It never would have gotten past the front door in any respectable house in Silvermoon. It was chaotic, unrefined, inelegant. It had too many pieces and not enough flamboyant phoenixes.
It was beautiful.
When Jhulen had first found it among his things, buried in a clothes chest he hadn’t bothered with in weeks, he could only blink in confusion. It wasn’t something of his, although looking at it more closely, it did have a resemblance to the one he’d been so fond of that Twitch had...
That Twitch had...
Oh.
The tears, when they came, were hot and overwhelming, ambushing the unsuspecting priest and forcing him into a stumble to the bed, where he sat heavily with his face buried in his hands. His shoulders shook with all the emotion he’d been suppressing almost since the day Twitch had been captured, and his breath came in ragged, harsh-edged sobs that threatened to choke him.
How long he cried, he had no idea, but when the tears finally started to taper off and the world started to right itself again, he felt... clean. Husked out. Cleansed.
No one had disturbed him during his grief, and for that he was grateful; no one was allowed to see these moments of weakness. Not anymore. Perhaps there had been one or two, before, but they were long gone, and he was grateful for that too.
They had made him weak.
They had made him vulnerable.
Brushing his hair back from his eyes, the priest stood, tall and with squared shoulders. Swiftly he washed his face, wiping away all traces of his cleansing, and tied back his hair. Then he changed, shedding his casual clothes for the dark, form-fitting leathers he had been originally searching for in the chest.
Finally, he set the lantern on the table, touching the burnished brass edge of it one last time before he turned and left the tent.
Let the leaves turn, let the steel be drawn, and let the world tremble.
@intoxication-wra
