Somewhere Around Nothing
Part two of a fanfiction by Velkyn Karma
Disclaimer: I do not own, or pretend to own, the Fire Emblem game series or any of its subsequent characters, plots or other ideas. That right belongs solely to Nintendo and Intelligent Systems. The only thing here that's mine is the idea for the story.
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"So boundless I feel,
And boundless all my fears
Stop running back to old times
(Stop running back to old times)
You loose your routine,
'Cause I've found my path."
--Path Vol. 2, Apocalyptica
-----
Jaffar was pounded by debris on all sides as he rolled along the disturbed ground. His senses, usually so keen and completely, utterly aware, had been temporarily shot. He could barely tell up from down, light from dark, movement from stillness, could only recognize that he was suffering injury. His ears were bombarded by a soft rhythmic thudding, fading slowly away as it was overlaid with hundreds of deafening booms.
But then his equilibrium had returned to him in a flash, and he was suddenly aware of his surroundings, and the fact that he was still rolling painfully over the uneven ground, the stray sharp rocks slicing at his skin as he moved. He glided swiftly to his feet, finding firm footing immediately, wrapped his cloak about him to conceal himself completely in the darkness, and looked around warily.
The horseman was gone, and Nino along with him. Good, he thought to himself quietly. She, at least, would have a chance of escaping with her life, if the knight could find his way out of the storm. Upon further inspection, he realized grimly that his chances of escaping were not nearly so high; the magical thunderbolts were crashing down all around him with determination, ready and willing to kill anything within their domain. He must be far within the depths of the storm, close to its center.
Shelter, his instincts told him immediately. There was no hope of outrunning the storm on foot, he knew. If he did not hole up in this tempest, he would be killed by the thrashing bolts and flying rocks and debris. He was not afraid of death itself—since his training had begun years ago and he had adopted his profession, he had been well aware of and accepted the fate that would eventually claim him in his violent existence. But he worried over Nino's survival without him, and would do everything in his power to return to her side...just as he had promised. And so, sweeping his cloak about himself more firmly to prevent any watching enemy eyes from spotting him, one hand never far from the dagger sheathes at his sides, he set off, searching for a suitable place to hide and wait out the storm.
After a harrowing ten minutes of dodging and twisting to avoid the bolts and the following cast-off earth, Jaffar finally benefited from their ruthless attacks. One particularly strong lightning strike had dug a hole deep into the side of one of the small hills that dotted the valley, and the cast-off dirt and slag had half-buried the entrance to the little cave, providing suitable shelter with cover. Moving quickly, the assassin twisted and squeezed into the hole, pressing as far back into the cavity as he could. It was small, only enough for perhaps three people if packed tightly, and still hot from the blast, but it would have to do.
Huddled in the back of the tiny shelter, he had an excellent view of the outside, and settled down with grim determination to out-wait the storm. The assassin watched the pure darkness flash brilliantly as bolts illuminated the mid-afternoon black outside, occasionally averting his eyes as a blinding lightning blast came into view, blinking away spots.
Apart from the occasional scattered rocks outside, there was no movement, but Jaffar had no doubts as to the cause of this storm. It was unnatural--he could feel it in his bones, and he had very little doubt that the Black Fang he had only recently departed from was the cause. He doubted any of the Fang would be foolish enough to wander to their deaths in their own storm, however, and so did not entirely understand why he kept such a vigilant watch outside of his little shelter.
It came as a great surprise to him, then, when he saw the sudden silhouette of a figure not twenty feet from his cramped cave.
His form was barely discernible through the darkness, and even with his sharp vision Jaffar only spotted him at all due to a far-off flash of lightning that outlined him slightly. Immediately wary, the assassin watched tensely as the figure traveled through the storm, but the other man (he was sure it was a man from the build and gait) was not walking with any reassurance. Rather, he was stumbling through the storm, desperately trying to avoid the thundering bolts around him. He had not spotted the tiny hole that served as Jaffar's shelter.
He had to be one of Eliwood's men, the assassin realized, after a moment's careful thought. The figure was not searching the storm in any purposeful sort of way, as he determined the Fang members would, if they had the ability to traverse safely through the storm and search for enemies. No, far from it; Jaffar's keen eyes recognized signs of exhaustion and uncertainty amidst the storm. He could belong to no other company but Eliwood's.
He paused, considering his next action. The man in the storm still had not noticed the shelter, and would in all likelihood stumble right past it while trying to avoid the flashing death above him. Jaffar could call to him, but it seemed unlikely that the man would hear in the horrific booms crashing in from all directions. And to leave the safety of his shelter to pull the man in was to risk his own life, his one chance of returning to Nino.
Was it really, truly worth the risk? He had to return to her, at all costs; staying in this shelter was his one reassurance that such a return could possibly happen. And it was not as though anyone in the army would know what had really happened to the man outside—he would in all probability be struck by the dangerous bolts overhead, an instantaneous death. There was no way to prove that Jaffar had been in range of the man at all, or that he could have rescued the man. No one would ever know—the assassin was sure of it. Concealed death and its cause had been simply business to him since he had been a child.
Yet even as the idea crossed his mind, even as he watched the cloaked man stagger past, something else twitched at the back of his mind. Feeling...was this feeling again? Nino was the only one who had ever truly allowed him to feel...
Nino...
If she found out--
But she won't, his thoughts hissed to him, angrily. She never has to know, and you know how to hide such information perfectly.
But if she did find out that he had left this man to die...Jaffar had a strange feeling (again, this feeling!) that she would be disappointed. And somehow, despite his ability to kill without a second thought in utterly cold blood, Jaffar found he could not bear the thought of seeing Nino disappointed in him.
He did not hesitate any longer. Slipping forward, he squeezed free of the tiny shelter, his cloak furling away from him immediately as he was buffeted heavily by the wind. It nearly knocked him over, though he recovered his balance quickly. He had forgotten how powerful he wind was in the storm, after hiding away in his shelter for the past twenty minutes.
Wrapping the cloak about him securely once more, he darted forward quickly towards the stumbling figure, dodging with agility around the bolts that crashed down around him. The figure was close, less than fifteen feet away now, but even so it took Jaffar a heavy amount of effort just to move forward through the dangers of the storm. The better part of a minute had past before the assassin had reached his quarry.
He shouted to the cloaked figure, but his voice was ripped away by the powerful wind, and the man did not respond. This did not deter Jaffar, however, and he reached out quickly with one gloved hand, grasping the opposing man's right arm through his thick cloak.
The response was nearly instantaneous. The other man twitched in surprise, but immediately spun, and Jaffar noted with an expert's eye the silvery gleam of a dagger as it was drawn and swung with surprising accuracy towards his head.
Jaffar had not attained his level of skill by being unprepared, however, and as the left arm swung around to attack him he launched his other hand, grasping the man by the wrist and effectively halting the killing slash. Leaning close to the face—he still could not make out the figure completely in the dark—he roared with as loud a voice as he could muster, "Shelter! This way! Hurry!"
The figure hesitated, tried to draw his arms back, and Jaffar released one of them, tugging the other in the direction of the tiny cavern. "Hurry!" he yelled again, over the roar of the thunder about them.
The man, deciding that there were better places to be than the storm, finally turned and stumbled after his assassin guide. Sensing the man's cooperation, Jaffar now let go of his new companion's other arm, but made sure the man was not far behind him as he moved.
Getting back to the shelter proved another difficulty, and for a moment Jaffar was afraid that he had lost his sense of direction in the swirling storm about them, that the shelter was forever gone. But after a few more moments of dodging the bolts, and carefully retracing his steps, he located the half-covered entrance and squeezed his way back in. The man followed, slipping into the tiny hole with an exhausted grace, and pressed up to the side of the wall opposing Jaffar to avoid the cramped conditions as best as possible.
Neither spoke for several minutes, Jaffar watching the newcomer quietly while the other man panted heavily, trying to regain his breath after the hard flight in the storm. It was still pitch dark, and neither could really see the other, but the assassin was sure the man's silhouette was very familiar now.
"Thanks," the cloaked man finally rasped, after several more minutes of silence, and Jaffar's memory tugged at him again—the voice was very familiar, too. "I don't know how much longer I could have made it out there. That storm came on so quick, I was swallowed in it--"
There was a particularly jarring boom outside their shelter, and a powerful lightning bolt smashed down uncomfortably close, sending the surrounding area into a blaze of sun-like light. The flash illuminated both of the sheltering men's faces, and in one simple, fated second both realized who the man sitting across from him in the cramped, miserable hole was.
"You!" the newcomer snarled angrily, a sudden blaze of pure hatred in his voice, and though Jaffar's face remained perfectly expressionless, inwardly he cursed his exceptionally poor luck. Matthew's shock of dirty-blond hair and amber eyes were unmistakable, and the assassin recognized him all too clearly as one of many of his fellow army members who displayed open and unabashed loathing for him.
"What the hell are you doing out here?" Matthew continued, his normally cheery face contorted in anger and suspicion. His exhaustion seemed to have fallen away within moments, to be replaced by a tense wariness, a barely restrained desire to cause immeasurable pain to his current cave-mate.
Jaffar considered the question rather absurd, but answered, his voice soft and to the point. "Sheltering," he said simply. "As are you."
"Don't play dumb!" the spy snarled back, narrowing his eyes. "You're a killer by nature. Were you not getting enough blood on your hands with us? Decided to help your damn Fang friends, hunt us down and ambush us out here?" He looked absolutely livid.
"I have no intention of killing you," Jaffar answered flatly.
"Like hell you don't. There's no other reason for an ally like you to be out here," Mat growled lowly, all but spitting the word in a mocking, ironic tone. Jaffar remained silent, and the thief continued angrily. "How many others have you killed, and called it the storm's fault, hmm?!"
"I have killed no one," the assassin responded, soft and simple as before.
"Of course not," Matthew sneered. He looked angry still, but frustrated as well, and his left hand was resting on the hilt of his sheathed silvery dagger.
"I could have left you out there," the cowled man added quietly, eyes never leaving Matthew's glaring gaze, though he was well aware, almost instinctively, of the opposing man's hand on his weapon. His own hands strayed comfortably near to his blood-red daggers, though he did not touch either weapon, avoiding threatening moves for the moment.
"Left me to die?" Mat responded, with a bitter laugh. "Of course—death is death to you, isn't it, no matter how it's achieved. No matter what is done, no matter how gruesome. Life means nothing do you, does it, oh angel of death? Of course not...that's how you could kill someone like her!"
The barest trace of a frown slid over Jaffar's face, though it was difficult to see in the gloom. "If this is about the woman--"
"Not 'the woman,' " Matthew snarled viciously. "Leila! Don't you ever forget her name!" Once again, Jaffar remained silent, and the spy across from him glared savagely. "But you don't care at all, do you? There's nothing to you but killing."
More silence, and now Mat was growing aggravated from the one-sided conversation. "Say something, dammit! Or can you not even own up to your own nature?"
Jaffar glanced out of their shelter momentarily as another bolt crashed uncomfortably close, once again lighting the two men up, before opening his mouth to oblige. "I have nothing to say on the matter."
The blond spy's eyes narrowed dangerously. "That so? I bet you'd have a hell of a lot to say if it was me that killed your precious Nino, huh?"
Almost immediately, the assassin tensed in preparation of the perceived threat, his hands dropping to both of the hilts of his daggers, ready to spin them out and slam them home in the body opposite him. If this man so much as touched one hair on her head, he would be dead so fast he would not have time to recognize the blades thrusting through his body--
But Matthew only smirked bitterly across from him. "Thought as much," he said, voice now surprisingly flat, devoid of any hatred. It was strangely unsettling. "Can't blame me very much then, can you, Jaffar? You would do the same thing in my position."
With an effort, the cowled man managed to slip his hands free from the hilts of his daggers, rest them once more on his knees as he stared quietly across at the spy sharing his tiny shelter with him. "You wish me dead."
"I've told you before, Jaffar," Matthew responded, a low growl barely audible in his voice. "You're going to die by my hand, and you will remember Leila's name." His eyes narrowed, the burning rage replaced by a more cunning hatred.
Silence for a moment, and then the assassin spoke, once more glancing outside at the crashing thunder and inky blackness. "Regardless," he said flatly, "this is not the time or the place for your revenge."
"No one would ever know I--"
"If you attack me in this hole," Jaffar cut him off, eyes leveling with Matthew's, voice full of a matter-of-fact tone, "I will overpower you, and you will die."
Matthew fixed him with a sullen look, but nodded quietly. The assassin had a point—he wanted to kill Jaffar himself, not leave him to the Black Fang's thunder, nor did he want to die from the magical bolts himself. And were he to attack in the hole, he would be at a distinct disadvantage—Jaffar was slightly larger than him, and with his double-bladed dagger techniques he would, as he had stated, be able to overpower and kill Mat easily. The spy might score a hit before he died, but it was unlikely he would be able to steal his enemy's life in the process.
"Fine then," he responded, his voice sounding bitter, grim. "We wait." Not a particularly comforting thought, the thief thought to himself flatly. It was rather like sitting in a hole with a sleeping viper; one was unsure of when it would strike, if it did at all. "When this blows over though..."
Silence from the assassin. Matthew shot him a glare, settled back against the dirt walls of their small hole, and waited, keeping a wary eye on his temporarily allied enemy.
-----
Pent frowned quietly from the safety of the cavern entrance, wrapping his cloak tightly about himself as he gazed out into the fringes of the roaring magical tempest. The storm had raised the temperature until an almost unbearable humidity had doused the land surrounding them for miles. Yet despite the uncomfortable conditions a chill ran up the Mage-General's spine, and he pulled the cloak tighter still.
Something was not right. He could feel it in the depths of his bones, and that instinctive feeling worried and frightened him.
Beside him, Louise sat quietly on a small boulder just inside the slim entrance to the cave, her bow laid out across her lap as she watched the whirling clouds outside. They had stretched closer for hours, her keen eyes had told her, but had come to an eventual halt perhaps a mile away from the closest of their cavern retreats. When measured against open ground, however, the distance seemed far too short, and the occasional lightning bolt still reached out and thudded into the ground uncomfortably close. It seemed impossible that anyone could survive the wrath of that magical summoning.
Nino, standing quietly just a few feet from Pent, gazed out into the storm as well, silently hoping that the impossible would become probable. She had remained in the same place since her rescue from the storm, never moving, barely stirring, watching the paths just beyond their caverns for signs of life...any life. The young spellcaster was desperate to catch a glimpse of that silent form gliding effortlessly down the path towards them, to see her best friend unharmed and safe, returning to her side just as he had promised he would. She could apologize then...she hadn't meant to leave him behind, and she would have gone back to help him through the storm if she could have...
There was a quiet crunch of the dead leaves that littered the cave floor behind her, and then a gentle hand rested on her shoulder. "You should sit down for a while, Nino," Lyn said softly. "It's been a very long day. The rest would do you good."
The former Fang member shook her head. "I should wait. I know Jaffar will be coming up the road any minute." She smiled tiredly at the long-haired Sacaean, and then returned her gaze once more to the outside world and the whirling storm.
Lyn bit her lip at the helpless tone in the girl's voice, shaking her head. "I'm not so sure, Nino," she murmured. The girl gave her a horrified look, and the noble of Caelin amended hastily, "I don't mean like that! The storm is brutal, Nino. I expect Jaffar probably found shelter like we did. He probably can't move at all, just like we're pinned down here."
The young spellcaster nodded, still looking worried. "I hope he's safe. I don't want him...to..."
"He'll just wait out the storm," Lyn responded encouragingly, patting the girl on the shoulder again. "Just like we're doing now. He'll be back soon enough. It should blow over any time now, right?"
"I wonder," murmured Pent from the cave entrance, still frowning speculatively.
Nino trembled slightly at his words. Lyndis, startled, looked over at the Etrurian, asking rather sharply, "What is that supposed to mean?"
The Count of Reglay's eyes slid to meet those of the lady of Caelin, and he stated flatly, "I am not entirely sure that this storm will end anytime soon."
Now Eliwood's head shot up, and he glanced at the silver-haired lord in surprise from his place against one of the cavern walls. "What is that supposed to mean? You estimated that this storm would die out within a few hours, since it's impossible to hold for long!" Beside him, also leaning against the wall, Hector's eyes narrowed in worry for his missing agent.
Pent looked grim. "That is what I estimated, Lord Eliwood," the mage agreed, "but it seems my guess was incorrect. It is nearly nightfall now—the storm has been going for close to seven hours."
The red-haired lord frowned. "How can you tell? It's been dark out there since the storm hit—and it only feels like a few hours have passed to me."
But the silver-haired man shook his head. "You would not understand," he answered quietly, "but anyone who has been attuned to the natural arts for even a small amount of time soon begins to understand its ebb and flow. I can feel that the night is coming, despite the interference of the storm." He glanced in Nino's direction quietly, and she too nodded in agreement.
"I see." The Pheraean nodded quietly, accepting the knowledge of his companions. "But then, if it has been going on so long, why do you think it will continue?"
"Because," the Etrurian lord responded, "even the most skilled of mages should not have been able to sustain this storm for more than a few hours. I myself doubt I could support such a massive summoning for longer than three and a half hours, even if I was fully rested and prepared. This storm, however, has lasted twice as long, and shows no signs of relenting." He frowned. "I fear that our enemy—undoubtedly the Black Fang—must have some sort of powerful magical aid or talisman at their disposal, to be able to sustain this tempest for so long."
"And you think they can continue this?" Hector questioned, leaping straight to the point with his usual display of impatience.
"It is very possible," Pent answered with a nod. His expression stated very clearly that he expected the worst.
Eliwood frowned, fingering the hilt of his rapier absently as he considered the implications of this new turn of events. "If it continues like this," he said softly, "then we will be unable to leave these shelters safely. It's too dangerous to go very far outside them."
There was a sudden, soft gasp of horror, and then Nino almost whispered, "but what...what about..." She bit her lip, trembling, and her eyes seemed to move against her will to the cavern's small entrance.
Lyn immediately moved to calm the poor girl. "Nothing has changed, Nino. No matter how long the storm lasts, I'm sure that he'll be fine."
"But what if it lasts for days?" The young spellcaster still looked horror-struck. "It's so dangerous...and so powerful..." she shivered unconsciously at the unnatural aura that the tempest presented, one that she felt so painfully clearly with her connections to the natural magics of the world. "Even with shelter, to be caught out there...he'll..." she seemed unable to speak the inevitable word, swallowing it instead, and added softly, "and Mr. Matthew too..."
Hector's eyes narrowed. "I'm not worried about Mat in the storm," he growled lowly. "I'm more worried about the fact that he's out there with a psychopathic killer--"
Nino flinched, and Lyn shot the Ostian a dirty look. "You have no tact whatsoever, Hector!" she hissed at him angrily.
The heavily armored man glared back. "I know you seem ready and willing to give him another chance, but all I'm saying is--"
"Enough!" Eliwood cut in sharply, and the lord and lady fell silent, glowering at each other but doing little else. "Enough," the Pheraean repeated, calmer this time. "There is absolutely no point arguing over this. It simply burns our energy and leaves us divided, so let us forget the matter entirely. There is little we can do for Matthew or Jaffar as long as they are out in the storm, so for now they will have to rely on their own resilience, and we shall have to look after ourselves." He glanced at Pent. "Is there any way to counter this storm? Any way at all?"
The Etrurian shook his head, his expression dark. "Not that I know of, and certainly not from here. Were we closer to the mage, I would suggest trying to eliminate him, or seal his magic, but from this distance not even I can dispel the storm completely. The best we can do is ward these shelters against damage magically and pray for the best."
"Then do so...whatever you can manage. Enlist the other magic users if you think they can help. I want to ensure the safety of all the members of this army present." Pent nodded quietly and, with a quick gesture to his wife, slid out of the cave to locate Erk, Canas and Lucius in the other shelters.
The cave became uncomfortably silent rather suddenly, despite the whipping wind and booming thunder outside of their temporary home. Yet despite the unnatural quiet, the thoughts and emotions of the cave's occupants seemed to crush heavily down upon all of them; Eliwood's concern and worry was rapidly catching, and the restless irritation between Lyndis and Hector still hovered sickeningly in the air, spreading its tension like poison.
Yet nothing within the cave could match Nino's feeling of utter fear and concern. She was afraid beyond measure for her best friend, trapped somewhere out in the storm...she knew he was a survivor, she was all too aware of his skill, and perhaps he would not ever truly need her help, but...the shadowy feeling of apprehension touched at her so painfully that not even the tormenting heat of the storm could melt the icy feeling in her heart.
Something was not right.
-----
Ages were spent in that dark speck of a hole, curled up and painfully cramped as the two strove to avoid touching each other. Complete avoidance was impossible, however, and both thief and assassin spent their hours in hiding staring across at the other, warily watching the allied enemy for even the slightest signs of danger our dissent.
Jaffar could tell almost instinctively that many hours had passed, and he estimated roughly that it should be close to nightfall. Time telling had never been a particularly difficult problem for him—sometimes he would spend hours lurking in the dark, awaiting his next target, and he had long since learned to judge the passage of hours with relative accuracy without the aid of the sun.
Yet spending that time was another matter entirely. Unable to leave the confines of the tiny shelter, scrutinized and watched carefully by his hateful cave-mate, Jaffar was able to do little but think, delving into introspection that he could not truthfully say he had ever experienced before.
Not that this was surprising. For the entirety of his life he had been taught only to obey orders, to attain the goal without question, and beyond planning for such encounters thinking had never been required for his profession. Indeed, Nergal had discouraged it, and so his Angel of Death had done exactly as told with never a second's pause.
But now he wondered.
Matthew had said there was nothing to him but killing. That death was death to him, and its cause mattered little. Was it true?
Yes. Undeniably true, the assassin knew all too well. He had been killing since he was a child; being the bearer of death came as naturally as breathing to him. No hands, no blades, could be quite so stained as his.
Was this all there was to him, then?
No. The Ostian spy had seemed to imply that Jaffar enjoyed murder. But the ex-Fang knew, after some contemplation, that this was wrong. He did not enjoy killing, just as he did not hate it. He felt nothing for it. He did not know how to feel; had never known, until he had met Nino.
So did he truly live to kill?
A difficult question. Very difficult. He struggled to find the answer, thinking carefully, deeply, laboring in his attempts to understand his own nature. To destroy, to steal life itself, was all that he knew, all that he had been trained and taught to know. Its opposing force, morality, he knew little of. It had never entered his violent education, and now the concept of such a thing eluded him, just has he barely understood the concept of feeling. Matthew—no, all of the army members—seemed to think that this feeling was inherent and instinctual, that he must be every representation of a monster to feel no remorse for lives taken, yet...how could he understand, any more than a child born blind could hope to understand sight? He was aware that they sensed something else that he could not, but that was all.
But after many long hours, turning the question over and over in his mind, he came to a slow realization, a quiet understanding. He did not live for killing, did not exist for murder; he lived for the goal, for the focus, for reaching that one point successfully. The two concepts had always overlapped in his life before, becoming so intertwined he had never learned to pull them apart, merely accepted his life as a killing instrument without complaint or question. His place had always been to bring an end to his master's enemies, to rain death down upon those who would interfere with the Fang and with Nergal, and until now he had always considered this exactly his existence without ever stepping back to look at why.
Now he considered.
His objectives had changed. He no longer served Nergal; so he was no longer his harbinger of death, the concealed blade that destroyed, only knew how to destroy. Indeed, he had no master now. Though he served the Lord Eliwood and the Lady Lyndis, it was simply because Nino traveled with them, and thus he did as well.
But if his goal changed...then so did his methods. He still possessed his skill as an assassin—there was none better than he in the arts of concealed killing. But it was unnecessary, it seemed, to use such skills in his strange, new life. Certainly, since he had left the Fang, he had not engaged in wholesale slaughter; he fought as directed in the minor skirmishes they had encountered since his joining, but he had not gone out of his way to kill for the sake of killing.
Had anything else changed, then? Was he still the killer that his cave-mate envisioned him to be, or had his objectives changed even farther than he had realized? The assassin wasn't sure. Far too much had altered itself in the past week since he had joined the army. His sudden decision to protect Nino, utterly the opposite of his previous life of sheer destruction, had caught even himself unawares—he was still not entirely sure where that choice had come from, was still coming from—and he was still grappling with this difficult concept of feeling.
He did not know where he was going, then. Jaffar worried about the uncertainties—he had always known his objectives before, ever since he was a child, and being unable to predict his own goals frightened him a little—but there was no turning back now. He had not survived this long by being a coward. He would move forward, remain brutally efficient in terms of his new goal as he searched for it...whatever it may be.
Across from him, Matthew watched his temporary shelter ally with wary curiosity, shifting his leg uncomfortably from where it had fallen asleep. Hours had passed now, completely uneventfully, and the Ostian had long since burned out his anger and rage. It was far too exhausting to uphold sheer hate for as long as they had been trapped in the miserable hole, and the spy had abandoned it in favor of a watchful tolerance that did not eat at his energy nearly so much.
He wondered, vaguely, what Jaffar was thinking. What went through the mind of a murderer? Did he feel remorse? Was he thinking about those that he had killed? Was he...was he thinking about what he'd done to Leila?
Matthew felt a pang of guilt in his heart as he thought of her. He should have convinced her to stop earlier...she'd devoted years to the spy network of the Ostian marquess, she could have retired from such a dangerous life far earlier, and if he had just...if she hadn't...maybe she...
Enough of that, the spy told himself sharply. Thinking such things wasn't going to bring her back, and as she herself would have told him, his line of work held no room for regrets. She never would have listened to him anyway, he knew. Free-spirited and intensely loyal to her country and her marquess, Leila would have laughed at his concern and continued as she always had. What he had to focus on now was surviving his current predicament.
It was then that he noticed the silence.
Their long and uneventful existence in their miserable speck of shelter had, so far, contained a background of dissonance from the storm. The boom of thunder above them had been continuous, the crack of lightning bolts smashing into the ground almighty and all-prevailing, the levels of the cacophony fluctuating with the nearness of their origins. The worst had been the blast so close to them—Matthew estimated a bare five yards away—that it had cast debris into the tiny entrance of their shelter, nearly completely hiding it from view from the outside. The thundering crash had been absolutely atrocious, jarring both men, forcing them to cover their ears or risk loosing their senses. The sounds of the storm had never stopped, and both thief and assassin had grown accustomed to the noise, ignoring it, letting it slide to the back of their minds.
But now there was...nothing, absolutely nothing. If he strained his ears, Matthew thought he could hear quiet rolls of thunder, but the sound was so dulled that it seemed far into the distance.
Jaffar shifted sightly across from him, his head raising almost invisibly in the darkness of their shelter to turn in the direction of the exit. Frowning, Mat glanced at the nearly-covered exit as well, muttering without thinking, "Is it over?"
The assassin was silent—not that Matthew cared—and so the Ostian spy shifted his cloak slightly and began to crawl towards the entrance to shift the large rocks blocking the way and investigate.
And froze, as the sounds of hoof beats and footfalls just above them drifted to his ears.
Startled, but immediately wary, Matthew flattened himself against his wall of the shelter to avoid the tricklings of torchlight that slipped through the few tiny cracks at the entrance of their small cave. He glanced back quickly at his companion, and Jaffar nodded in what little light was available, also tense and silent. An unspoken message passed between them, strangely easily in their shared professions of hiding in the shadows; wait first and stay hidden.
And so they waited.
The hoof beats seemed to trot past their location, circling around (the torchlight moved), over (scattering dirt and pebbles on the hidden ones' heads, though they moved not), past once more (the light returned), while the footfalls of an unmounted man followed. After a few moments, evidently in which the shelter of the hidden men of Eliwood's army remained unlocated, the movements stopped several yards away, and voices broke the silence.
"Nothin' here." A snort. "Stupid to look."
"Doesn't matter," the second voice replied flatly. "We were ordered to go on patrol by the commander, so we're patrolling."
"And tell me," the first voice sneered, "what the hell is goin' to get in through that? It's impossible. Like trying to walk through a wall."
"Walls can be broken."
"Worrywart!" Another snort from the first. "Anythin' that was out there is dead now. I'm tellin' you, there is nothin' here. Patrollin' like this is ridiculous. I'm tired from movin' all day in this thing, and my horse is too. I'm goin' back to rest!"
"We haven't finished!" the second voice, seemingly the unmounted man, said sharply. "We're supposed to patrol up to the radius, that's what Arellen ordered--"
"I don't see your man Arellen out patrolin' with us, do you?"
"No, but he has his duties--"
"Bah!" The first cut him off. "He ain't out here because there ain't a thing out here to find. I'm tired. It's good enough to me out here—I'm headin' back to rest." An amused chuckle. "Gotta be ready for the raid tomorrow, after all—if there's anythin' left of 'em when we get there!"
"You idiot..."
The voices and footfalls faded away, and the torchlight slowly melted from the cracks of the shelter, though a faded light—rather like dusk, it seemed—remained. Matthew, looking grim, exchanged glances once more with his present cave-mate, and Jaffar once again nodded silently. Both understood the implications.
It seemed, in an unfortunate turn of bad luck, that they were hidden beneath the very territory of Black Fang company that had released the terror of that unholy storm.
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And that wraps up chapter two. Things should start twisting next chapter soon enough!
I'm glad you all hate bolting as much as I do.
As usual, if you plan to leave a review, please make it substantial! I want to hear how I can improve the story or my writing skills just as much as I want to hear you tell me whether or not you liked it. Constructive criticism is a fantastic thing.
--Velkyn Karma
