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Yep. 50,307 is the new magic number.
I am officially awesome-of-ness.
It was that time of the day when lights in the sky receded and the shadows came out to play. Sunset, human beings called it. He could no longer remember what the word had been in the old tongue. He didn’t remember a lot of things.
Across the horizon and past the strange brilliance of the metropolis the night flowers were blooming and he was watching this happen from over a thousand miles away, right where he was between earth and the heavens. The wind made him feel weightless, like he was riding on currents of sound and smell and cold. Back where the midnight moon was the only source of light he had none of this. Perhaps this was why the woman behind him was still alive. It couldn’t have been mercy.
“The air is sweeter here. Had you the strength to move again, perhaps you could enjoy it with me.”
Her fingers scratching across the rooftop; her cheek braised against granite. Overall it was tasteless, this business of murder, and it was only interesting when they fought back. He turned from her figure, prone and gasping for air on the rooftop of the building, resting his gaze on the blade stretched out across his knees instead. Only his reflection there, pinned there dead and screaming without ever having to open its mouth. Buzz at the back of his head, so he lifted the blade and rose to his feet to dispel it. Night was coming. There were still far too many other things for him to do.
He heard her whimper as he approached. The end of the blade in his hand kissed the floor and then melted away, steel turning to blood. Her blood; he had drawn the weapon from her when he had plunged his hand through her chest.
“You shouldn’t have even tried to run,” he told her, quietly. “You should have accepted the moment they offered you sanctuary. You knew we were coming. You knew we would find a way. They were not wrong about you Aet’har. Creatures of light truly deserve to be flung from the sun and ground to dust.”
The blood pooled about his feet as he dropped the broken hilt to the floor and knelt, to reach out and stroke one porcelain cheek with his thumb.
“Pretty Aet’har sorceress, how would you like to die tonight?”
“Tsukasa.”
The voice and footsteps of his Lord and Master behind him. He turned, moving his gaze from the woman bleeding to death to the sight of grieves, forged from the same darksteel as his own, and the ends of a cloak hanging from a man whom he still believed to be impossibly tall and always and ever unreachable.
“It is not like you to prolong a fox hunt, child.” It was easy to read amusement in that voice, echoing as it did from within the depths of a demonic-looking helmet. “Your acting on whimsy is a rare occasion, and this time it has served us better for it.”
“My lord?”
He watched his Master as the man stepped forward, moving past him and kneeling, to better lift the broken body of the sorceress before him up into his arms. The elder Blade walked and he followed, returning to the edge of the rooftop where the wind was strongest. There was a different taste to the air, self-same as the strange charge one could perceive before a storm.
“…You would do better to kill me now, sir knight.”
“Ah, so the dead one speaks yet.” The smile was in the purr of his Master’s voice. “How now, corpse? Forgive my manners. I don’t normally place myself in the position to hold nor grope a beautiful woman.”
“I had thought you merciful, sending your boy to be my executioner.”
“I had thought so too.”
He left his Master to speak with the sorceress, turning back to the groves of night flowers thousands of miles away. He returned in time to see the sorceress thrown from his Master’s arms and get swallowed by the rising mist of the evening.
“Our Queen has ordered us to leave her. We no longer have the time to play these games with the Heralds. Our Lord Tactician has seen something in the stars. It may be of interest to us.”
“Understood. What are our new orders?”
“Nothing for the moment, but he as our Queen’s ear for it now. When he speaks next, we have been decreed to listen.”
He said nothing to this. His Master enclosed one gauntleted hand around the sigil hanging from his neck, the symbol of an empire on a blasted moon. Hot energy rippled through the air as a door of dancing lights drew itself into the space before them. Overhead, storm clouds were building castles in the sky.
“She would have had an easier death at my hands, Master.”
Laughter: rich, dark, low, sweet. The sound of it grated down his spine like a serrated blade, drawing no blood and only sensation. The thought of the smile that lay beneath could bring him to his knees in weaker moments.
“An easier death will leave her no chance to tempt fate. I find that terribly uninteresting. Don’t you?”
The younger Blade did not answer; there was no more need for words. He lowered his eyes and followed his Master, stepping through the portal that would take them back to a place without light.
My NaNo post (along with the rest of the story) is over here, at
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stitchedophelia, the fic journal. It doesn't get much better from what I've posted here, but I would love you muchly if you even decide to brave the whole stretch anyway. =_=
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~Miri
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