” to him now too. Funny how things had utterly changed for him and also not at all. “Your life is probably more exciting than mine. Honest.”
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