[SE] from these stones

The dragon snorted at the clumsy humans and their silly rocks, but accepted the apologies with amiable grace as she turned to guard the tunnel at their backs. Tal spared her another grin before he went back to tapping at his seam, trying to loosen the next section free of the rock around it.

"Hey, that's kinda what my dad used t'do," Tal revealed, a little shy and a little wistful at the bittersweet memories. "For Halo. Didja train Anju at all?" He didn't know many Dragoons, but he figured he made up in quality what he lacked in quantity.

Ronin had been outnumbered and, arguably, outgunned by the Ascended swarm that rumor held had descended on Stormbreak that fateful day. Tal staunchly continued to defend the Huntsman as they hammered and tapped and cracked away at the wall, collecting small stones and chips of bloody scarlet. "I guess... sometimes there's no way to win," the courier said slowly, working his way through the idea as it moved from brain to mouth without a filter. "All y'can do is try t'lose less badly. I don't think anyone could've done better. An' most folks would've done a lot worse."

RONIN

the darkstar

light is easy to love.

"Oh? Interesting." Smiling across at Tal, Ronin lends his concentration to a few brief, harder taps of his hammer, and a shower of stone and a few larger pieces of gemstone fall free from the rock face. Thinking that they should leave some of the rubies to other travellers coming through (though perhaps the other man will feel differently), Ronin replaces his tools and gathers up what he's managed to collect thus far.

"Did you not want to go into that sort of thing?" he wonders, given Talyson's father's career compared the courier. As for Anju, "You know, I think I have," he says with a wistful smile that speaks of times too long ago to seem real. "Met her a few times, and trained with her once." He nods. "You know her?"

Shuffling back away from the rocks, Ronin lingers by a ruddy stream of light pouring from above to examine his finds. Tal's remarks about the Stormbreak attack are surprisingly apt, and although part of him - a large part, as it happens - rallies against the idea of achieving anything but the absolute best he can, the other man has a point. "Well," he mutters, "with any luck that sort of thing will be a once in a lifetime event."

show me your darkness.

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

A lucky well-aimed strike knocked a second chunk of stone loose that was the same size as the first, and Tal scooped it up to examine it with his Goggles. Not bad... he could do something with these, for sure.

"Hmm? Nah, when I was growin' up I was a real scrawny brat," he admitted easily now that he had finally put enough muscle on to stop feeling so self-conscious about it. "Too small t'be a Shield trainee. An' followin' other people's orders, well... it's never been my strong suit." He grinned over at Ronin unrepentantly as Boreal huffed amused confirmation of his sentiment, even if she didn't understand the words. "An' Anju? Yeah, she's... well, she's a friend o'mine. I saved her life in th'desert a couple years back, an' our dragons get along," he added with an affectionate scratch to Boreal's horns before he started packing up his own tools, seeing that Ronin was done.

He gave a fervent nod to Ronin's muttering and started back the way they'd come. "From your lips to the gods' ears," he murmured. "Now let's get outta here. These tunnels always give me the heebie jeebies!"
~Fin~