@singularitei said: A hand reaches up to rub at tired eyes, the faint realization that they haven't quite been making any further progress for a while by now, their own thoughts inevitably drifting away and towards recent events now that there's a moment of peace to let them sink in. The design on paper is far more complete now, at least, maybe enough to even consider it to truly be approaching its final stages after far too long, so maybe Kairos can afford themself a break from the arcane, for the time being. They are still on guard duty, after all, and even when they've been doing a good enough job not getting so absorbed in their notes that their surroundings became background noise, paying closer attention for a while might do them some good.
To think that lair of horrors was hidden away in these mountains for so many decades... just how has it gone unnoticed for so long? Someone must've realized something if enough people and animals kept going missing to keep feeding the madman's machinations...
( and that creature... something about it deeply disturbs them, bothers them in a way they cannot figure out, beyond the surface level horror of its existence. )
Inevitably, their eyes find Elias again in the opposite corner of the cart— and to their credit, they've at least more or less gotten over their ( justified! ) irritation, only a slight flicker of the tip of their tail against old wood, hardly noticeable compared to before. He knew more than he had the time to share, clearly. Kairos still considers his earlier actions reckless, stupid and not thought through as well as they could've been, but... they'd like to believe they weren't unfounded. The scars he sports did not go unnoticed, and luck only carries you so far, after all.
"Did you have any particular reason to try and take apart that effigy instead of letting it burn with the rest of that place?" Now, Kairos still doesn't quite feel up to any sort of conversation, let alone trying to get to know anyone, really, but— if they have to set their own grievances aside and cooperate for the foreseeable future, having some sort of idea about who exactly these people are and what to expect will only help in staying alive, won't it? ( there are more questions gnawing at the back of their mind, too, like it or not. there are things they want to know. ) / cart conversations. :)
The pen stops when the question reaches the author, lavender peering up from beneath snowy hair, disheveled from the occasional brunt of frosty winds that circulate through the mountain pass they were slowly making their way down from. Elias' pages are as detailed as Kairos', but with another subject entirely—behaviors and expressions and correlations. At least they're far enough away to be unable to peek at the small sketches of a fluffed and scaled tail gestures, and notes of potential emotions. Perhaps it would do him some good to take a break and watch the scenery, now that some fauna have finally re-entered the area.
"Uhh, spite, really," he answers at first—truthful, all things considered, but of course, he doesn't believe Kairos is looking for that kind of answer. The field journal is tidied up and closed, a long leather lace wrapped around several times before weaved through some of the makeshift looms, then stuffed in his coat for later. In the meantime, he settles and arm over the edge of the cart, a pale hand decorated in plain silver rings simply left to the whims of gravity and any fallen branches and stone that disturbs the mostly smooth terrain.
"Realistically, that effigy's already been set ablaze hundreds of times. It's been the de facto way to reach the heavens with whatever you want to beg of them. Besides, that skull was holding far too much magic in it to be left alone. A house fire wasn't going to burn hot enough for it to become ashes," he explains easily, as if there was one back home, wherever that was. "You'll set back a zealot far more by messing up their means of communion than you would anything else, short of taking their life. Besides, given how long that necromancer was there… he was clearly successful in some regard."
There's a pause, brows furrowing just enough to crease, as Elias recalled the mess of a fortress, and especially the wendigo that had been, much to his chagrin, released from what he assumed was it's cell, somehow. Maybe the treasure hunting crew had fallen for it's trap as well, seeing how difficult it was to see even after setting the cell ablaze for a short time from above. "Grenith—the Envoy—whichever name you're familiar with, has always been consistent about false idols. Unfortunately, because he was someone who transcended into godhood, and felled the previous god before him, there's always some fanatics who believe they're qualified to retrace his steps." He shakes his head a little. "There was something wrong with that effigy. I wasn't gonna break it, but he made that decision for me. Now he's gotta start all over again, which means no wendigo chasing us down the mountain." Sure, the whole ordeal was reckless, given the entire mob of undead had all been commanded to attack, and he did get yet another nasty scar in a couple of weeks, but… well. Arguably, whatever this mage was doing was far worse than a butcher's blade coated in decades of blood and sinew. "Nobody gets to determine the fate of an entire environment like that. Not a single living thing was up there besides us. That's not what inevitability should be. But, I digress."
Lips curl a little as he settles his head back. Wayward fringe follows gravity, and perhaps to some surprise, he does, in fact, have a perfectly good eye under there. "You could label it a personal agenda, if you wanted to. You wouldn't be wrong." Now, that is to say Elias himself wasn't necessarily a part of the church dedicated to the god of death and decay and winter, so to speak—hardly, between the tumultuous game of tug-of-war in Estelvea and attempts to catch up with peers in education between the displacement. Both parents being as scientifically-focused as they are certainly had a preference towards one end of the pantheon, but it was a product of their former livelihoods and the town in which they believed best to set their roots in. In short, belief and knowledge of His lessons were simply part of the culture and the upbringing, an easy code to live by as to not cause undue harm to one's neighbors. Elias' case was only complicated by his aetherial bias towards ice and the potential issues that could come of it, thus, without the biological cause, he had heard of his peculiar coldness as a blessing from his fellow Dovanians, and a curse from the paranoid Lavallites. "Anyway, does that answer your question, Kairos?"
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