“Pleasant to meet you, Agdayne.” The name rolled of his tongue, tested out. Navlaan felt a rush of surprise when Agdayne admitted to still remember Olenford, followed by a blossoming of shame from his Vessel.
“Gravelord Nito? I heard of him a couple of times. Must admit… I doubted that he existed for a long time. But seeing how the world changed, how Death works destroyed that doubt at its core.
Few people even know his name in these days. Most only know of Gwyn, the Old Chaos and Seath, the Dragon. Nito faded from common knowledge.”
Navlaan hid his giddy excitement behind another assessing glance over the structure around them. He didn’t have to disclose that the moment his doubt was completely gone was just now, at the admission that the Fenito were linked to Nito. Marvelous.
“I have a few questions about what our body does. We will leave afterwards.”
“First-”, he lifts one finger. “I sense that you can see the Darkness as well. So, my first question answers itself, that Fenito can do it naturally. Instead, I’m going to ask this:
If you look at our Souls, what do you see?”
These niceties grated on him the same way they had when he was young, but he endeavored to pay the discomfort little mind. Though he waved off the other’s ignorance, arms coming to rest heavily across his chest, he quietly reasoned that much of this one-- this two’s?-- time in undeath had been spent studying the old ways of things. Such names would amount to nothing but nonsense to near any other humans in this time, and he very much doubted the age of Aibne and Navlaan to mirror his own ilk; perhaps not all of the old worlds were lost to the land above.
Not that it mattered. Whatever was, would be, regardless of humans’ influence, or attempted influence. Regardless of their ignorance of its machinations.
The inquiry gave him pause, however, head canting to one side for a moment. His ruby gaze raked to and fro over the shared form and his chest rose and fell slowly, once, breathing in his presence. Before trying to answer, he reached out one hand in an almost lazy gesture, fingers hanging toward the other, but not coming close enough to touch, only seeking to feel as the other indicated.
It was not so much a visual sensation as it was a smoke-like aura filling his mind’s eye. A blackness swirled and danced around his hand, an anti-flame licking between his fingers as he focused, mouth set into a firm line.
He had witnessed the entanglement of souls before, whether it was two sharing the same space, or an amalgamation of many lives, great and small, mashed together into one pulsating mass, but this was neither of those things. A pair of vastly opposite souls met his prodding, spiraling, each one trying to overtake the other in an endless grapple from which there was no escape. Agdayne’s brows creased together. These two were as any human soul, only vaster, like that of an aged hero or fierce warrior, both brighter and darker at once to cancel into a dull sheen.
Drawing away, he folded his hand into the crook of the other elbow again, exhaling a long breath through his nose, his dark magics vanishing into the empty space. “A battle,” he said flatly. “Two lives attempting to exist in the same place, at the same time. Straining over one another.”
