[seasonal event] it'll be tested, this cosmic mettle

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

Distractions and deterrents, limbs maneuvering without a plan, without a mission, without any sense of contemplation – mind fogged, hazed, in the piercing slide of anguish. It bent his head and savaged his bones, weapons at his back but no hunting machinations occupying his senses, the unattainable, the unreachable, a range of living munitions that sunk into the loam, that thought about fissuring and splintering into the earth. Maybe he’d fell apart there and it wouldn’t really matter, not after everything else, uselessness flanking over his shoulders and ricocheting along his soul – an echo, a fringe, a resounding, beating, barbaric curl and coil of yesteryears. How he hadn’t done enough. How he hadn’t savored enough. How he hadn’t cherished enough. How he hadn’t learned, how he he’d charged blindly along, rapacious and ravenous, with no thought to preambles and preludes of disaster, of ruin, of botched lines and schemes. How he’d forgotten what the world did to its inhabitants, sharp and precise, brutal and carnivorous, carving out hearts, lungs, and souls, one moment beatific and enriched with things he thought he’d never have, and vanquished in the next instant.

The Sword couldn’t stay in the house, not alone, not now, not with wooden ramps he’d been preparing beside stairs, not while swallowing down screams and sobs, not while threatening to be swallowed in the desolation of the past coming back to haunt him. Remember, it seemed to say, remember you are nothing, you have nothing, and you can do nothing.

Zuriel turned her head back towards him, a snort in the wind, as if refuting the latest notion. She’d been hanging around closely, hovering almost as badly as he had with Amalia, and he wondered if the unicorn merely thought he’d do something incredibly stupid. If he was planning some other penultimate, capricious, mercurial divide and division, if he thought to just lay himself flat out on the earth and accept defeat. Not yet, not yet, not yet; but the world was an overwhelming cacophony of noise, irritation, and sorrow, and it had been before, when he plunged headfirst into shadows, into darkness, into ichor and ruin. The temptation was raw, on the feral lines of his teeth, on the bestial intricacies lining his movements, into shade and shadow, into copses and groves. Still he moved, still he roamed, further and further, as if purpose would singe his flesh and turn him in a new direction.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

You just went on. That was the only way past loss, devastation, destruction, ruin. She knows what it feels like to claw back out from the depths of hell, knows what it’s like to try and piece your heart back together just enough to make sure it can still pump blood through your body. Because it will never be whole, that torn and tattered heart, but you don’t need a whole heart to keep living. It just aches to live more than it did before.

They were on day two of their excursion into the Hallowed Grounds. Weaver hadn’t seen much of Korbin. He kept to the settled areas, the market, and to the beds of pretty girls. She kept to the wilds, to scavenging, and the beds of pretty boys. They made for a stellar team.

Today she finds herself in a forest. She’d seen the trees yesterday from her adventure in the field, though she hadn’t ventured in. Trees. How strange. They were fairy stories to her, a girl raised in a frozen wasteland. She knew only caves and snowdrifts and blizzards, but not the darkness of so many trees. She finds herself thankful for the shade they provide though, after baking in the relentless sun of Longheat yesterday.

She’s got her pack with her, nearly empty, and every intention of filling it with whatever mushrooms, herbs and probably edible things she can find. Korbin would take the job of finding someone to tell them what it all was. If she was infinitely lucky, something would be hallucinogenic. Hey, it gets really boring in Halo sometimes. There are days it’s too cold to ever step foot outside the house, and so, they might as well do something. Equally useful would be something with some healing value, she supposes.

She’s been wandering through the forest for some time, marking trees as she goes so she doesn’t end up hopelessly lost, when she spots a stranger and a unicorn. She debates disappearing into a copse of dense trees off to the right before he spots her, but the look of him interests her enough she doesn’t. He looks built for war, or at the very least a good fight, and she can’t help but wonder if he isn’t someone useful to know. So Weaver keeps on course, closing the distance between them, gently slashing through a few trees as she goes with one of her many knives. She is a collector of them, it seems, mostly because they are prone to getting lost in battle and so she has many.

“She’s a pretty thing,” she says, nodding her chin in the direction of the unicorn. Usually she likes to start out conversations with strangers in a rather more biting manner, but she’s not in her territory, and he was not the sort of dude you messed with. So she settles for a compliment, coming to lean on a tree nearby, pack slung over one shoulder and her long braid over the other. “Weaver,” she offers.

weaver

-- ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies --

Quote by Charles Dickens

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

Noise; leaves rustling, boughs breaking, snapping twigs and branches, enough precision and power in the movements for him to grab hold of the sword at his belt, hand placed along its pommel, ready to unfurl, unleash, whatever menace or machination deigned to rampage and ravage its way towards him. But then the cacophonies soften, and his eyes narrowed, Zuriel’s ears pricked, head swiveling, and he wondered if he’d relish a fight or just the opportunity, the excuse, to fall further into old habits. Into routines of nonchalance and ruin. Into primordial, primeval exchanges, blood for blood, devastation for devastation. If it was a monster, he’d cut and slash, if it was prey, he’d maul and flay apart, if it was human –

Her appearance caused an arch to his brow, and only because the first words were extended to Zuriel. While the unicorn gave a haughty, preening shake of her head, he fought against an eye roll, somewhere between a sigh and a snort, digits removed temporarily from the hilt of his blade. He said naught at first, studying, scrutinizing, examining quickly, efficiently, the way predators and hunters often did, contemplating judgements and capabilities within fragments, within moments, within instants, ascertaining levels of threats, of strength, of dominion. He didn’t recognize her at all – which shouldn’t have been surprising, but he’d met a vast majority of people on his comings and goings – perhaps she was from elsewhere entirely.

Then a name: Weaver, and something like ghosts, like wraiths, like phantoms in snow should’ve curled and coiled over his memories. But they didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t; he’d been perished, dead, entombed in the mountainside before anyone of similar ilk had prospered their way into glacier valleys, intertwined in ancient story lines.

Reborn, here and now, resurrected, come back, to wallow and grieve again.

“Deimos.” Titles in the exchange, before roaming deeper, brushing aside a branch, maneuvering into a glade, shards of sunlight settling in beyond rocks and stones. The mare tilted her head, pondering on getting closer and granting her own introductions, but followed the Sword too, a low nicker of invitation billowing through her nares that the man hadn’t extended. “That is Zuriel,” he ensued from beyond, following known trails mindlessly.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

She’s flattered that the way her feet crunched through the twigs and leaves beneath them sent his hand to the pommel of his sword. It’s not as if she doesn’t notice, not as if one hand doesn’t curl instinctively to one of the small knives that’s good for throwing. Not that she’s a great shot, but he’s a large target and any sort of hit would at least be a distraction. Her body language, excluding the hand curling toward a knife, remains calm and composed, as if there are no threats around. Which of course, even if he is not a threat, there are threats everywhere in Caido. Certainly everywhere in Halo, anyway, and as such it is easy to pretend that monsters are normal. They are, for her.

The silence between them is palpable, even as his hand releases the hilt of his sword. She leaves it be, letting him eye her up as most everyone seems to do (for varying reasons). She does the same, of course, amber eyes keen and interested, at odds with the casual lean of her shoulder against the tree. You don’t live long in Halo if you don’t pay attention, even if you pretend not to pay attention.

Eventually he gives a name, and though it is meaningless to her, it tugs on her all the same. She has never given much thought to what comes when you die, despite the death that surrounds her. Perhaps they are reincarnated into something else, into better lives. Perhaps she had once been something else, some other version of herself. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. And does it matter? Because now seems like the only thing that matters. Living, surviving, fighting to see another day seems like the only thing that matters.

He keeps walking, and it’s the unicorn that invites her along with a nicker. He offers the mare’s name, and Weaver takes that as invitation enough. She offers the mare a nod and smile, before following in their wake and pulling her scythe from her back, making sure to make noise as she does so. It is entirely unthreatening, but she’s playing on a hunch.

”For fun?” she says, raising an eyebrow and waggling the scythe slightly. ”If you don’t mind a bit of a student on my end.” It’s a guess that he’s a better fighter than her, but an educated one given the look of him. The hard lines, the hand on the pommel of his sword at a sound, something perhaps eager about the gesture. It’s a hunch that he needs a distraction and she’ll take the practice if she’s right, but an educated hunch given how he just keeps moving. Worst case, she’s wrong and he says no, no skin off her back. His unicorn liked her, and that was good enough.

weaver

-- ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies --

Quote by Charles Dickens

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

The familiar sound of maneuvering steel, unsheathed, unfurled, ricocheted along his ears, and his head maneuvered to glance back over his shoulder, an arch to his brow. Hunters, the whole lot of them, predators seeking one another out in the predilections of other callous indiscretions, distractions, diversions, expressions of molten infernos and things that once were when everything else seemed to be falling apart. He knew the clash of steel like the back of his hand, the inherent, driven, primordial essence of lacerations, of brutality, of mettle and grit and fire in one’s blood when they should’ve been dead on the ground. It was familiar, it was comforting, when it shouldn’t have been, when instincts had always registered flight over fight; but not to soldiers, not to warriors, not to those trained and regarded to be sent out first, a fleet, a scourge on the horizon, overthrowing, harpooning, tearing, ripping apart no matter the cost. It’d been his desecration and his survival, coiled, contorted, knotted, and embroiled together like sanctions, oaths, and vows amongst, amidst, pandemonium, breathing venom, living menace, calculating his worth in the amount of things he could destroy, in the amount of lives he could take.

It’d been everything.

It’d been nothing.

The Sword turned towards her, regarding the space – a glade, lush and overgrown, not caught in wildfires or the haze of previous blights, enriched with moss and ferns, boughs and hanging vines, neither spectral nor eerie. Cast in light, the whims of shadow missing entirely, a makeshift battle arena, when strangers challenged one another on hunches, whims, and rushes of death again. Perhaps that’s what he’d missed after all this time, after all these downfalls, tragedies, and treacheries, just the opportunity to wreck, ruin, and savage, just to push until he couldn’t any longer, just for his muscles to bundle, to coil, to undulate in absolute fervor and irreverence. “Go ahead,” he announced, nodding at the proclamation, hand dropping to the blade at his belt once more, listening to the rush, to the singsong glint of its grasp as he pulled it, as it, he waited, defensive stances, maneuvers poised beneath his skin; a beckon, a siren wail. The unicorn shook her head, somewhere nearby, a creature of the forest where he’d been something conjured out of ocean salt, ether, and mountain crags. He didn’t ask her why Weaver was doing this. Maybe it was a creed, an understanding. Maybe it was nothing at all.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

”He likes to talk, doesn’t he?” she says, eyes glancing to the unicorn as she says it as if she’s being conspiratorial. Probably the unicorn doesn’t understand her, and of course she’s not actually trying to hide it from Deimos. It’s simply her way of being, bordering on the ridiculous. Life was too short and too cold (or too hot, at the moment) or too insert-whatever-you-want here to be perfectly serious. She’d already died once and though she wasn’t some sentimental sap about having a new lease on life or whatever (her heart stopped for a few beats, it’s not as if she’d been dead for long), she wasn’t going to waste what she did have either.

She takes a few steps closer to him, circling, watching the way he moves (or doesn’t) with her. She has about zero advantages in this fight, but she’s used to those odds, and the fight isn’t necessarily about winning. It’s about the fight, about the game, about letting some primal part of their minds be unleashed so that the rest of them can simply be. Another step to her left. “Grounder?” she asks, another educated guess. He wasn’t from Halo, or she’d have most likely known him, and he didn’t exactly look like a fae from the Greatwood. “I’m from Halo myself.”

Another step. She tests the weight of the scythe in her hands, holding it at angle with the blade above her head to the right. “What’s been happening here? Halo has been a bubble, after all. Information has only recently begun to trickle in, making its way past their supposed King and down to the peasants who made up the country. Finally to the people who mattered.

She will not strike as he answers, though whether he answers before or after is up to him. This is not a distraction tactic, but it is a game. Step. Question. Answer. Strike. Step. Question. Answer.

Strike.

She launches forward, bringing the scythe down toward his right shoulder, aiming behind him as if she might pull forward and hook the scythe through his back and right shoulder. It was a useful blade that way. The shaft stays largely across her torso, blocking an assault directly to her front as best she can. Her sides and legs are open targets though, and she keeps her body at an angle, attempting to keep her more vulnerable spots out of reach.

weaver

-- ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies --

Quote by Charles Dickens

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

Oh, Zuriel understood, far more than Weaver could probably envision. The mare shook her head, an inward smirk and snicker sticking its way into their corresponding senses, unicorn and Sword; except she also comprehended why the reticence, why the reserve, why the nonchalance, so the jocular sting was minimal, in the face of grief and anguish. Any other time she might have let the haughty endeavors spiral against him, but not today. The inclination of her horn, of her head, of the way her eyes narrowed back at Weaver might have been a warning – or just an ominous, foreshadowed bend.

The Sword said nothing once more – choosing to dive headfirst into examining, into scrutiny, into battlefield tactics, on pace with her movements, threading his way through the forest, pivoting, following, watching how she maneuvered, how she bore her weight into the earth. The scythe should’ve sent him some semblance of a misgiving, but with the lack of care in his chest, in his mind, the conflagration wasn’t there. “Outlander,” he marked; could he be considered a Grounder when the Naturals once balked and hissed at their presence, or had a year of assimilating treated them to the word? Did it matter, really? But the General also noted her home of Halo, and something else hurt. Worlds and nostalgia, biting and lancing at him from all sides today.

He had no need to test the weight of his blade as she does; he knew every inch of it, had whittled it himself, had carried it along his belt, within his calloused palms, as if it were another lifeline, another thread holding him together, from unraveling, from fraying entirely. “We are recovering from the latest disaster.” Would Halo have heard of the death and destruction? The gleeful celebrations of life and survival, succumbing to its opposite? His teeth clenched, jaw tight, readying the weapon in his hand. “We are moving into another tradition started by the Fae: capturing the sun.” He didn’t have the heart to laugh at it now; at the ridiculous contortions, at how even that too would likely break and crack and fissure. “And in Halo?” Because if she was receiving information, so was he.

Then she came, launching, the cumbersome weapon coming towards his right shoulder. Deimos turned, a shift towards the left, so he wasn’t caught in the crossfire, in the haze of its potential menace; missing the graze, the slide of it nearly touching his clothing, his flesh. She’d be faster just based on build alone – but he had strength, power, and might behind his swings, reaching out towards her right hip, testing, testing, testing with the edge of the munitions, seeing if she’d be too open, and it could cut and slash across, upwards, on an incline towards her ribs.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

She sees the way Zuriel lowers her horn toward her, the way her eyes narrow. She is tempted to make some other remark, likely about life being too damn short to be so serious, but she keeps her mouth shut instead. They don’t know her history, they don’t know that she speaks from experience rather than inexperience. They don’t know that pain cuts through her heart at the thought of her brother, her mother, her step-father. They don’t know that she moved forward because she had to, because moving forward was the only option left after tragedy. Drowning in the depth of sorrow was not an option she considered.

Was he drowning in sorrow he couldn’t move past? Well, not quite move past, because it never goes away. You just learn to live with it the same way you learn to live with the loss of a limb. The phantom of it will plague you. The memory of life with that limb doesn’t go away, but you learn to make do without it. Life changes, and you change with it into the shape of something vaguely human.

Outlander, he says, and she grins at that slightly. “At some point you become a Grounder, I think. How long you been here?” Maybe they don’t though. Maybe they always feel a little other, a little outside, a little lost. She can’t quite imagine living like that, but of course, this was home for her. Though she wonders if she’ll ever accept the Outlanders in Halo as Halovians. Eventually, maybe, when their faces become one of the faces she simply knows from sight, because eventually you just know all Halo faces to some degree. But maybe not, maybe they would always be the people who came later, the people who don’t really know what it is like to spend a life trapped in a wasteland. Only time would answer.

She doesn’t need to test the weight of her blade, strictly speaking. She knows it well, though she has always liked to test is anyway, mostly because Weaver is made of showmanship, of bark (though also bite). Besides it is a strange weapon that deserves a moment of attention. It is not a makeshift weapon as many scythes are. What grass would she have ever possibly had to thresh? But still, it is a unusual weapon, even if it is designed to be a weapon and not a tool.

“Latest disaster implies there has been a string of them.” It is more statement than question, allowing him to elaborate or not. She doesn’t pry too terribly into disasters that seem to hurt, but still, she’d like more information on them all the same. The statement is open ended, his to take or not. “My mother told me of that once in a fairy story,” this seems lighter, easier, of a topic, and so she latches on to it figuring he would be less likely to shy away from the answer. “I admit I hardly remember it, and I’m sure our version is not the Fae’s actual custom. What exactly is it?”

His counter is expected, going toward her unprotected side. She drops the shaft of scythe low enough to block his swing, taking a stumbling step backward at the strength of it. She is outmatched, of course, her strength nothing compared to his. If this were a real fight, it would not be one she would intentionally pick. The blade of the scythe comes forward with her backstep, and she sweeps it left, as if to cut across the front of his chest. Unlike the farming version of a scythe, her blade is double-edged so she can cut from either side, allowing for something slightly more sword-like, though given the angle of the blade only part of it would reach him in such a move.

“Outlander calling himself Warden of Halo. Still cold and icy as hell. With the portals open I assume trouble will come for us.” There is the truth. She’d rather the portals be closed, for all she is enjoying getting out of Halo. There are herbs in her pack to be brought back to Halo, game that is not the same thing she always catches at home, and more goods traded for at the market than they could have dreamed of. And yet she’d give it all back for the quiet that was Halo before.

weaver

-- ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies --

Quote by Charles Dickens

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

He’d lived with ghosts for as long as he could remember or recall – and it’d always taken him time to shake off the feelings of their souls, of their presence, in the corner of his eyes or the pinnacle of his memories. By the time he eroded, by the time he surfaced, by the time he breathed again, there was always something else. He’d moved forward, only to be flanked and slammed by another event, another cataclysm – this one too fresh, too new, just days before. The beast was allowed to mourn and sink for as long as it took – usually too long – trauma billowing and etching its way into his skin time after time after time, and once he thought himself numb to it all. Sometimes he wished he still was – the embittered, the rancorous, but also the indifferent, apathetic, and nonchalant. No one could touch him, no one could reach him, no one could damage the inner workings of his malicious, unrelenting soul. Except here they could, because he cherished and devoted instead of shirking away into the shadows, and lords the darkness was all the more tempting now, something to bite down upon, something to relish in, something he understood and comprehended when the world started its storms.

So it would take more hours, more days, more seasons, until the holes were filled in. Until new ones took their place.

The uncertainty of Grounder versus Outlander status caused the slightest of shrugs, as if it didn’t matter. The status was persistent, the notions of nothingness consistent. “More than a year.” There were once stings of those percussions and hated, hissing, grating growls over fields while they watched those fighting Spire Demons die and fall apart. They hadn’t held those in some time, not after they’d upheld and cherished traditions, not after they’d melded and molded. But the everlasting notions were still there, still present, in the back of minds.

“Yes,” he answered thereafter at the implications of disasters, half-tempted not to say anything more on them, not relishing in reliving them. Maybe he’d opened that up on his own though, skimming over the surface in hopes it wouldn’t be scorched or touched upon. “We endured LongNight, where monsters reign and we hide.” Or opened doors, waiting for the demons to come in and feast while they struggled to save. “We had a festival to celebrate our survival, and to represent Rae and Frey: Fiat Lux. It did not go well.” Maybe an understatement – considering the amount of death and destruction it exhibited, how many lives had been scorched, maimed, and mauled. Everything else had seemed fine, up until the end.

The Sword fell silent then, listening to fairy stories and of mothers who exhibited tales to their children. He’d only been told the capturing the sun story once, by Ianto, and truth be told he hadn’t been in the grandest mood for it – ultimately distracted by pending rescue attempts, reeling back into his memories. “The days grow longer because the Fae capture the sun. They weave or acquire baskets to catch the sun’s rays. Meanwhile, respect is paid to Safrin, with gifts and song.” He didn’t say, didn’t look too deeply and wonder if they were supposed to dread the upcoming festival for this one either, if something was damned and doomed to go wrong. “In the middle of LongHeat there is a midnight festival, and everyone brings their baskets and a gift to put in another’s. Like releasing the sun.”

Then there was the skirmish and duel upheld, the shift of her scythe blocking his swing, testing her defenses. Her blade rose again, clearly intending for a brush across his chest, and on instinct, on practiced maneuvers, on primeval things lodged in his mind, his sword met her blade, raised to meet across and out, another hindering, deflecting, muscles upholding and taking the accord in stride. Instead of swinging it either way, he simply tried to push against the scythe’s wares – a conflagration of strength rippling through, intending to send her backwards and away.

Information though was still a tracing thing, and he took what he could: Warden of Halo, opened portals likely causing tribulations. “They do that,” he proffered in a sort of twisted humor. For all the freedom and liberation, for all the new things unfurling before them, there’d always been hardships too.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

That’s the thing, there’s this mistaken belief that the holes fill in, that time heals them. Anyone with holes in their heart though knows better, knows that it’s a lie told to pretend like it will get better. The holes don’t fill in. There are holes in her heart the size and shape of her mother, her brother, her step-father. They will always be there, and they never cease to hurt. In the mornings when she finds herself in that hazy place between waking and sleep there is a moment, just a moment, when she can forget the holes. That moment before reality slams back into place and the holes ache as if fresh all over again, and then she remembers and the ache becomes a bruise, a thing she knows how to live with.

That is the thing to learn. The holes do not fill in. If you keep expecting they will, keep hoping they will, you will never learn to keep living. Life is made of pain.

He tells her he’d been here for over a year, and she wonders how long Outlanders had been getting ripped from their homes and thrust into Caido. She wants to ask about his past. Where did he come from? What was it like? She’d heard of some from different times, some simply from different lands, and she wonders what else is out there. How strange to think there are other worlds, other timelines, other ways to live. She will never know them, for Halo is home, though it was changing now. Outlanders chucked into their midst, new leadership, and a world slowly opening to them.

He speaks of LongNight and retorts flash to her lips though she seals them shut. LongNight is her life, though she knows it is a worse version of her everyday. Halo is dark and full of monsters, but LongNight is it’s next level. And it is not the way they live here in the Hallowed Grounds. They are not used to hiding inside and learning to keep the fires burning. It is one of the first things you learn in Halo, sometimes before you can walk. She had, but of course, she had the sort of mother that didn’t actually mind if she got burned.

He mentioned some festival of survival and the gods, and she can’t help but scoff. “I am not so sure things with the gods ever go well.” But of course, she has always been bitter toward the lot of them, given her invisible status to them. The gods had little interest in her kind and she’d grown up with the disadvantage.

The topic shifts to the present, to this ritual of capturing the sun to keep the days long and bright. She has no such interest. Her days were blinding and still cold, and capturing the sun did her no good. But for the rest of the world, she can understand the appeal. “Ah,” she says, and there’s something familiar about the story, an image of a tiny Weaver in bed and her mother sitting on the side of it. “I’m pretty sure my mother’s version involved monsters. But then again, all of her stories included monsters.” Maybe it had been a scare tactic, but Weaver doubted it. Likely Straia was just teaching her the truth. Not all monsters were obvious, but they were everywhere.

His sword clashes against her blade, the sound of metal ringing on metal echoing around them. There is something beautiful and primal about the sound, about the clash of steel, and she grins though it’s half a grimace as he simply pushes. He is stronger than her, and she knows she cannot win a battle of pure force. She takes a step backward and then spins left, ducking out from beneath the weight of his sword and taking a hand from the scythe. She grabs a knife and tries to spin close to him, tries to use her shorter height to sneak in under his guard to stick a knife into his side (not literally, of course, but to pretend). If he could play to his strengths, she could play to hers.

“Have you been to Halo?” she asks, curious if he’d been in the parties of people that came to explore a land already lived in, if he’d been there to crash into their lives. Not that she blames him, because in the end if not him then someone else and what did it matter, it was done. Still, she is curious to know.

weaver

-- ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies --

Quote by Charles Dickens

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

A scoffing of the gods, a noteworthy annotation to his mind, more and more beings who’d either been ignored or discarded by them. He’d only grown slightly tolerable in their eyes since gaining Attuned capabilities – otherwise scorched, scorn, and rebuffed just the same (and he’d followed through on those intervals and patterns once – only crossing lines when it mattered and counted – even then, they hadn’t come). The Sword didn’t hang in her bitterness, too much of his own resentment and rancor stored within, listening instead to stories, where monsters always dwelled (and that was the thing about demons; they lived with feverish fervor no matter where one traversed; be they human, fiend, or an actual cretin from hell). His mother’s stories hadn’t been: but that was a different time, a different world, and instead of malicious cretins, they’d been legends. Namesakes carried on winds, titles and myths, stern tales and lessons embedded in each. He might’ve tried to orchestrate and contort each of them as a child, much to her chagrin. He might’ve sunk into their warnings, into their omens too, time and time again.

But still, he said nothing – absorbing, nodding, piercing eyes lifting with their ghosts, wraiths, and shrouds, too many other depths and fathoms to name, reaching and scorching for the blows, for the fury, for the ferocity he’d rather cling to than any other semblance of sorrow and memories.

Her step backward was the only warning he’d receive, and he took it, snagged, too many warrior tendencies lodged in his brain, muscle memory eternally intact, spinning towards his side, the glint of a knife towards his ribs. In another world, the beast might have smirked. Instead, he lowered the edge of his blade so the pommel’s descending, plummeting, blunt force faced her dagger, her stiletto, her nuance, shoving it down, down, down, intending to knock away or pummel.

Have you been to Halo sizzled in between his veins though, and he nodded once more. “Yes,” uncertain of the proclamation’s heresy – that the world he’d died within had been mountains too and they’d been sealed, been torn apart, been enclosed in shadow – he couldn’t go back, had been too tempted, too enticed, too wanton for a glimpse of the summits. Of things that sounded, whispered, like home.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

And then it is only the fight. The conversation becomes nothing but a yes, and the questions die on her tongue as his sword hilt slams into her fist. Grunting, fingers instinctively flexing open, the knife falls to the ground. Weaver grows reckless, a thing that often loses but sometimes wins her the fight. She is outmatched in skill, strength, speed, stamina, and basically everything else that matters, but she is not outmatched in a reckless sort of fury.

She remembers Erebor’s constant chiding as they fought. ”You forget what you have learned,” he would tell her, which was both true and not truth. She did not forget but she would fight like she had. Something feral took over, instinctual. Those who could do both - keep proper techniques and still let instinct reign - as her brother could, always used it to their advantage. Those who only knew the technique though, well, she found that they did not know how to handle her when she forgot her manners.

She does not doubt that Deimos knows both, as her brother had. Fighting him reminds her so much of the brother she will never see again that it hurts, that old wound aching with memory.

Still, Weaver grabs for another knife, the seemingly endless array of their handles glimmering along her belt. She spins, attempting to whip around him to his back, to simply play dirty, to drive the knife point right below his ribs. In a real battle she would try to cut up and under, to shred the insides of him. It is not fair play, but then again, life has never been very fair.

weaver

-- ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies --

Quote by Charles Dickens

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

No, life was never fair.

Those lessons had been instilled within him from a young, tender age, when the world altered and changed at the expanse of his magic, of the way life drained around him when he had no control, no nuances, no understanding of the power beneath his skin. Or when efforts were put into resolve, into adamancy, into convictions, and still, it didn’t matter. Instead of melding into a blinding sort of wrath though, he seethed beneath a wake of frigid, glacial walls and thresholds, painstakingly cloaking himself in primordial anthems and diabolical schemes, molding into a perfect reach of composure, reaching for the scathing nuances when necessary. When thrones toppled. When kingdoms scalded. When the earth’s weight was too much. When he tried and lost anyway.

His wrath and abhorrence didn’t consume or unravel him – it fueled him.

Deep into the heart of unfair tactics, he might have scoffed and snorted, furrowed his brows at her level of ridiculousness – the alternative was to say nothing, fight back (fight fight fight; those were echoes too, brandished and smoldering, between the air of smoke and fumes), and carry onward in his stoic enterprise.

On her spin towards his back, he didn’t immediately coax his blade into the fruition. He hadn’t lived multiple lifetimes to be stuck on one playing field, with only technique, with only form, with only age-old muscle memory allowing, permitting, him survival. The General lifted a foot back towards her at the feel of a blade sticking at his clothing, much like a massive kick, intending to at least force her backwards with either force or surprise. Then he spun too, whether or not he caught the edge of her knife along his garb or flesh didn’t much matter (what was one more scar?), striving to push his sword towards her throat.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

She actually manages to stick the knife to his clothing, to press it in close enough that in a real battle she would have cut. The small victory surprises her, and for a split second she drops her guard as he kicks. She stumbles back a step, knife whipping away from his back as she works to regain her balance. He spins in that moment, and she’s a second too slow to drop her knife and get both hands on the scythe again. She can wield it one-handed to some degree, but it is not a one handed weapon and the attempt is unwieldy at best. Though she moves the scythe to block, she is too slow and off balance and instead, there is a sword at her throat.

“Yield,” she says throwing up the hand that only moments ago held a knife, fingers spread wide. The hand holding the scythe drops, letting the blade land into the dirt softly, though she doesn’t drop the weapon all together. No tricks, not in a playful fight like this one, and so he has no reason to worry. Weaver takes a step back, bends to collect her knives and sticks them back into their holsters along her belt. Slinging the scythe across her back again, she gives him a small nod as if the beginning of a bow. “Maybe someday you can teach me for real?” Though phrased as a statement, there’s a clear question at the end of her words. He’s as good, if not better, than she expected. She knows her betters, and she would learn from them if she could.

She takes another step back, clearly preparing to leave him be for now. “If you are ever in Halo, look me up. I’d be happy to show you around if you want.” She nods to Deimos, and then smiles at Zuriel, because she had not forgotten the unicorn, and turns her back to slip away into the trees, calling out as she goes, "That's for the fight and the scintillating conversation."

weaver

-- ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies --

Quote by Charles Dickens