"Do I know you?" Death inquires with a deep warning. His face held a wrath unintelligible in any language let into sight. How the inquiry is too close to the angel opposed to him, who stays stoic to the warn and calls to himself.
"I am Nathaniel," The winged guard begins, recognizing the demon cross better than legend. "I fought beside you at the gates of Eden. Would have died if it wasn't for your blades, but I am not troubled that you do not recall me. Your thoughts that day were on killing Nephilim."
Death's look furrows. When he meant only to decimate his own army, he had inadvertently saved the angels from demise in their entirety countless centuries previous. Thoughts to a battle they both silently recall, of whom this general held better than the others. Probably from his pompous head, Death scoffed in mental cue. Keeping his gaze forward to Nathaniel's rank still standing. For the strength he compassed is incorruptibility to become of the plague turning the land, leveling the city gated beyond reach. Even before Corruption, surviving the final nephilim war, the angel recovered from the lone cannibal creating havoc the field, guiding his infantry and hiding them to the walls. The remaining numbers, albeit dwindling, proved his worth of a mark in their history. Though, it was not how many he had saved when he was spared, It was his heart is has kept him immortal. "You're of the Hellguard," That very cannibal recalls.
"I was, but I guide the light now. And it's archon." The angel spoke higher when they became on his triumphs. Begetting a lone audience set to abandon for another few eons lets him cut to the chase for a moment more. "You will find both in the crystal spire. But something tells me you are not here to bask in my master's radiance."
Death almost chuckles as he takes his leave, "What gave that away?"
"Because you stray from it," Nathaniel corrects. "The Archons that way, Horseman."
"Perhaps I have other business." The wayward snaps with a dismissive wavering of his claws.
"Come and see then." Nathaniel offers, with better attention from the mask as he pulls a scroll in hand of thin air. "I'm looking for a friend, a lost soul. Where better to look than the land of the dead. ."
"What business do you have in that land of corpses?" Death asks of curiosity and the contract; Nathaniel makes a strange smirk, seeing a past murderer resume to stand. The guardian takes to a hunter tracing prey, catching the trudge to his lain trap. Knowing his own curiosities of another to know more secrets. If he would no longer move the subjects away like rumours both had already known.
"And what say you for the white city?" Nathaniel returns. Death ticks with his teeth, knowing he took the bait as he does with the scroll now in his possession, Crushing the ledger a bit in his grip. Raw tendrils, insipid to the being defeated many times, writhing still in a chasm of wrought sin the underworld turned him to become.
"Because I procured a soul of my own". The indirectness between the two ancient beings thought to have grown out of these childish interjections. The more experienced and expired one cuts the recollection short. Casting a wave of another summoning spell, cracking beneath the soil, separating them farther. Despair climbs effortlessly up from the mysterious emergence. Having pulled through, sputtering the ash trapped in his maw carried from the underworld, rising past the height of Nathaniel's wings. Even taller when Death admits something else upon his remount, readying to leave only a pinch of information to the angel he owes, "Not as far gone as the soul I will have to put out of it's misery for you. I hope that what your master holds will make the trip worth another. Your dying brethren in the human world."
Nathaniel reads the response with a look of furrowed sureness. "You should have known that the city is closed to them. Unable to return home."
"But mine could." The other, Death brought from his shoulder more roughly, Nathaniel taking his glare to care less for their suffering. The feeling of dissected details ensnaring from the mask's departure from him. Still sensing eyes at the nape of his neck, as if Death accidentally shared of how deeply into his distractions he truly remains in. To share Genevieve's existence, her whereabouts. Nevermind that he thought as he spoke, "I will speak to your archon, if the key presides."
Nathaniel still glares to the one en route of the path, confirming Death's assumption. He and his feral mount wishing to shrink into the distance as the feeling follows them down, mulling over one of the questions classified from him, or anyone. Nathaniel finally raising it with manners veiled in an equal unimpression, "Whatever holds possibilities that it correlates within the Balance."
Nathaniel halted the worn, cleated hooves to halt unexpectedly beyond the spire. Catching the stance atop thawing in one breath, an uncertain swallow down the neck of a being who could somehow lack such subtle movements. "Then I would be out of prophesy." Death turns again only slightly enough for the angel to recognize any uncertainty. A spectral statue forever shunt in his ways. So opposite from the wrath he had known. "Unless of course, it is."
The cold chill of fall might as well have been early winter. It all feels the same when one travels with the dead. Conversing of either companions or albeit, enemies all within Death's touch. He remains atop Despair, traversing over the Gaian roots as he still paved the spire. The barren spaces at the rider's broad shoulders held firm, being empty perches for his crow who is elsewhere on another mission, the amulet of his very own ever torments him in dead languages singed into constant recollection. Listening to the whirling insults and slurs like existence as ever. An abhorrent task as the others, clearing his path of monsters with his ever so slightly estranging focus.
For Absolom lives, a visit from the spectral Crowfather had confirmed the source of the plague. The message delivered to Death was of revenge from a monstrous foe he would have called his fifth among them, the first of their people now remained as the core of the disease. Rueing the newfound source of madness. Another fault to be undone with sacrifice, his own to be more exact. The Crowfather spoke of this uneasily in his unrest, to bring up his own mind of the delivered circumstance. 'It seems that your quest brings the circle of life round, grasped within it's midst. Truly unexpected, what say you of the circumstances?"
"I shall condemn him at the source, if Absolom is the heart as you explain it."
"And what after?"
"what of after?"
"Don't play daft. You are aware now that the Well of Souls is the means to it's end." Crowfather pointed in line with his murderer's tentative gaze. "What of the deal for the girl receiving safe passage to the citadel? So you think there's answer for her there, so you could leave her be? Do you think there's a chance?"
"Tread carefully, dead thing. I still smite the dead for a fee and my secrets. Do you want to die for a price?"
"My crows made use of the body and all that remains of me flies above you. Your every move marked along your ever straying path." The harrows blew, "And you know Dust has a sense for more than corpses, horseman."
"You're choosing your opinion of value in a loosely grasped prophesy."
"You should know that treading dimensions is not a hidden passage, I'm certain the citadel awaits you both, from your meddling! for your brother's sake! Who do you plan on salvaging amid this is becoming rather. . unclear."
"Vulgrim still speaks of her fondly, you know.", "And if the Lord of this land could speak, it would be like glass about your situation."
'But from what I heard she's a salacious dealmaker – with a mouth. And before you silence me!-" The blade already swept. It slices through the Sorcerer who held the last scroll logging his own salvation. The only proof to vouch the sightings allow such a bloodbath in his waque. The head falls through the smoke, never reaching the ground in the dissipation. Death dropped his scythes instead if shouting at the void the warlock now possessed. turning Death at the sky, to his voice. "it is not guilt in your heart horseman. Nor is there remorse, you wish such feelings would plight you. Why would it concern you if you've started showing your face. It must only be what pride you must take at such heresy."
"The prophecy continues to change, Crowfather!" Death said as if almost to lament the loss, quickening the voice back to shield it to the dead projection.
"She still isn't human let alone. I don't believe anything will really come of it." "Though, If you weren't busy with the mortal's foolish skin you what have seen it on her eyes."
Death could have bit back at the aberration. But the anger merely bubbled, defensiveness made no sense to have. Stopping at his eyes, clenching his fists at the sorcerer he had slain already for such insolence. The feeling was painful to him. It tightened his chest, pulling at the wounds he thought healed. But this feeling kept on like it was new.
"The corruption, she carries it as well. Well worth the silence. For such a fleeting spark."
With the failure to ask that final question, he crossed back through the tree. Taking his ransom from the Angel at the gates back to the Woodlands. As Death forged deeper into the thickening vengefulness becoming his sanity. The spire's paths mimicking in writhing and withering roads. The corrupted angels wandering farther from the base begin to lower inspire less warning of wandering from the trail. No and slay attempts to the hivemind seeming to take time and complication nearly as much as before. Budding modernity from absence at the maintained grounds of whomever remained of the plagues. The final shred of man seemed to at least entertain from the growth. Though not even his horse sputters, the closer thing to a conversationalist he had known in his travels, besides the girl with wrapped arms that held him at his waist as they crossed each dimension.
No matter, he thought.
He snaps the reigns with a graveling nudge out the back of his throat. Despair kicks his legs up to match the command and into the hollows they ride. Curving into traces of what was once a path, past a bank of land with a tight turn though thickets of frosted green disintegrated to save merely time. Minutes feeling of hours through such a begotten field of land he only wants to escape. He knew the way, but it betrayed him. Without Dust, he was getting lost. He didn't wish for the trail to mirror his thoughts. Especially to not admit that a constant need of his guide absent from the pierced nebula being their sky.
His only admittance to it, something else that concerned to what makes him tick. Is that he went against his own code for her. To second guess his own prophesy by testing if the Third Kingdom still lived. Checking for a pulse with his tongue when in hindsight, a simple hand at the neck would have equally proven true. Somehow, holding the human taught around his teeth fit better. It could not have possibly coerced his beliefs for it to be of love, prolonged pressure or hunger. Either be, it made him gain a heartbeat of his own, beneath the clasped shawl. Below the belts and a reach past the parceled blades, the growth beneath was all the proof he would need.
Destroy it with passing. Just ride and wait it out, as if it mockingly aches like a need at all. To have a use of the watchmen at any point beforehand, more valuable to him than what is required of his role in the worlds. Mere recollection fueling with the many tears he watched run down her cheeks, her songs of naivety. When they shared simple words, he still felt them even there under the nearing abyssal sky. The newfound weakness for the pheromones he inhaled in the short, cheap moment of freedom, burning worse for how "frightened" scents could layer a palate, as if Vulgrim rumored it to fruition. He was beginning to fall for the aromath, understanding the demon merchant's thirsts, and take the soul trader's advice.
"Despicable..." the shattered green embers cackled, even the smallest of crystals digged deep into his thoughts to carry voice, more than before. The pounding of hundreds, a mere handful of the souls encapsulated to be of the rider's mental health loomed from the messengers' lampshards like their nowein mental health. An extinguished end would meet them all in time, it would seem. The reaper's immortal fate is to put out the army imprisoned within him in the literal sense and truly rid the cosmos of Absolom. The well of souls repurposing the lantern's shards and what would be left of his purpose. Genevieve would be long lived to what will be left of the spire when that time comes. Death would not have to tell her a thing.
The dereliction so familiar to a gaze he knew last of her on Maker's soil call his sinewed bone gauntlets to glide. To loosen in the reigns. Cold as if to see himself, frozen from it. He didn't even realize he was falling forward in with Despair's slowing trot as the reigns fell from his master's palms. The steed halted and the saddler leans. The inertia pulls something under making the voice of the ancient hitch, cracking with the pressed leather. His lungs fill with winter, letting heat back to the air with one word of his actions, "Disgusting..." he heard in a whisper naught from the shrapnel glowing, if only he realized it came from behind his mask, through the steam beneath it.
All of the times his body printed from the blood of worlds would illicit this menial feeling, easily shaken off by mere sensibleness or negations more at hand. Without mind when he slaughtered armies, harming his own. But when a blade first touched down on human skin, one sputtering drop was enough to clear the blockage. Oozing in with a kindly voice asking, begging for help, wishing of any other ways to fulfill such a selfless act of salvation in her.
To with everything, he would still destroy anything that wished to grave her fragile ppath.
Being glass herself. Melding into a shape that fit around a statue of stone. Glowing with that warm day on her back, the nearing frozen contact of his chest and sprawling about in wondrous shapes as careless life, stiffening with the lost temperature. How his psyche gripped tightly to meld, as he stayed in balance with the pane as locked arms undid their clasps. It would not need time to know which would crack first. It would certainly not be him again, he wished with thoughts replayed and hands forged upward to a belt buckle with the final clasp. Knowing he was truly lying to himself then.
The first moment they met. A swing of castiron rot to the chin and holding the woman against the wall, searching for anything worth like a dimmoral village watch after lone lanterns in the night. Seeing her as one of those runaways without knowing how deep she could cut him not long after that encounter. A punishment for an olden sharp tongue thought to never have to learn again. Until he heard nothing but that memory, and its shatter. Inventing these new thoughts of an action dipped in human affluence to tether back the pieces. He had to recall the form, truly needing to be alone with it to do so.
He steps down off of the beast's back harness of slain skulls turned stone, wishes the hooves away for them to collapse beneath the trench of frozen ground deep enough to be another floor. Death drops himself down into that pocket, hearing Despair crumbling into the dirt surrounding and tremors deep into the now silent surface world. His buckles tremoring heavily as Harvester's halves pierce it upon their wielder's swift withdrawl. Cleaving them into the trunk of a sulkened willow dipping from atop the trench just above at an arms reach, in case of ambush.
The thickets of autumn froze over between the portals. Making the ragged cloth palming his scythes start to wave through the chilling lightlessness, along with the faltering bone kilt coverage now loose on his body. The bitter cold on his skin is so close to customary of the living albeit at all felt like a reward he would never earn. Imagining it is enough to prove cover over the fighting life he still considers invadable serenity, so dissonant from his favour. Or Genevieve's.
Moreso of a haunting than a distant secret. For a ghost of what once was in a world gone for centuries, her needs of protection expensive. And when he returns she would be harder to break as she would be to speak to. Concerned that a side of himself did not require that need. Aversely wishing to see her suffer like a tortured ghost she presumed herself to be on that first day.
How the thoughts of it couldn't hurt, even if she presently could slash his sight to shreds. To scorn himself for the exploration enough, the happenings addictive like a sin, a swear to it's normalcy worse than an oath each event. And his bonds that caged him could collapse under it all. Prophesized to endure this throughout his tale. To bond in with life, to have it end with nothing. An experimental failure already so controversial, any clergy would gain upon their transgression. To make it worse, the rumours of their sightings seed. His memory having the proof first hand. So detrimental to his brother's trial. The risk of hiding them only for these times of relapse, another new word founded from third kingdom ways.
It was not the first time he caved into unsheathing. It certainly would not be his last to slowly press down through the layers as he envisions. Death's memories of his encounters with her body so harsh and vivid, they begin to replace his surroundings. He needed to recall the sun's reflection casting off of her hair, her back. Legs that begin above his hips wrap his head around until the spire beyond, the begotten wind and snow, everything that it clung to amissed to the siren planted in the middle of nothingness. Splaying herself downward to the source of both of their troubles, with her head bobbing just there.
Below are not his hands, they're her. And through her thighs around his muzzled skull, impulsive chuckles reverberated. Ones she would make even in the darkest of times. She's muffled, his thoughts of her grin melding into the shape to make such a sound. It made him want to sink his teeth past dull snapping under the skin.
The mask doesn't match the air anymore and inadvertently blocks any gusts against the chasm hidden away by delusive spirits. Actually gaining a mist underneath one who breathed a cold breath. It was what feigned in his head that sweltered, budding only enough to imagine suffocation. Persuading himself that becoming a perfect throne for a gorgon would not truly be a hazardous fate. Whining as she pulls herself upright, and twists herself behind just enough for him to look at her, she glowed in a sun absent in the estranged void. Far enough for the underside of two rouge spots that off-point to the hazing light. Slightly turned in, dewy pursed lip coaxed by a dull fang that could barely puncture let alone ensnare. It was all to see, even in the blur of nothingness, he felt that pleasure once more. A snooze on prophesy, a moment to bow his head. Nestling into her view gone and drowned into the flesh before his face. In the distance of this visage impended, yet distant mewl that kept on amid an impending roar. He pieces the barks and snarls of the thousands in mariness set of war. Banging against the crystal walls, demanding him to wake up. Taking that whole army to attempt in bringing him back.
Though it caged, maddening army forged, his abberition was louder, brighter and larger amid the claws to return and Death could not hear them anymore. Only her soft mouth manifesting the shapes that drown an armies' cries. Until her face tenses as well. Finally turning her head back, tilting golden coiled hair onto her creator's muzzle, not as deadly as his own suffocation. Amid the shouts they muffled again as she dipped her body back down to his cock. Ensuring that the coil breaks. A blacked out view in his tightening eyes could fool to be a crook in his neck. Shouts of the countless in the darkness so narcissistically. And in that darkness was guilt. Spilling into it, her strangled voice lulling from the climax, still shrill above the shouts of an entire wiped out side of the war. Pulling him in instead.
He cannot even utter a moan when he does.
The world came back in static and pulses. He presses his finger to his temple as if to refocus the blue manually, doing nothing. An eye peeks down. The sins taking route down the bow under the shaft, still pulsing solid streaks into the snow, but failing to melt through. Death still moved his hand to a slower halt like it could not be over. it was, the static fades in the waves of her warmth one leg at a time. His vision sharpens to the world in the loss, not an entity in sight, only whispers, and snarls of the fleeting time.
If his heart still pulsed in the same it would have raced. Wringing the last of the static out to the dry air. He agrees with the aggrieved, wailing soldiers. The slick getting on his hands.
"This is madness."
He could have sworn the Makers grounds grew a bit closer to the Abyss. The land with every inch to the made it all feel evermore temporary. Beside him is Thane, who would usually kill time by sharpening a collection of tools before jousting them at his few students. He does not skip his routine, not even for company being Death himself, returned foresakened to back the runt of the handful of passerbys by far in the past millennia.
"How is she then?" The demon halved asks.
"Sleeping off another night of etiquette practice. Practicing curtsies without tipping any. " Thane says sarcastically, finishing up an axe for the armory ,"You have as much an idea as l."
"Do you think she's ready?" Thane took the response with another twist in his look. A pause in the gurney's flaring sparks.
"Genna's done what she can with me!" He raises his eyebrows with his voice without gandering from his work, "And has survived, minding, it was the condition as promised."
"That will be the only condition."
"Not to worry, it is." Thane teased less than smoothly, finally turning his large head to eye level. "I didn't mark the face you like so much."
"Don't push me." The glare between sedentary and full differed in size or stature to compare. Thane noted the defense, as if there was something peculiarly sealed.
"Ah, you'd know if I was doin' at." Thane heeds to acting with a shrug to the reluctantly followed command. "But she's a solid sleeper that one, I suspect it might be purposeful but nonetheless, She is usually is a bit late to work."
There was silence then. Until the mountaintops beyond the ruins began to fade into a rolling fog down rivers of the crumbling outskirts, creasing the Eidards immortalized face. The stomped out eyes and crown flowed down about the bridge and below, still there was a point where he looked beyond to the damages as well. Noticing the absence, brimming the tension.
Thane chose not to pass a second look to any visitors, nor the overflowing statue in the mountain. Though, at least composure began to crease when Karn approached the two from the shadowy gallows of the stone. Bringing to light that the subject of their pact was now truly missing.
"I shouldn't need to waste my breath on this matter, the one time the short one biting at your ankles is absent." Karn's eyes rose to Thane's huff of an mockingly authoritative question. Then scrunches back as they caught Death narrowing ones sorely out of peripheral below him. " Arrive at the ruins?"
"Aye—." Karn drawled with a bit of grin. Taking an optimistic hand to his temple, with the rumbling abyssal storms falling recently, he figured off-putting any moods would be an errand of fools. He tells them what he had seen, "I feared I had missed the farewell.. I saw small steps printed in the turned soil out her room. I looked 'in all that was left were burned in marks out of the door, and the walls." He chose to leave the tree out of his description. His gift to a friend. Marked with a hand of hot charcoal, stamped with a strange resonation, that it was accidental like the rest of the room. So sporadic, anxiety ridden.
Death scrunched an eyebrow, tilts his head back to step in with an attentive check and stare. "Is it usual to take it upon yourself to find her room?" He asked, leaving Karn to not answer to the time of question right away. It could have registered as agastedness, but the way that Death's mind would wander to such a assumption made Karn concern to why.
"She is your ward." Karn emphasized in a chummy yet, scapegoated comment rather than sound insulting. "She began wandering much more from the forge before your return, never hurt, not badly from traveling beyond the walls." Death locked on the detail, and could tell that Karn had never pulled her out of a pool of her own blood. Finding her tortured or utterly destroyed as Death had. How gruesomely he wanted to tell him it was like. The opposite of this world then he would know what her protection meant to him. "Death, I only'd found the room to see her is safe within it."
Death insults the giant, "To think I would have figured you've surpassed that stage of any year to consider an age of courtship." flicked his gauntlet in the direction of the pet name, the giant held back only with a difference of wisdom on the line. "What could you possibly confound in such a gasketed bëirn?"
"To see the fires calm themselves, Pale One." The pup outspoke, more youthful than what was taught among their previous kin. It bubbled a bit in the reaper's eyes, only a drop of rage but the crowbearer ceased, "Or did they never falter in your presence?"
"Useless Pup." Death shot sharp to the Maker, left confused behind the blank, filled in with Thane's pointing hand and obscuring the glare from conducting the sparks of a brawl. "Perish the thought that I need to."
"Look there." Obscured of eachother, the two follow up the storm hand belonging to Thane's voice, who was so silent up until now. His arm and axe pointing to the rolling sky. Only answering to an adversarial call coming from overhead. Turning to slivers, the eyes lock to Death's tracker out in the horizon, the crow flapping hurriedly out of the tallest tree in the mountain and soaring down to reunite with him. Impatience falls next when he sees that Dust is unaccompanied. A harsh glimmer in the distance filled his claws. As he got closer, Thane begins to share a look similarly disbanding. "Does your bird usually make that much noise when you reunite?"
"No," Death notes, "Not usually."
The rain turned foggy, making the sky seem closer to ground than the abyss could reach. It would have deterred her own from travel, with what shriveling humanity she had left compared to ageless giants made her figure this mattered less. She got ready so slow and distracted by her thoughts, she barely processed when she was actually dressed into her gear. Such menial tactics she knew well in your copes with trauma to time lapse and get over their sources. Making her forget to eat, but finding time in the rains in search for herbs, to burn them in later sessions. Using this to take extra time to help snuff out the flames of silent anger in a walk outside of the crumbling walls. Yet neither let up and she kept going. Now, having lost herself north of the paths to the forge's cliffsides, leaning to her grip on a slick rock quaked open by a Construct born anew. Trying to shun the twists terraforming her guts worse than if they were butterflies. To her discomfort, the unsteady slopes smoothen particularly more unfair with Tri-Stone's weather and has to lean on the rock. The next one down a few notable, unsurvivable metres. In despite of the mortal's bearings, she stays rather sound. Comfortable with the dangers with a view so high up. Allowing herself the grip against the whetstone let alone her thoughts. To pack her things and leave again, did she even want to be in peace if the travels were unending? She had this time to breathe and it feels like she was robbed of the air around her once again. Humidity fills her chest heavy like the growing tar planted in her heart by the forthcomings who gave her this chance, binding Vulgrim's wager to the other side. Cancerously bound together with the newfound growth of corruption in between. The stone seeming so much larger than what she saw in her visons, staying all under a watcher's rogue eye in constant view. She felt heavy from the enormous diamond like piece over her sternum in a similar fashion. Taking the weight into her hand, wanting it to be empty, to make herself useless of her tribulation in the balance. It was her key of value, a price tag, a tracker, a leech to a useless host's extremities. Her only leg in being a lascivious soul of sin known to so many demons in the paths she crossed in Death. Embedding irrevocably like the piece she carries in her cleated hand. Pulling the piece of glass just before the cliff, self sufficiency keeping itself dry amid the morning rain. Like her own skin it had seemed.
She wondered where the dry fires stemmed from. Something left lost with the passing suns, intervals expendably endless with what the hatreds wrought? Being the last piece of that world so far gone, They felt like her own and all they had left was she. The pressure with the thoughts of a physical obsession being in her memory to what plagues her head. For a being who could not even understand the simple commands themselves, the rest of him fell in so naturally. He had done that before: sparking familiarity among their species and evolution. more than what she had gotten to feel but a taste so bad it could have torn a hole through hell.
Being so different, not even simply, a literal weapon at birth. Privileged to skipping the processes and burdens to grow into a body, having been printed to a premelded purpose seeming so far off to her. Surely holding back would have been too much to ask, mocking the idea. Something too much to want for a literal entity that seemed so endless in mystery. But it was Death, a being of change, if name could tell her future, to forsee what remains of such a little life. A flicker lasting only a moment with him in his eternal existence. And knowing the smoke that erodes once would ever know. A being, someone on the other side that could let ypou know how it all ends.
If at only she woke up sooner, but he carries a chance to find out what happened herself. And until then, Was it so wrong to want to know what eternity was like?
"Or W a s. I t. N o t. h. ?" A dark voice in her head sounded. Something so simple enough to hear and understand so blindly. Gaslit to the idea of a lost wanderer just caught out of view. To bring the attention back to her with another ball of corruptive fire as a homing beacon to the first. Like she was not any different. Her core, her hands balled up all over again. The light of hot flames shown. An attempt to contain it falters miserably. Keeping control alone and unsupervised was more like smoldering cauldrons filled with molten steel. It was so much, sore ducts for her tears manage on even still, dripping thick as oil. It stemmed the fire, and she wants to burn everything in sight.
There was only a thought that spoke once, ". . u?" And she lost it all.
It made a scream that pierced the storm, even when the chain leaves her hand. "I DON'T EVEN WANT THIS ANYMORE!"
As the arm vaults forward. The chain glistens with the shuddering lightning. Vanishes with the rumble of thunder, beyond the cliff.
Her hands empty, Genevieve only heard the rain. She had to be calm if she would have to manage her long climb down. To cool down with the quieting mountain, at least for a moment and to not start anymore mud from sliding from under her. Starting to shiver even in the fur lining, she first took the hint and followed the long way to the path. The only real bird she had seen becoming audible amid the storms. Choosing to follow the caw until Dust appeared out of the smaug. Flying in circles, she put the pieces together of his unrest, inferencing the source was just over the edge. from catching the of the eroding rock that murmured beyond the cliff side had grown more cataclysmic failing in getting the stillness that she wanted.
Neither did she wish to see the claws from over the bend instead. Fingers dead plum, tethered over and soiled with digging into the sopping twig and charcoal to pull a greater light from underneath it. The light bubbles over with the erosion, the amulet rises through the sputtering hiss to an intrusive, very familiar gauntlet. The dissimilar platings warped further from the last time she met them in dreams months over. Which in the case of these, particularly looked to be melting. She grows nearer to the edge and with both hands, pulls until the engraved arm carved by bludgeoned swords appears overtop, knowing it signified angels. Digging her scuffing boots into the mud, the new cleatings drag and anchor the rest of the figure over the bend of solid rock.
Over the cliff came the tusked shield she had slipped her hand under all those weeks before. It was darker from rehydrating the unpolished bone, the embers within them stayed alight through the flattened wet hair. barely put out by the twisted look away from her. Death looked pissed, and agitated, along with something else. It was not a look of anger, it was a mixture of pain
She blinks at it, then rushes to get the amulet out of the deforming metal from burning him any worse, pushing nails first under the soldering necklace to tear it out of the stickened metal. The scratch it makes when she grabs hold is when he finally looks up at her. As if he too remarks the changes, the loss of plumage of fabric about her peppered skin revealing new places he rueingly had become familiar with, and unspokenly memorized. The hair he knew was gone, her face of full view and new scars greeted him between the waves of wind. Like her first one splitting a left brow, the carve having grown more faded under such a shadowy cheek. Even in the clouded rain, her eyes shimmered in so many stars as did her skin. Endless speckles on a curving wax canvas, something death found useful in her travels..
They capture a new memory for her when her long traveled warden spoke. Speaking with only a crack from his exposed knuckles. The burning flesh wafts over with each undoing of chain. "As if this was what makes you difficult to find." And didn't deserve a word.
Not after what she endured. The lack of words thereof that day was already too much for what actions lain. What kept her trapped every night thereafter. Months of poison in a festering heart, and he only decides now it's fine to suck out such poison. Mentally kicking herself to not find the time to let go of his hand, lest look back up again. "When I was the one to tell you to leave, it's my problem rather than yours." The siren grouses, concentrating again lest of all sudden response back a bit too quickly. The final loop around his claws, impulsively tears out each one as to get just a wince out of the being, but even then, no falter. Death is still used to the small jabs, it's peculiar, Gen couldn't read of why.
For a moment, he tilts his head with a quizzical look that makes him forget that his hand was searing. And shook it off just as quick as it showed as the burning stops. He no longer kneels, taking the rest with his own strength and greater size to pull himself over the slick ground. Making the girl simply trying to help fall into the dirt, rolling back into the soil and looking to need assistance herself. The Nephilim doesn't oblige right away. Instead he strays cooly from the clearing, seeming as if the rapid smoking out arm was delusion. Something similar Gen had done with the lack of guilt dismissed and it alarmed her of how he harnessed the same method. To have learned that from her as well.
Death tossed the chain into the pleats garnering her lap. He sighs, pulling the gauntlet to take the last of the chains now in the girls grasp again, the glass bulb neckbraces intact. Already settling away the thin line of welding it left. "I am surprised at the least, to see you still together in one piece."
Lies, she bartered gathering herself up from the mud, ruffling wet tousles and realigning up to the overcasted Death. Counted it to be conversation better than no words shared. To bide that time, she spoke back with a jinxing grin with the least bit of wickedness. Almost tripping her step to get a stance on the slope of rock, "I didn't catch you. Usually out at this time…" She snipped with her off stature to the weather, shifted in as if to shake off the white lie she gives and as if like karma, the ground got softer as she gave it, still smiling. "I spend mornings catching up on aim practice, clears the air, besides. . It's not like I knew you were here."
She could not see the surprise in his eyes, and did not hear it when the ground beneath them sunk, exposing all sorts of roots and boulders down the mountain. sighs, and goes in to grab the girl heavy with her half truths. "It's going to have to be the long way down."
"I can make it myself," was what she wanted to say, but she grew tired, hastened even. She couldn't find anything useful for the trip through a labyrinth of treacherous mountain the exchange of words with the horseman that distempted her greatly. Death outstretches an arm of muddened sand and soot, The tree did so much for levy as it slid slowly with the rest of the cliff. The arms rooted with destruction she's seen showered in blood a hundred times over. They were once stained with hers.
Sliding just to grab one such extremity. It pulls her in with an upright tug and a wince to the impending collision. She wanted it to feel like a wall of bone. But taking the other hand to get below his shoulder curbs the blow to his sternum at her hip. feeling cold flesh against the linens along her collar. Which stress as she inhales, ensuring the ensnared that life severing claws have as equal ability to hold a pocket behind the neck of begotten young, with the discrepancy of care within the grip along her frame and she wraps her legs securely. Below with cleats that latch tight against the false Earth it climbed to reach, already in early burial stages. To save time for latter stages. And to reach the fossilized roots as he takes the girl held to merely positioning her to climb, hiking up a bare leg, pulling her forearms in. She took her chance this time, allowing him to angle her comfortably enough with precise care. Knowing it enough to look past Death's rugged condition. Wrapping her arms around him and attempting comfort amid it all grabbing the one carcasses of the demons that crossed. Fossilized to wall, and embedded through a millennium of cauldron fire. Gauntlets latched in the eyes and ribcaged vessels something ,Genevieve was never cold now she doesn't shiver.
Watching the platform she watched her merely cry on be washed away with the storm. Not daring to let eyes follow it to fog it vanished in.
"You're confounding." Death husks, relighting her eyes. A dreary flame lowering them, her split brow.
"I don't follow." She says at his ear in the grinding halt a couple of stories down already. Trying her best not to rest too closely past relics tethered by his hair, so sleek with soil.
"You abandon posts, You act so sheepish and lie. Why are you already starting this avoidance again?" He didn't worry of the movements or save time for bashfulness as he takes the girl held to merely positioning her to climb, even as it was careful and precise. Far more careful that he was dirtying anything, he showed mere, basic, primal concern. "Whatever happened, I'm sure there will be something we can aide—"
"I would love to catch up on it. If- that's what you're asking?" She chimes, with the sound of that smile that shook, the off one Death noted before, silently nodded to it. Short to it's sweetness. As if the grapple to another ledge of rooted decay affirmed such an action. Genevieve had not, and stifles the returning fog supposed air that she sorely missed from his back. Burnt moss, would he just stay still to talk like this? "Was only training and working with giants. I nearly died at both positions, so I've learned some meditations."
I had dreams of being eaten alive." Genevieve could recall, her real voice creasing in this time." Probably since work has nearly killed me every day and when I made mistakes, I nearly killed everyone! That about cover the honesty bit?"
The overcrowding storm made a shadow of darkness that made his expressions amid the onlanding cast of quiet. Aside from the glare, dimmed orange so dark, as if it looked to spoil to a murkened green as the moss that seemed at plague that once spread the walls of the mountain. Another sigh breaks his silence and momentarily his eye contact. "Your kind is taught. It's such a grueling process." Death gritted calmly, tossing them both to another ledge hooked beneath. "but It could not have possibly been as difficult as you describe it. From what I had heard, you excelled."
"I practiced through mountain men and hell dogs for months!" She broke into honesty at the disbelief she hears. motioned, continuing about her life, "I don't get many chances to exactly fail when your world's idea of success are predecisive close calls!" It didn't work, it was strange how these feelings mixed with someone who acted so mildly alive. A lack of blinks, the dead silence that seem to hold breath. "Sure it seems lucky, that is not something a. . . Normal human can do." When he breaks the silence she wants to escape again. I still don't know what I am. .
"Yet you saw me come for you and you run?"
"I would have turned back-" No words of it came out again, heart compressed with her chest, the admittance staying. "For what that's worth, I only hope I survive well enough." She spoke in real time to the source of her own madness. "Should I be lined up to die next?"
Genevieve heard his grin, yet sees only sign of it in his eyes, krinkled to the mud turned dirt dusted out to his temples. A bit agahsted at such a question. His stranged voice humoring it nonetheless, "That is what I am for, should the time arise. And by how I see it, you will not. So much as you keep this self doubt out of my sights."
This back and forth, like a switch of silence to honesty. She already didn't hold for long after that comment. The rumbles from the mountain did warn with each clasp down. The grappleable cleats on cinder block slowly slipping through the heavy rain. Still choosing to outspeak at the second his foot uncharacteristically slips in the sleekening stone. And like his breath she catches her own until he grabs the rock that failed his before. The air comes back to her, even if Death's unsteadiness might signal it too soon. "But I still can't trust that. ." The jagged nails gain composure quickly on another rock and a bit of footing. A spine so jagged she forgets to breathe once more when it hooks her own ribcage. Genevieve breathes in through tight eyes. "Last time I had trusted you with that, you failed me!" Death grabbed the ledge, avoiding demise for the third time within current conversation. back at his carryon's sinking heart, turned with a look meaning to throw her. Even with hidden sharp teeth baring,
"The mistake." He grouses. Eyes red and blaring down. Unable to see the rock slowly coming loose above them, a crackle in twigs would have been the only signal. "Albeit my own, is yours in the same."
"Which is why you suck!" Death didn't look back again, Not daring to show a look wanting to drop her, if not wanting to avoid the boulder falling silently in the rain this time. Seeing if her kind could land on their feet from such high ground as they hissed and clawed for such attention, or if that only slimmed down to merely their housecats. Imagining the girl's hissing sounded similar if he had not survived staring back at her, as if to check if she even noticed the geodes that crumbled floors lbeneath them. There would have been nothing, lost to the altitude' mist. "You weren't my equal then, you tried to be, but I suppose I don't get to change my choices on a simple shag—"
And Death broke eye contact, and laughed, and if they faced each other it would have been there in her face.
What is she trying to be? A partner, at a level anywhere close? was not like a mentor and prowess anymore. Any smidge of that erased. She had to be something else, that is true and of all times she decides it now?
She felt like baggage morelike, now with a use. Truly a reward, she mimicked.
He broke the switch on honesty. To blame equal part of the act and make her realize her assumptions and chose to bare them back to his ear.
"You had a choice to come back." She hissed once more."
"Genevieve, you're prophesised, You could be proof in my brother's trail. You have at least purpose at all not satisfactory?'
"You didn't have to leave your tracker of a bird to watch me."
"There isn't much of a choice now, spoken even from you." "I don't need your forgiveness on whatever bonds you fall through. What is done is done."
"Then don't kiss me—" She hissed again, buries her head in her shoulder as his own bladed the sheetrock like styraphoam or lighter. His knuckles outstretching stern limbs, enough to shield tons. "Don't lure me into the fucking darkness the way you did!
"Nevermind!" it began to grow cold in the sting, Moreso from landing how she had on Despair, spawning gout from below the wreckage, ricochets of the hatch and mountainslide sputter thankfully away as the two landed, Dropping down into the back of the seat. More luckily, the side that lacked all of the spikes. "When you're out of my hands. And Maybe then you could oversee your own regrets."
She was silent the rest of the ride. And it's journey lacked haste. In enemies. Signs of the corruption being held back by survivors. And upheld well. Leaving only ghosts of unwon souls. The wisps follow Despair on the trotting path. Melding to the aura when they would get close. After hours of watching them tether, the process of getting used to horseback, the cramped space at her warden's chest. Was silent. With a stare vacant of her understanding, attention even still. Signs of lasting another long while, she feared. Especially nearing the castle, a bright light emulating from the top of the wide stone steps. And unmistakably humanoid, winged and weapon clad waited at the top they source of the light. Hints of unfiltered daylight flushing out his skin, begotten hints of green. Gazing into a pool with palms at the end of his claymore. Stabbed at the foot of the reflecting pool. Poised away from the two, Death watched as well, seeing the demons of the underworld , the destroyer thwarted by War, before his imprisonment.
His voice hoarse with the transgressions of the balance before him. "I see you, horseman. What you have done. Your pasts beyond. Did you believe you lived in fortune then or has rutting on angelic soil mistaken you?." A rough beginning. The introduction merely insultive and vague to the smallest one hidden upon the horse. The one after her, an absolute wall. Strangely unmoving again.
"That… Really isn't your business." Genevieve butted in popping out of metallic hood. The angel turned his head a bit within his resonation. Ganders the gloves protecting the little eyes that cast no light. It was there on his horse, in his lap.
"No it isn't." Absolom murkened. Nonetheless infuriated, disgusted, to Death's stonewall of a look. "Though when it is right outside city gates. .It becomes so."
"Where is the Key, Absolom?" These otherworldly types did seem too know too much of each other on first. So much appeal to keep as worlds collapsed around them. But didn't know the real reason of the confusion. Looking at Genevieve, more specifically like a source of the disease.
"The Corruption has spread far too much and I cannot allow you to spread it past the gates.. "You will have to cut through the Earth to do so."
No recollection, rehearing it again like how everyone was assured her again and again. That it was fine to not know. To not have been there. "What does he mean?"
Death hisses behind her. Still unmentionatuve silence. No recollection to answer only He did try telling her. Now she would have to see it for herself.
"Not even a single thing about you either, horseman. But know this . ."
"What you will see down there horseman, even you, will damn the name of War."
