#skalitzhare

[blacknighted]

He was a branded criminal. He was mad to come back here. Like lunacy, it was like careening headfirst into open flame. Yet, even greater than his foolishness, God bless him, and perhaps, too, that coalbed of his anger lit in his belly, he would nurse fondness with his love and witherless yearning. Unabating. Afeared, he had long since been a stray sat at the door.

Oh, but he had known many homes, hadn't he now? He had known Skalitz, stormed Rattay, and even had Kuttenberg. But alas, they had all of them been taken, his father gone, Hans rotting, and his each and every world so stolen and robbed. At this point, even Theresa must've left them, Theresa with her laughter like the tickling of spring, but oh God: give me this still, won't you? This one good thing I might have left. Dear god. All this war and all this mourning...

Henry breathed hard. Knocking at the door, he gathered what was left of his heart and courage. "Hello? I don't mean to interrupt," he called loudly, "but, er, is there a Theresa still milling about here?" He waited. The moon dipped in his hair, the grey in twinkling, but his voice -- still round, parts weary, but so, so him.

A ghost. He shouldn't be here, but the graves were full. / @skalitzhare.

[blacknighted]

@skalitzhare asked: [ 29. ] sender wakes receiver in the throes of a nightmare, reassuring them, "it's okay, it's not real." / A YELLOW SUNRISE: still accepting.

"Ma. Pa!"

It's always worse when it rains, Henry's realized.

Waking with a start, his gaze harries back at her blown blue and wide.

Straw scattered haphazardly about -- he'd been drowning, it seems, in shadow and mire and those deep impossible trenches of a well-scored mind -- his bed creaks, Henry jolting from his slumber with a sickening lurch. Here, his hand reaches for her lap as though the bunching of her dress there might serve as an anchor. The candle lists. He had left it to burn by his bedside up the ladder. He stops his reaching. Sweating, he peers up, Theresa's nose and fanning lashes kissed umber and gold. "Theresa?" he manages. Of course, you silly thing. Outside, the rain throbs with tempest as the pram of the heavens part.

...in his mind, there roars still the fires that swallowed Skalitz.

Ah. "Sorry. I, uh, I didn't mean to wake you," he says. No. "I just-- I remember what you told me." Waiting to die, she'd murmured. The night thunks heavily like an out-of-time pendulum in a grandfather clock. "Do you still feel that way?"

[drahnovice]

ㅤRE: ISTVAN HELPS ERIK PUT ON AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING. ㅤCC: @skalitzhare.

COMMISSIONED FROM AN ARMORER IN ITALY, the Milanese Brigandine Istvan's fitting Erik into. The armor wasn't needed. Erik had armor. Erik had fine armor, crafted by the finest armorer in Sasau not five months before. But Istvan had insisted, and who is Erik to refuse such exceptional, pretty armor — who is Erik to refuse Istvan? Istvan could dress Erik as the retinue's prized pony and Erik wouldn't complain. Well, Erik would scarcely complain, as Erik is scarcely complaining, now, flustered and with a face flushed red. "It reeks of favoritism." The Milanese armor, the fitting of a soldier, a commoner and a former farmhand, in to the Milanese armor as one would fit their beloved into a corset or finery. The favoritism was obvious before. The favoritism was painfully obvious before, Erik's sickbed two months before not a bed of hay in the barn but a bed in one of the opulent chambers of Toth's estate. Now, though, Erik is wearing the favoritism, and how pitiful and pathetic is the pride swelling behind the cage of Erik's chest for being the warlord's favorite. "Forgive me for the, uh, im – imprudence. The bluntness." Such florid words still not fluent on Erik's tongue even close to two years later. "But the others won't be pleased." Not that they'd been fond of Erik before.

[blacknighted]

@skalitzhare asked: a woman is a changeling , always shifting shape . (from theresa) (is she flirting? is she threatening? is she doing a secret third thing? up to you!) / ↪ 𝐀 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐋𝐘 𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓: still accepting.

Henry doesn't know much about the Bible, but from what he's heard, what this mill girl would speak on would encroach on devilish. In fact, were he but a clutcher of exorbitant pearls, he would've argued that and scolded her and rallied for a father; however, as a lad a twinge bestial and wild himself, well... Chuckling, Henry eyes her plain in her monstrous image.

Hm. Do the creatures those fishwives speak of, he wonders, mirror in any flavor this stouthearted woman? He reasons this: if they've but even half of her comeliness, he imagines life will fair reasonably in a beast's foul clutches.

"Right. What sharp teeth you have," he teases, his smile fluttering this side of a boyish smirk. Leant in, too, it's as though Henry had meant to spy at her fangs where they twinkled in her mouth like a winking threat. Alas, he only catches himself not nearly too early, and coloring -- half like a berry -- bows his wee head. "And, uh, what are you now? I reckon it doesn't matter. I can handle you." Yeah? "They'd start singing my name in them tavern songs in Rattay." Like a hero! Thwacking his stick, he takes down the poking thistles as they walk.

[drahnovice]

ㅤRE: ISTVAN HELPS ERIK PATCH UP A WOUND. ㅤCC: @skalitzhare.

ALTHOUGH THE SCHNAPPS AGAINST HIS SHOULDER STINGS, and though his fingers cinch the fabric of his braies, Erik flinches none, only sighs once the cloth, now bloodied but already stained from wounds before, is removed and set aside with the basin of off color schnapps. Bandages wouldn't suffice, not for such a cut from a blade: sutures would be needed, sutures Istvan is ready to stitch, with catgut thread and a sewing needle set upon an end table nearby. Only twice in childhood had Erik's wounds — from a blade to cut herbs from the earth, from the corner of a table against an eyebrow after a fall from before Erik could remember — been stitched by another. Only twice in childhood had Erik needed to be stitched by another, and the two wounds been stitched by Erik's mother and Erik's mother only, surely not by nobility. A noble willing to stitch a commoner's wound. A lord willing to stitch a peasant's wound. Erik's heart is foolishly and erroneously aflutter. "You needn't bloody your hands for me," Erik says, quiet, though looking at Istvan as though to ask a question — why? — with an even quieter reverence and a strange, shameful adoration. Finally, Erik flinches. "It's all right."