silent night

[dullahaunt-a]

indie fantasy oc. dullahan. the headless horseman.

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[dullahaunt-a]

@velawen

Dust lined the table. It did not creak from under him. A book lied pushed aside on the wide expanse of wood, an untidy scrawl scratched hard over the pages, and above through the low ceiling, slightly cracked and water-stained, a sliver of a slit had begun to leak. They dropped slow onto the floor. One fat bead in a puddle. Two. 

“I’ve thought of you,” his voice crawled, low. A whisper. “---And I've wondered.”

Her eyes glowed. Lanterns burning behind them. He curled three fingers around the armrest of the chair and lingered all around like the smell of smoke. He murmured.

“What you were -- What you would be." The tips of his fingers traced a line up the back of her neck. Disappeared in her hair. His eyes go hazy. He kissed her. A single breath, slow and deep and crawling to the far reaches of eternity, and he inhaled a lungful of roses until the taste of her filled his mouth, thick and full. Not enough. Water dripped. A lick to her lips. He sucked, warm and hot and just a second. Swallowed. He was gone.

The candlemaker stayed against the table, face-to-face and a breath away. His eyes oozed over her mouth, his hand falling.

"I looked at you -- and knew,” he said, so hoarse and low, a secret between them. “They could never be you. Not if they wanted to."

[lady-arryn]

costume appreciation: Petyr Baelish’s wardrobe from Game of Thrones (costumes by Michele Clapton)

for @petyrbaelishs, Happy Birthday! ♥

[dullahaunt-a]

chevalors​:

“And yet, it’s often those who are forgotten that make the world go round. Not being acknowledged doesn’t mean you aren’t important.” She could feel he had a different energy to him, something that separated him from the rest.

Élise listened carefully before shaking her head, a small smile and a short sigh leaving her lips. “I’m always one to speak plainly, which they never do.” Or him either, it seemed. Élise turned her gaze out into the room, never quite setting it upon anyone in particular. “The only thing they ever want is their own power. They don’t care about the rest. And whatever you or anyone wants from them… it has to be taken, as they never give anything up willingly or easily.”

“What they think of you doesn’t matter. Only what you think, does.”

"That's so right." Something about him gleamed. It was not the fire. “After all --- it's only betrayal from the ones we don’t expect."

They hide in plain sight. Like the single mother of two down the street. The smith with the blistered, patchy hands and badly stained apron. A sweetly freckled thing; all shy smiles since he was a boy. He kills his brother for gold. Never the ones you expect. 

She looked away, this gold lion. Only what you think matters.

"I love rumors," the candlemaker said at last. Croaky, then. "They always tell me something... new." A muffled song was playing. A ballad of some sort. There was the soft click...click...click of heels against the floor. A woman’s mousey little laugh. And as Gaspard de Chalons, gold and sharp and shining, set his glass down, a girl he was talking to slipped a half-curled smile, rosy pink even through her mask.  

"Once, I heard the story of a queen,” he told her, raspy but gentle. “Not very loved... And we know what happens to queens who are not very loved... And a knight. The true heir.”

 The candlemaker finally looked back. Every word was stretched long. The spaces between them.

"I wonder what he thought of this queen,” he implied. “And I wonder if he ever loved her."

[dullahaunt-a]

mahariele​:

Though he had not proved a threat just yet, Feyna’s life had not made her particularly trusting of others. She would need a bit more time for that. Her gaze followed his, curious to know what went through his mind as he watched her, taking in her features.

“I can fight back against a knife in the dark. It’s a physical threat I can deal with. I’m confident in my abilities in that regard. But what troubles me… isn’t something I can fight with my sword. It’s all in my head.” Exhaling a tired sigh, her shoulders relaxed, becoming more comfortable as the horse turned its attention to her. With a smile, the tiniest light of excitement within it, Feyna slowly raised a hand to pat the horse.

“There’s trouble brewing within the Grey Wardens. And, likely tied to that, is the… side effects, of what makes us Wardens. They’re getting worse, well before they’re meant to. You could see that I wasn’t focusing… and that trouble eats into my sleep.”

"I suppose you wouldn’t have known,” he rasped. It sounded small. “This -- ‘misfortune.’”

Not until after she became one of them. A side effect, a condition and what makes a Warden a Warden. It eats into her sleep, she said. Does it eat into all their sleep. Do they lie awake, eyes bleary black and wide open. Do they taste it in the back of their throat and swallow it down until it sits like stones and curdled milk, bubbling, low in the empty pits of their stomach. And what is everyone afraid of.

Maybe the Wardens never told anyone about it until after. Maybe there’s a reason why. "The less we know," he wondered, softly, "the happier we are."

Slow, the pools of his eyes, how they blink. The candlemaker laid a hand upon his horse, too, and his gaze came to her like rising water. "What will you do with what you know."

[dullahaunt-a]

bellecosebabe​:

“I don’t know what you mean.” Defensive and that would spell her second demise. She should have prattled off some snarky answer, ‘you lose skin, tissue, organs,” any of that would have been better than what she had said.  

A chance for him to redirect and stop speaking as if he knew something others weren’t meant to. If she cut off three fingers, then she could count on one hand the amount of people that knew of her condition. Two knew. They had seen her come back from the dead, that gasping, nerve searing, reconciliation between spirit and body, ghost and corpse. 

She wanted to curl her fist into the collar of his jacket, slam his head back into the stones he had set his candles on. Make an example of him that no one but herself would understand. But he would understand, though who was to say he wouldn’t just get back up like she could? Who’s to say he wouldn’t return the favor. Maybe he was simply clairvoyant, but something was wrong, had been wrong ever since she approached his stall. Ever since the other passerby faded from view. 

"You forget yourself.”  It was a warning, a warning that if he pushed any further he might find himself in a bog.

He tucked his chin in ever so slightly, the look about him turning wry and fixated. Glittering.

She knew. She must believe he knew she knew. A warning slipped from her mouth and splattered onto the ground, worming and clawing its way to him, and the candlemaker was unmoving as it clambered up the length of his neck, tumbling and slipping inside the winding tunnels in his ears. 

Two hands on her. She only needed one. A cloud shrouded the moon and children spun fitfully under their blankets in deep, deep sleep, and here they stood, face-to-face, the wax running, sticky slow and burning. There was a raised line over his throat. Go. Take it. Swipe her hand over it.

"What do you want me to know,” he coaxed, something about it soft but like a promise in your ear from someone you don’t know. The cloud passed and the moon returned. “Do you think you know me.”

[dullahaunt-a]

axllyxn​:

Aellyon blinked. 

He had surprised her. Such a response, the harpy mother did not expect it from a being like him. Aellyon was used to answers of rage or longing - death was such a lonely position and the experiences left only negativity. He was different. Desire… what did that feel like? Was it burning? Did it hurt? Aellyon had centuries, eons, to watch such an emotion wash through humans but had not had the chance to feel it for herself. 

“Desire for what?” She questioned lightly, “For peace? For happiness? What does desire do for you, Rider?” Her lips pursed together in thought, 

“I had not felt that deep of a burning in my heart for so long. I think I have forgotten what it feels like. Inside of me, I know that I can feel. I know that in the past, I have but as of late… there is such a hollowness. I want something but I cannot name what I want. Is that desire?” 

There was a moment you could see the thought slink and wash over her face. She wondered what it felt like. Perhaps she dreamed if there was a dim, simmering burn nested at the empty bottom of the heart. If the simmering swelled hotter, bubbling more. Whether it leaked and spilled all over and if the people, wide awake in the sunken, creaking pits of their beds, sputtered face down and at last drowned in it. 

He stopped by a wall and spread his hand flat against the stone. She could poke the point of her claw square at his neck.

"It is everything to me," he finally murmured, croaky when he’s hushed. His mouth tugged. "The world was made by men who want. And we can only be as powerful as the things we want.”

The driving force of everything. They would do nothing without it. Locked within the four walls of their homes, their knees hugged to their chests. They would never build kingdoms, start wars, families. The candlemaker’s shoes clicked soft onto the ground. Some of them only wanted everything that came off the tip of a tongue. 

“If you don’t know what it is you desire, take everything,” he guided. “All of it.” Whatever she can. He was closer, stopping deep in her shadow, black and twisted, that swallowed him whole. She could wrap her wing around him. “Whatever is left will be yours to want.”

[dullahaunt-a]

magioffire​:

   The way the man moved, quick and silent, clearing the distance from Valeriu to the fence in one blink of his eyes. And yet the dokkalfar still appeared entirely oblivious to the actual threat the specter posed – he knew better, in the back of his mind, to keep clear of any and all strange beings, but his curiosity was much stronger. His drive to discover and to learn stronger even still. He often risked limb and life to up close and personal with this world’s most terrifying beings - some earned their reputation, others were quite misunderstood, some straddled the line between both. He silently wondered which line this creature stood upon. 

     The reek of decay lessened as the stranger moved away, somehow, even though the acrid scent of literal rotting bodies remained in it’s place. It was a different type of decay, one that enveloped more than just physical flesh, but also feasted upon the entropy of energy like millions of metaphysical detritophages chewing at the fringes of a soul. Vali ground his teeth together as the man spoke, sneering ever so slightly at his last comment. He’d already been given away to men he barely knew, he already gave his dignity up to strangers to maintain some power, some dominance, to keep his head above water. Just that one phrase became enough to drum up torrid memories of the past. He resented the stranger for it. 

     “The true gods are nothing more than hellions and demons now, and lesser deities have happily taken their place. My kind is as much blessed by gods as we are snakebit by demons, because they are one in the same,” Whether he meant magi or dokkalfar meant little, all fae beings engaged in this, the dark elves simply were the convenient out; all dark, wild eyed and full of sharp, hard edges, not evil, simply a victim of their evolutionary circumstance, and their enemies took full advantage. Valeriu did not know why he was saying such things, to perhaps someone who would not even understand, but something within him drew out his words and laid them bare. “That’s why they kill us, any, all, creatures touched by magic. Are you going to attempt to string me up with these other mages? Or do you simply watch over the bodies of the dead after they have passed?” Still, he couldn’t be sure who or what this man was, but he certainly was not a mortal being. 

The candlemaker has not moved. He lingered there against the fence like a heavy fog sprawled and hugging low onto the road, and perhaps the reflection of the bodies creaked over the lens of his eyes, swaying back and forth. Back, forth. Perhaps it's its own reflection instead. Rosy red, the scales on its face. They could have been open sores and someone might have thought about sticking a finger wet into one of them. 

The fly buzzed its wing. Two dead mages. There were no flowers, poorly plucked and crumpled, shoved quick into their tattered pockets or thrown under their scraped, peeling feet --- no final goodbye from a teary brother or mottled-cheeked wife looking over their shoulder, afraid someone was watching. What would she have liked. A fistful of lilacs. The man with the hole in his thigh, seeping damp, might have wanted thyme. 

It sneered. Ground its teeth. 

His horse threw its head and the sticky streaks under its eyes caught the moonlight. Like tears. 

"I find --- very often,” the candlemaker began, “that powerful men hate powerful men.” The words crawled belly down, inch by inch; tar spreading thin. Something about it chimed. "There only ever is one king."

That’s what mages were. Powerful. And the king, clutching onto his throne and heart sweating, decided the only good mage was a dead one. 

The fence whimpering, now. The candlemaker leaned off of it and stretched an arm out long until his hand spread over the rotting upper rung, the tip of his tongue pressed to his teeth, barely at all. "Whatever you want me to be, I will be," he promised, hoarse when he's quiet. "Your friend --- Your enemy." 

His palm slid down the fence, closer to it. It could touch his hand back if it wanted. "And who do you trust more."

[dullahaunt-a]

bellecosebabe​:

Just once, hardly at all, got him the soot and ash on her fingertips to be smudged on his skin But as she grabbed him around the base of his hand. This predicament had gone from near normal, to odd, to pushing boundaries. Glaring up at him, she considered pressing the butt of her cigarette to his flesh, she considered pulling her knife. She considered what harm should be done against him. 

Shoving his arm back to him, she stepped to the side, carefully between candles, and back into the gradient dark of the cobblestone, killing even the weak light of the cigarette under her heel. 

Even with the time between his words and the distance she had made, there had been little time to mull over what he said. What was she to say to something so ambiguous. What sort of response did he deserve after pushing her into a corner.

“Well then you’ll be sorely disappointed, because I have nothing to give you.”

She snatched his hand and shoved it back. Ashy gray, two streaks on his skin. 

A silence like a blanket wrapped slow around them. It slipped through a forgotten bedspread down the street, pinned to a line, waving in the wind. It slipped into the fuzzy black smear of their shadows folded in and splayed together. It slipped through her cigarette. Snubbed out. Into the tiny creases of their palms.

It slipped past the sleeping children cuddled warm in their cots and below the squeaking floorboards where the rats now squealed and skittered. Into the hollow pits tucked away in the back of their eyes. Filled like a river.

And it slipped through the candlemaker who watched as the shadows flew in her face, and he lapped and licked in the sight of her without blinking, turning, twitching. He thumbed at a smear on his hand, not at all. The smear was still there. “So few ever do," the words lingered out. “But I’ve learned --- sadly --- that there's always a little more left to lose.”

Rolling down his chin, dappling on the tips of his shoes. 

The candlemaker toed the edge where her shadow stopped and sipped in the air around them. She could take his throat. "And what do you lose after you've died?"

[dullahaunt-a]

bellecosebabe​:

His eyes were boring into her, and while most tried to decipher her, it felt like a dissection. Carving his way through flesh and bone to figure out what ailed her, a late-term autopsy, or did he make his candles out of human fat? He was intense for a candlemaker, and she his only customer for the time being. He certainly hadn’t sold her on his wares.

She should have backed out by now, she should have folded her cards and walked away from the set-up of candles. Pinching the wick of a lit candle, she snuffed out the flame: the warmth and ash in her fingertips. She turned to him, ‘A light in the dark, I find, draws them to me,’ what was she a moth? Surrounded by the flames, she might as well be. 

“You wanted me?” It’s a nervous laugh caught her in throat, and she narrowed her eyes at him, head gently cocked to the side. Uncertainty and she was often so sure in herself, all things considered, but this was beyond her. He was beyond her. “And what do you want from me?”

Her laugh catches in her throat. A fire snuffs out. There is still moon- and starlight, though. They ooze together and seep inside the jagged, thin cracks of the road and her hair until they’ve filled like bathwater, silvery white and lukewarm pale. Fires still burn. Candles peek through shutters. But she is here bathed in the streaming black of nightfall as though the impenetrable veil of midnight is hers and hers alone; her face shrouded, a secret known to no one.

Smoke comes between them. A ribbony thing; faint, gray, and fading. He looks to her fingers leaving the wick and the tip of his pinky scratches feathery against the stone ledge. A little more. He stops. Could brush the fleshy soft of her wrist with a nail. He’d dragged wax across the rock and it dries cloudy cold.

"Everything," comes the confession. He spreads a hand against his thigh. "The only thing I ever want: whatever is left of you to give."

That smile stays. Trees rustle and rub against the houses. Leaves scrape the road. The tip of his finger unfurls again to touch the spindly veins on her wrist, just once, hardly at all.

[dullahaunt-a]

mnogiye​:

there’s no register to the presence in his optics, no target to scan or warning to precede the sudden appearance of this ghost, or phantom, or ghoul. but OR-10N does not flinch, does not do much more than look over his shoulder at this inky black blot stained darker than the night around him. his words curl around OR-10N like wet fog; heavy, rasping, coating to his skin as the oil in him would. examining his own circumstances has always been a hopeless endeavor. he’s been trapped since his inception.

“ they see me as a tool. something to enforce their will, to send out when they want to play at the idea of real power. ” he looks away, back at the haphazardly stacked stones layered in an attempt at a wall. it’s long since started to crumble, dust at its feet and moss crawling out from every crack. “ they destroy it. they have no use for a weapon that will not listen. ”

his usefulness had been up, once - or perhaps, his danger had outweighed his strengths - and they had tried to decommission him for it. only the mercy of a stranger had saved him from the neverending black of a total shutdown.

“ what are you, then? a tool, or a tradesman? ”

"Let a mad dog go, and what does it do." Gradually, the merchant steps down. Not a sound comes from him. "Who knows when it will bite? --- A dead one never will.”

It isn’t them. Nothing comes from from standing next to it. No reason to hiss in a breath, to taste it through the crack of your teeth. No deep-belly content. It has two arms. Two legs. In the dark, the sun set, it even looks like one. But there is gold where a face should be, and as the stars, like candles behind the windows of sleeping men, leak and wash over it, a stillness that comes with holding a breath settles in. 

It looks to a wall. Does it feel the breeze. Smell the dirt and moss wedged tight in the rotted corners. What are you? The candlemaker comes close, looking over the gleam of its face. His eyes are still.

"At your side," he answers at last. He almost shines. "If that is what you want." 

A temperamental sea rolls close by. In the air, a shrill, mourning howl. 

[roominthecastle]

Petyr Baelish Week 2017 – costume porn

[dullahaunt-a]

indeath​:

     exactly, he thinks. actors, performers ! and isn’t he just grand ? he plays his role very well. impressively so. unsettlingly so. each story drawn to it’s conclusion, each play well-done is awarded with the satisfaction of another night not-himself. trophies, lined up on the wall in aureate and glitter. they congratulate the art. and he likes all those golden things he’s stolen for himself, like the threads that drape off the thin of him, or those blinking innocent in his skull. 

    he grins, pearly-points and roses. and blush should reach there in the apples of his cheeks, dust him pretty like modest girls after a compliment too-great. ‘ sometimes. i can never be sure that everyone plays their part. my stories, i think, are very good. but nature, or god if you believe in that sort of thing, is not so artistically minded. ’ he pauses there, hands at his chest. this man does smell so horribly familiar, doesn’t he ? and … ‘ and there are things, things like you, that cut the story short. but what is one to do but pluck to the next movement, right ? ’

There's a heavy look to his gaze. A pert, twinkling smile, unperceived. "It isn’t their stories that I end," he calls out, rising off the ledge. “But I do close them."

Like a book.

A candle snuffs out. He pushes his lips against theirs and tastes a soft gasp, their surprise. Quickly, a whimper. Now the scratchy skid-scuff; their shoes slipping over the dirt, and then a fist balls hard and thumps at his chest as he stifles and swallows down a cry, the tail end of a sigh, bittersweet. The skidding slows. Their hand falls. Cold, dry, and slightly chapped he licks a corner of their mouth. It’s still wet.

The candlemaker is close enough to touch. There is no heat between them; no warmth. It must be easy to fall for this thing with its heavy-hooded eyes that makes promises in the privacy of four walls and rucked bedsheets. The wind sings a lullaby. His eyes slog from a pointed tooth to his reflection in its eyes. "A friend when you want someone. Anyone,” he says, thinking aloud. It’s soft enough to have never happened. “And what are you when you can’t have what you want.”

What role does it play now. With him.

[dullahaunt-a]

bellecosebabe​:

He’s uncanny, odd. Something was off but she hadn’t yet placed it, couldn’t place it. Part of the world passed by her as the windchimes on her mother’s porch, the other part she could hear clearly without ever needing to focus in; perhaps it was a talent, telling who was important and who wasn’t, or maybe it was just selective hearing. Regardless the stranger fell into the latter.

And she might as well humor the oddity in this interaction, it would be a waste of an evening if she didn’t. She stepped off to his side, shoulders aligning in all but height for a moment before she stepped closer to the candles. Look well made enough, some amount of thought was put into them, the light smoke of the candles mix with the heavier of her cigarette. 

“Then what is it you want.” Rhetoric in her question, she expected him to continue on with his rambling whether or not she acknowledged him, but he had piqued her interest after all. She had to know what he wanted. “You don’t just carry around candles for fun do you?”

"What they have. What I don't,” he rumbles. "What you have. What you don't."

He’s a painting watching even as your back’s turned; two pinpricks for eyes, plodding slow and black. And as she steps aside, as the candles burn seepy and the others sit cold, the blushing glow of fire has begun dripping down the long, thin line of her neck to the dips of her collarbones. lapping. sloshing. and he pushes his tongue to the back of his teeth, wanting. 

Half here, half not. What would happen if you reached out and touched her shoulder, felt the curve and soft of them. What would she feel like. Cold and warm. The ghost of something warm. Like remembering the smell of something, but only the words for it.

"A light in the dark, I find, draws them to me," he tells her, and the candlemaker finally comes forward. There’s a glimmer to him, small and radiant and chiming. He drinks in the winding dark of her eyes with a smile. “But it was me who wanted you.”

[dullahaunt-a]

andrastespromise​:

@dullahaunt​ || cont.

[ the cold embrace of the dark never fails to unsettle her, but it doesn’t instill as much fear as the thought of what melava could find lurking in it. in fact, upon hearing unfamiliar footsteps approaching, the elven warrior instinctively wraps her fingers around the hilt of her sword and gives the unwelcomed guest a grim warning: another step and she’d charge, cutting down whoever stood in her way. however, much to her surprise, no slicing would be required this time. it’s no unintelligible growl that answers to her threats but a voice, and it seems like it isn’t looking for trouble. ]

“ sorry, i assumed … ” [ the worst, to put it simply. the light he kindled might be dim, yet the inquisitor is drawn to it like a curious moth to a flame, a moth who much prefers basking in its warmth rather than remaining in the shadows. ] “ is there anything you need from me? ”

His mouth perks and he muses, “Don’t we all.”

There will be rain soon. The air smells ripe with it, of the must and the wet dirt of a coming deluge. A low roll groans through the air. The distant stir of thunder. He looks down and drinks the sight of her in like a cloth soaking water: her burning hair, the shadows squirming into the faint lines of her face. She is teeth and knives, ready to draw a blade. Is she heavy.

The candlemaker stays close at hand, a blur at the edge of your vision. Does she enjoy watching the fire burn and the wax melt; a mesmerizing thing, to have worries ooze down and away, the slow stream of runny trickles. A pool fills in the center. The wick goes black. "Don’t ask what they want. What they need.” It’s low enough to be trick of the mind. Soft enough to be a thing of sleep. “What do you want,” he encourages. “What do you need.”

[dullahaunt-a]

sunweald​:

starter  call     ⊱    @dullahaunt​

“     you  have  a  strange  look  about  you.     “     she  considers  for  only  a  moment,  but  the  eyes  give  away  knowing  in  a  way  her  smile  doesn’t.  he  reminds  her  of  the  specters  and  spirits  of  din’elgar,  and  the  faintness  to  them.  whatever  it  is,  she  lets  the  thread  slip  with  a  lift  and  fall  of  her  shoulder.  perhaps  a  mage  with  their  hands  among  the  dead.  one  among  many.     “     perhaps  your  trousers.  they’re  filthy.     “

Her eyes are brown and sparkling. I see you. There are flowers in her hair, a root, a posy or three, and the look on his face sparks back.

"Very strange,” he agrees, a partway nod. Still that look, a cemetery mink that rolls in the leaves of someone’s heart. He lays his hands flat atop each other, spread wide, and learns the marrs on her neck. Her jaw. Cheek. And two black points, never blinking, suck whole the light. "I've heard many things about two faces,” he says, bright, “and rarely half."

Like hers. Water dapples in a pond where a tree has rotted, sunken. His shadow does not bend, and the leaves skitter around them.

[dullahaunt-a]

magioffire​:

    The smell of death hung heavy on the air, heavy like a miasma that clung to every blade of grass and gust of wind – their bodies were barely rotten, barely touched by scavengers, but still the dokkalfar could smell the distinct smell, like blood pooling in the body, like tissue and organ breaking down slowly, like rusted copper and bile and rot and dead leaves, all attacking his acute sense of smell. The susurrous sounds of the wind rang upon the wind and drew Valeriu in like a siren. He did not smell life, he was practically right next to a man who breathed and spoke but Valeriu could not smell life upon him — like fresh metal and leather and sweat and fresh blood flowing and all the disgusting and beautiful smells of life, the vibrant all demanding need to survive. He used the darkness to his advantage as he drew closer to the scene of the bodies of his kindred hanging from the branches of the old oak tree, a warning to any other magic user that would dare travel these parts. He first thought the man was talking to himself, but then he turned, and regarded Valeriu directly, spoke to him, spoke of his eyes glowing in the darkness like tiny little flames, and did not have fear in his voice. 

     Vali paused for a long while, simply observing the other, somehow managing to avoid looking the other directly, wondering if this was a trick to make him just like those upon the tree (even if he did not need his lungs to completely breathe, he needed his neck and spinal chord intact to live like any other living being). He moved closer, knowing even if it was a trick, he was more than just a human mage, he was a terror of nature incarnate, a wildfire given flesh. The dokkalfar moved out the darkness into the light of the moonlight, yet still kept a sizable distance from the other. He drew closer and only needed to take one close enough whiff to immediately discern not only the undeath of the stranger, but also the fact it was no human spirit, but any more than that, he could not figure out from scent and sight alone. Withered flowers, decaying, burning leaves, the scents of fall, of atrophy, of the abatement of summer. His amber eyes zeroed in on the scar wrapping around the man’s neck, it looked like the lash from a whip or noose digging into the flesh or where a blade would have cut and left a clean wound in its place. He drew his lips back in a sneer as fear welled up within him, and there was a distinct warning deep within him that screamed at him not to look the other in the eye or really engage with the being in anyway. Yet the other was looking so intently at Valeriu’s own eyes, it became quite difficult. “Who – what are you, to call out to me in the night at the site of the murder of my brethren?” It seemed an innocent enough question, even if maybe he wasn’t ready for the reply. He needed something to fill empty space of silence creeping in upon him, the specter looking intently upon the him. 

It’s too close. It creeps into the spill of moonlight and then it’s here, inhaling him, and what does it smell? A wilted garden. Dead fire.  

Curious. The air rustles soft and gentle, a goodnight whisper kept safe in your ears. Or perhaps it’s the last of a sigh crawling from the bodies swaying overhead, the legs of their shadows stretching long and winding into the depths of the night. Its eyes fall to his neck. Traces the line there. His smile dies.

Ropes whimper. The branches.

Those eyes crawl back up, and so does his smile. "It wasn't me that drew you," he murmurs, and he turns. 

What were their names. It doesn’t matter. One was a woman, the other, a man. Her ankle is bony splotchy with a scrape that will never heal, and the candlemaker draws over the fuzzy smears of the bruises on her knees, fat and swollen, rosy raw. The man is a thing of sticks. There are tears in his clothes where they caught and snagged against the branches, and a fly, one wing plucked, has begun to nestle into the weepy, sucking holes in his thigh. 

He sees a mark carved into the back of their hands, too. A warning to all mages. The wind licks his neck. Her tattered dress flutters.

"She was strong,” he murmurs, steady. “And she was brave. And he was strong. And he was brave.” Like this one. The candlemaker looks to the shining scales against its cheeks, his voice rolling slow like a tide reaching for the moon. They're a breath apart. “You hear what they say. About you. Your kind. Gifted -- by the gods,” he wonders. “But why do you think the gods stay where men cannot touch them.”

Face-to-face. Cold without a breath. He can see the sweep of its lashes, the pull of its skin. A touch, a breath, a secret apart. He glimmers. “Never give yourself away to a man you don’t know.”

The site of the murder of my brethren. 

What if he’d been a mage hunter?