Sunlight and shadows moved over the forest floor in shifting patterns. The golden leaves of the trees swayed in the lightest breeze, breathing its way over the wooded landscape. There were clouds in the sky playing cat-and-mouse with the sun, adding to the changing of the shadows and light through the trees. There was a soft silence that pervaded the area. Most animals and birds were in other parts of the eternally vibrant forest, having no reason to come this way for the time being.

In a very small patch of clearing, Rhovin stood absolutely still, his bow in hand, a blunt shaft already nocked and ready to fire, eyes and ears alert to every sound, every change on the air, every shift in the light...

She was close. Very close.

His sharp ears had caught how her heartbeat had jumped up a pace as he had neared, and how she had immediately started slowing it down, to a more relaxed, almost sleepy-sounding rhythm.

Very good...

She had responded too quickly to make anyone think they were really losing her trail, however, and she didn't appear to be skilled enough to still her heart completely, as a ranger could if they wanted to mimic the stillness of death.

... But not good enough.

He rapidly turned to his left and fired, blunted end of an arrow that was meant for nothing more deadly than target practice sinking a few inches into a soft spot in the thick bark of a tree, a few chips of it flying away on impact.

Nothing moved. The clouds pulled away from the sun, but everything else stayed exactly as it was.

For only the scarcest moment, Rhovin considered the near-impossible notion that he might have made a mistake, but this idea was quickly contradicted, as a soft floral scent not of this world was brought to him from the direction that he had aimed for by a change in the breeze. Dreaming Glory. Aranya's favorite. No mistake, she was right there, invisible to ordinary sight. Why hadn't she moved?

"Whatever happens," she had told him, before they began this, "whatever you think might happen, do not hesitate." She had smiled in that sly way of hers, yet somehow made a halfway-good attempt at being reassuring, "Just trust me."

Rhovin narrowed his eyes. Just how far did she expect him to go in this game of "hide-and-seek?"

He listened as her carefully quiet breath and her heartbeat normalized from their consciously slowed pace. She would soon figure out a next step to eluding him, if she thought that her position was unthreatened. Rhovin nocked another arrow, as blunt as the last.

You'd better know what you're doing.

He fired, directly at where he supposed the mage stood, cloaked from all eyes.

The shaft burst into flames just as it neared the tree, smoldering pieces of it falling ineffectually to the ground.

The air rippled, and in the blink of eye Aranya was running right past him, smile on her face. Rhovin blinked, fought the impulse to do a double-take, and ran after her.

This was her idea of a game. She could play cards, sit in on a drinking game, and swap conversation like any other woman, but in her mind those were things to relax with, not the beginning and end of what real fun could be. Skydiving from a floating island in the Nether, blinking from sandbar to sandbar across pits of fire and fel, holding on tight to a dragon as they swooped and dove in aerial ballet - things like that were closer to the upper end of what her scale of fun was.

He was gaining on her quickly, regardless of her momentary head start. He was nearly on her heels. She blinked ahead of him and ducked into a shadow behind a tree, just as the clouds hid the sun once again. As Rhovin rounded the tree that Aranya had made a dash for, he saw four of her running off in different directions. His brow furrowed.

A quick scan of the ground told him what he wanted to know. The depressions in the moss of the forest floor never had any regular pattern unless something had recently tread over it. Three such depressions lined up, evenly spaced, aligned with the direction that one of the four 'Aranyas' had taken. Crouching down for a closer look at them revealed the deeper parts of them to be slanted into a kind of U-shape, reminiscent of boot heels. Rhovin smirked, stalking off a few degrees just downwind of the direction that they lead to.

Aranya kept going until her senses told her that there was nothing pursuing her, but her thinking mind knew better. Typically when she conjured her mirrors for Rhovin to direct his attention to, it was for a very different sort of pastime, but the end would be the same: something - however subtle it could be - would have him figuring out soon enough which one was really her, and which were only ephemeral constructs of magic that walked, talked, and threw ice-packed snowballs in near-perfect likeness of her.

She slowed to a walking pace, but didn't stop altogether. Her fel-lit eyes were bright and her heart thumped hard in her chest, but it was less from the burst of running and more from the exhilaration. This was fun. Hunting was an enjoyment of its own, whether seeking a meal or burning down some Amani, but eluding a worthy opponent? Now that was another level of reward altogether, and she loved it.

But where to go from here?

From her surroundings, and the sound of water that reached her ears, the mage could only surmise that she must have been quite close to Lake Elrendar's northern distributary, which emptied from the lake over the falls and then flowed westward to terminate in a broadly forked estuary, overlooked by the anchorage and the groves surrounding the West Sanctum. In her position, this was not a bad thing to be near. She could certainly make use of it for an interesting and hopefully unexpected way to make a getaway, if needed. Green eyes atwinkle at the thoughts that unfolded in her mind, she made for the water.

A sudden sound behind her had her momentarily frozen in her tracks.

Not even turning around to see what might have made the noise, Aranya quickly cast the spell of invisibility with a word under her breath and headed for the nearest cluster of brush to hide in, fading from appearance completely once she was lying flat on the ground.

Her breaths were slow, measured, and very quiet. Utterly silent to ears that weren't elven. She lay barely moving. The only thing that disturbed the stillness of her hiding place was the breeze picking up, blowing the clouds away from the sun once again and lightly rustling the leaves of the brush. It carried the cool, damp scent of the river to her... and the stale, decaying smell of the Dead Scar just underneath that.

Aranya turned her face away from the wind, pushing away the flash of sullenness that the faint odor provoked in her and embracing clarity and calm instead. Eyes and ears alert, still lying as close to the ground as she could, she inched ever-so-cautiously to where she could peer through the twigs and have a better view of anything that might be in the area with her.

Without warning, pain lanced through her upper arm, as a blunt-tipped arrow flew down into the brush from above her and raked across the side of her skin, though ultimately it pierced only the ground. Aranya hissed and clapped her other hand over the rough graze. Her invisibility dissipated, and she blinked out of the brush, still sprawled on the ground.

Rhovin dropped down from out of a tree, landing in a crouch on the ground in front of the woman. She had unintentionally blinked right into his direction. Her mind had barely half an instant to realize that he must have been the one to make the distracting noise that she had heard, watching and waiting for his chance out-play her the whole time - when he sprang at her, like a wild lynx. Aranya used the momentum of his forward movement against him, grabbing his shoulders and hooking one of her legs over his, turning her body to get him to be the one that ended up flat on the ground. His natural strength and speed quite surpassed hers, however, and with little effort he rolled them both over and had her pinned underneath him. Aranya tried to lift up at the torso from where she was lying on her back, but was stunned still, eyes wide, as Rhovin's arms snaked around her and he brought his mouth down on hers.

… But it didn't take longer than a minute for him to sense that something was amiss.

She wasn't kissing him back. At all. She was absolutely tense, like a cornered animal.

Rhovin broke away. "What's wrong?"

Aranya just stared at him, like she didn't know who he was or what was going on.

Rhovin frowned. He watched her blink at him several times, until finally something seemed to clear away from her eyes. The tension left her, and Aranya mouthed his name as she closed her eyes and relaxed back onto the ground.

"What happened?" Rhovin asked, an uncertain edge in his voice. "Where did you go just now?"

Aranya's eyes snapped open, back to his. "I..." Damn, thought Aranya, as her voice trailed off. He probably had the wrong idea about where or when her mind might have gone to in that moment. Her voice remained quite even and clear when she answered, "Nowhere. I was right here, but I..." She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath, grasping for what to say to help him understand. "It's not anything difficult to talk about, just maybe a little strange to explain."

Rhovin lowered himself to ground just beside her, shifting the both of them so that her head was at the crook of his shoulder. He took one of her legs to cross over with one of his, and brought his decorously-inked arms to encircle around her. They were lying comfortably close this way. "I'm listening," he said.

"Um, well..." How to begin? "When I was first learning swords and hand to hand, my instructor was a spellbreaker," started Aranya. "There was no intention for me to become a spellbreaker myself, just that he was known to get admirable results with his students, whether the focus was to learn defensively or offensively. One of the things he made a point to have me learn was..." She trailed off for a moment, and then lifted her whiskery eyebrows in a kind of shrug that used only the muscles of her finely-featured face. "Well, exactly what I told you: don't hesitate," she said, one corner of her mouth pulling up slightly. "He was careful, calculating, encouraging. He found ways to take things as far as he could with our training-" she looked Rhovin directly in the eyes "-to the point where I wouldn't know if I was sincerely fighting for my life or not sometimes." The gloss of reverie fell over her gaze as she continued, "And all the while he was gradually putting the habit into me of treating every fight as a fight for my life, where unexpected things happen, where hesitation is your undoing. Living at the edges of troll country only proved the value of what I learned and reinforced the habit." She was silent for a moment, and then twisted herself to be able to better look at him in the face. "If you hadn't shocked me with that kiss, I would have kept on fighting to break free and evade you," she told him. "It wouldn't have been because of you, or your fault, or anything like that, just-"

"The imperative to escape, to get away alive," Rhovin finished for her. Everything in the tone of his voice and the look on his face made it very clear that she didn't have to go on explaining, he absolutely understood.

Aranya nodded.

Rhovin pulled the mage in his arms just a little more closely to him as she relaxed against him with a soft exhale, her head resting against his shoulder. Oh yes, he understood. Better than most. There were some patterns of behavior that just couldn't be broken, once they were a part of your nature. With having little to no room to think, she only reacted with what came naturally, falling back on what had become familiar to her way of being. He would probably have done the same thing.

"You have a very comfy shoulder," murmured Aranya with idle content, eliciting a smile from Rhovin. Lifting her head up, she regarded his bow, discarded on the other side of him. Propping her upper body across his chest, she reached over him to retrieve it. Sitting up at angle to him (which left her leg still a bit tangled with his, though not uncomfortably) she gripped the bow and sighted, tugging a little on the bowstring. Rhovin noted that she held her arm the way that one was supposed to, if they didn't want the bowstring to bite them on release, and while she tugged enough at the string to get a sense of its draw-power, she didn't try to pull it back or make the amateur mistake of dry-firing it. "This kind of life suits you, I would say," she said, smiling warmly at him as she set his bow aside. "You just take to it so naturally."

It occurred to Rhovin right then that even the roles they had taken in their game, the crafty hunter and the elusive trickster, were old familiar things to them. Old habits.

Rather than musing on this aloud, he smirked and said, "That's a compliment, right?"

Aranya's smile got just a little wider. "An observation," she answered. "But if you'd like a compliment..." She turned her arm to show him the arrow graze. What tiny amount of blood that had welled up at the edges of it had already dried, and though it didn't sting anymore, it still felt tender.

Rhovin reached out, touched it, and frowned. "Was that from when you were in the brush?"

"Mhm," she replied, "and I'm almost hoping that it was intentional, because if you meant to actually hit me-" she leaned forward just a little, her eyes glittering playfully, challenging him "-then you missed, and if you meant to miss me altogether, then I may have moved right into it." She looked and sounded rather sheepish with that last statement, her mouth turned in a wry and rueful smile. Aranya looked down and watched as Rhovin lightly brushed his thumb back and forth over the abrasion on her arm, his brows still furrowed. "Regardless, it's nothing a little water, salve, and clean bandages won't fix," she pointed out. "It won't even leave a scar." She carefully took his hand away from her arm, clasping it with hers, and laid herself down alongside him once again. She hoped that he wouldn't think of this as his fault. If anything, it was her own fault for inviting such risk upon herself to start with. Still, she didn't assume that he would be too keen on lending his archery skills to this kind of game in the future, after seeing this.

Aranya's thumb brushed back and forth over Rhovin's for a while, and then she spread her fingers outward across his, unfolding his hand. Instead of twining her fingers with his, however, she spread them wide, brushing up the sides of his until only their fingertips touched, forming a kind of cage with their hands. There was a kind of focus in her eyes as she did these things that was curious to watch. As her fingertips slid back down along the inside of his fingers, Rhovin felt her reach into him through that connection - small and fragile as it was - drawing on something in him as she spread her fingers up and out again, the tips of her short nails grazing ever-so-lightly over his skin, and drawing it out with her. Her hand flexed just the tiniest bit, and with that motion a flame came to life in the air between their open hands.

But it wasn't hers. She had done it, yes, but it was his inherent power that she'd done it with. A creation of them both. His fire, and her doing.

Quickly, Aranya clasped her hand back into his, dousing the flame, and giving him an impish smile before anything else could be done or said.

Rhovin rolled in towards her, turning them so that he was above her and she was on her back once more, her leg that had been crossed over with his getting pushed aside in the process - pinning her again. The smile on his face and the glint in his eye were decidedly feral. "Didn't your mother ever tell you that it's dangerous to play with fire?"

Aranya grinned broadly back at him. "Mother told me a lot of things," she all but purred in answer. "None of which I'm in any kind of mood to heed right about now."

The sudden startling cries of wild crows interrupted the quiet that had surrounded them. Both elves turned their heads to listen. Together, their eyes watched, scanning through the trees and brush of the forest. Their pointed ears were perked, listening for anything beyond the light breeze rustling in the leaves and the caw-caw of the noisome birds.

"They're squabbling over a meal," said Rhovin after a minute, turning his attention back to the woman. "Their calls would be different if there was danger."

Aranya nodded, trusting his judgment from his experience, and sensing nothing magical in nature that was out of the ordinary. She turned her head back in towards him, smiled softly, and began brushing her cheek against the side of his face, like a cat. The tip of her nose ghosted just along the edge of his ear, and she pressed her lips to the side of his neck just below it, softly kissing her way from there to his mouth over the line of his jaw. Her hands slid up his arms and snaked over the back of his shoulders, pulling him down with her... and still kissing him like she couldn't make herself stop.

Much better.

"Favorite food?"

"There's plenty of favorites..."

"But you have one in particular, I bet."

"You should know that by now..."

"I mean actual food, you fiend."

The archer grinned, lying bare on his side, a hand used to keep his head upraised. Next to him, his beloved Aranya also bare, lying on her stomach. Rhovin gracefully smoothed his middle finger at the cheek of her back side. She, in return, toyed and braided some loose strands of his hair. "Steak. Always been a fan of steak. Not usually the norm of our people, but being out at sea for so many years you get used to what other species enjoy."

"Steak is good." Her smile was faint, her eyes lazy and bowed. She was tired. Another long night of intimacy for them to remember. She would likely leave in the morning. It wasn't easy waking up to her gone, but it was becoming quite the customary in his days. "Rhovin?"

"Hm?"

"Why did you do it?"

"Do what?"

She didn't look him in the eyes; she didn't have to. Still focused on that solitary thin braid he sported. It did, after all, became an appealing tradition in recent times. She adjusts the braid, add a personal trinket of hers at the tip, and the hunter would not touch it until her next arrival. "Return to your bow."

There was a moment. It was quiet, but lacked the inelegance that came along. He had to think and she gave him time until he could manifest the words. He looked to the far expanse of their bedroom. The open flames from the fire place that kept them warm, the snapping that followed. "All my life, my father tried to make me someone I didn't want to be, someone that would fit his needs. It definitely wasn't a ranger or a Farstrider... but something about a bow in my hands felt right. When I aimed and shot without thinking, and witnessing how easily I can hit my target... I knew it was something I was built for, something in my nature that required this lifestyle. I could feel the spirits of the beasts; I could hear the terrains speak to me in ways none could ever and would never understand."

Aranya stopped, looked at the man she loved, and listened. Perked ears listened keenly upon the words that came from the very soul she connected to.

"It's not a power you have to learn to control; it's a power that teaches you how to be a master of it. It guides you, challenges you, and nourishes you. The balance of nature selecting you to keep it that way - balanced."

Aranya shifted and propped herself up by the elbows. "So you're saying you didn't choose become this Archer, this... Arch-Lord as you put it?"

He shook his head.

"It chose you..."

"Exactly."

Aranya looked away, sinking into words, into this perspective that was never perceived from any other.

"I never left who I was behind," he continued. "I only had to follow what I believed at the time was right. What I believed was the only choice I had. But when nature tells you it's time to come back to her..."

"You don't ignore it." Aranya finished it for him. A mirrored imaged of what transpired between them not too long ago. He smiled.

"I followed my heart when you came along and stole it, and not a single ounce of regret came from it. I share my bed with you, my life with you, and my very core; just like I share it with the very world that decides if we will continue to walk her lands for another day." The hunter raised himself and sat on the mattress, looking ahead into the distance. One leg stretched, the other bent within. "No more will the Farstriders make the decision of my mastery of the bow. No more will they hold it against me and guilt me with my failures, failures I learned from. I took back what's mine because I was chosen for it. They didn't give it to me, so they have no right to take it away."

Slowly, Aranya crawled over to him, swinging one long leg over him. She straddled him, arms around his neck. Her wily grin soon followed. "I think me saying 'I'm proud of you' would be the understatement of the year."

The General tucked his chin, looked down and chuckled. He looked almost...bashful.

"Is that a blush I see?" She teased. Rhovin reacted by pressing each palm at her sides and forcing the giggles from her with ticklish aims. He swiftly turned and had her back pressed against the cushions. The laughs continued until their lips met in lustful needs only they could drain from one another. Aranya locked those strong legs around him, her arms around him, clinging to him. Rhovin pressed in, slow and deep, lost in the snug warmth he desired for every night. Unrelenting thrusts as the gasps from his darling resonated against the stone walls, never losing its fervor.

The night, apparently, has yet to end.

Author's notes - This was originally written Sep 20, 2014.

Despite the many class changes that Rhovin has been through over the years (hunter, rogue, warrior, rinse, repeat) this was some exploring of Rhovin's ranger skills and some of the things that he may have learned that would have never left him (old habits). This also shows more depth to the aspects of Aranya that are very much the "woodland elf" archetype that Thalassians embody in official canon - always on guard, prepared to fight or to run - rather than the comfy "city elf" so many people like to stereotype, especially when it comes to cloth-wearing casters and mages, who tend to get regarded as "soft" a lot of the time. It was an irresistible (and romantic) walk through a glimpse at their histories of developing their character traits.

About that thing that Aranya did with the fire: it's something of a variant on blood elves' ability to pull magic from other things, but not going so far as to drain anything from Rhovin and absorb it for herself. Also, she wouldn't do that with just anyone. It's only for the fact of having as much trust between them as they do that she would even consider it.