a face revealed | @lronwilled
Silent is the heaviness in the space between them. The thing that stays his hand and instead lands his feet upon solid earth. The thing that instead prompts him:
Shade gives way to a pale harbinger and belies the certainty in his voice. Bereft of his cloak and hood, the years carve memories into his skin - a sliver of weakness across the brow; a sharp shadow across his cheek. Beneath the dark shadow of his brow, sharp eyes golden as a hawk's, and just as precise.
"Nor are you," he observes. The crawling beneath his skin remains, but the rest quiet to a whisper as he closes the gap between them. His blade returned to its home, he might almsot seem harmless. He feels harmless too. Not as though a newborn kit might be, but as though disarmed. His blade is a heavy, familiar weight. A taste of home. A promise of his own.
And yet Yasuo stays his hand every time. With intrigue, with the look in his eyes, with the sword in his hand and that wordless, nameless thing that catches in the cobwebbed attic of Talon's chest every time he glances at the swordsman and their eyes meet in a cursed, fleeting, lingering moment.
That frustrating, terrifying thing that he only knows is a weakness.
"You... you carried yourself well." In the trees, he had glanced down upon Yasuo's form. Watched the sword in his hand, wielded as though it were not steel but a part of his own form. And the look in his eyes.
That nameless thing burrowed itself inside of him. It made a home amongst blood and flesh and viscera; and forced his eyes to look.
Even now, his eyes stray: the bloodied cloth in his hand; the wind which almost seemed to obey.
The stray hair at his nape; the rise and fall of his breath.
The blood beneath his skin.
Talon kneels beside the first corpse, and roots through its pockets. Some change, some loose trinkets he may pawn, and an unfamiliar fruit. Talon barely gives Yasuo a glance, before throwing it his way and moving on to the next.
This. This, too, is home.
But so too is the following and the followed. He swallows down the rising bile, but his thoughts are not so obedient as Yasuo fades to the trees. The General once sent his men after him. He had heard somewhere that humans were born to chase. To follow prey across plains until they tired and were killed.
Talon had been prey once. And the General was a greater hunter than he.
What a fool he must seem. Perhaps not to the corpses, lain on the ground. And perhaps not even to his clueless companion, who must not know of his mission. But of course to that woman; his target and his foe. The one who had run away. The one who was running away still. The one who had run, and run, and had yet evaded Talon still. The one who had sent these men his way, if only as a mere distraction.
A sound reminds him - he is not yet alone. And as the General liked to say, there is nothing more gauche than weakness shown.
Talon stands and offers Yasuo a stiff smile. "We should continue on our way. They were alone, but others may come for them."
Particularly if she had sent them.
"We should hurry. We are close, I think. To the... to the place I want to visit."
