…..:::::|. Silver Street: West .|:::::…..
Halycind found herself outside staring down two directions laid before her. The Fifty-Foot-O-Rope was definitely right. So her left foot lead her on her way.
Travelling back to their Inn, she was happy with her time here in the Blue & Silver City, for she had drank till her walk was sideways, ate of an animal that swore her death, and spent the shadow-rising with an Agency full of heroes. What she’d most enjoyed was having fallen for someone like her good-hearted mage-boy and had tasted of a kiss so enamoring she'd thought she might die if she felt him again. Halycind giggled to herself now, feeling more alive then she had since leaving Cashtiel Roams near a cycle ago. And about to show her childhood friend just how much she wanted him.
This road looked different.
She could have sworn she'd been right behind him when leaving the tavern. She' wondered if she was indeed too drunk to lie with a man like Kodlaa warned. It would be her first doing so and some discretion seemed wise. But she wanted to know him, right now. She wanted to feel ever bit of that look on her from before. She wanted to be made to remember what he felt like the next morning.
That was something Kodlaa had always sang on about reminiscing her escapades with fighters; how they made her walk the next day.
Kodlaa was right. Going to him drunk might have been a bad idea. There were tonics and medicinals in her system and she’d gotten very drunk far faster than usual. What if she couldn’t remember anything after they’d been together? She’d hate to muddle her first time due to inebriation. She’d hate even more to muddle her first time with Siin.
Halycind cursed her own impulses in giving him signals in the tavern to "talk" tonight. But it had to be tonight, she urged to herself. She couldn't wait any longer or she’d go chicken. She wondered again if any of those vials of tonics would aid in her pursuit of sobriety, since they helped clear her mind while she pulled earlier.
That hold and his passionate kiss shot back to memory and she let out a whimper of want in her staggered walk back to the inn.
How'd he get so far away?
Then she looked about herself and realized...she'd walked three blocks in the entire wrong direction.
She cursed hard outloud and turned her gait the other way.
Just drunk enough to muss up her first time bedding someone and she let out a string of other hard curses toward herself. No not just someone. Her best friend.
Her stomach churned suddenly in her self-chastisement but nothing had come back rearing its head in piles heaved from her gut yet, so she felt fine enough to press on. Those potions' effects were still in her system and she wondered of the side effects of drinking these mage assisted alchemical concoctions. Would she remain young looking forever? Would it extend her life? Would her insides one day suddenly fail from plant byproducts resident in her liver?
She knew who'd know. “Siin Ynggrloch. That fine arse of a warcaster. If that stupid Percival hadn't have interrupted us, I’d have had him all over—” Her words were slurred but her eyes were squinting at dimming lamplights. “Where are you Siin Ynggrloch...you sly rogue. Where's that damned Inn!"
Her aforementioned liver jumped. Or was it her gut. Something on her insides stirred in wild circles. Wild circles that she'd sworn would be her end.
A scent interrupted her morbidity. A familiar scent. The scent of a dying rose. She looked up from the wall where it seemed she had just loosed the contents of her stomach. She gasped, shocked at herself. Perhaps she was far more drunk than she’d realized.
...
Halycind should have been at the door of the Fifty-Foot-O-Rope by now and Siin's mind went to the worst of his imaginings. He kicked himself for not having guided her here, by his side, so he could keep an eye on his pup. He knew discussing matters of love or doing anything further with him would be her first time in such situations, so she’d needed the care and comfort to be herself with him the whole while. But he’d somehow forgotten this with five full steins of Casena in his system. The words of his brothel teachers came back harshly to him. There is only one First Time. The first feeling of fire in the blood. And it is every sasher’s duty to ensure its crimson gold remembrance. He shook his still drunk head and staggered off down the street to drag his Halycind back to the Inn to do this right.
...
She squinted again, finding her foot fall was faster than she’d desired in this state but this scent was too rich to not seek out. There was no form to make out, no body to follow in the darkness of midnight. She stopped suddenly to lean on a stone pillar and steady her blurred vision.
To the left, the freshness of the scent passed her nose and she bolted to a run after it.
It was fast. Faster than that Isam child buffed by 'robes' as Kodlaa had called them. Faster than even that Ghostgale she had battled. No, this thing knew it was being sought and she began to grow feral in her run.
Was Siin casting something? A trail to find him? Was he playing chase like lovers in Ashok? Did he want her to catch him, tackle him into soft park grasses, and let the moons wash light over their hotly involved naked forms? He wasn't an Ashok man but she would mate him like one.
“aBn Ynggr!” She called to the scent she followed. “aBn. Where are you?!”
A rumble on the wind answered her back and shivers ran up her spine to the tiny hairs there. She gathered a sudden summation in the fog of her stupor. This wasn’t Siin.
It was him, it had to have been.
The Necromancer.
She stopped cold. She didn't want him. Halycind looked around now. She was lost and she didn't want that one. “Siin?” She panted out a scared whimper. “Oh, this pehnhataht alcohol...giihalantent drugs. I can't think straight.” She caught only whiffs of his movement in the breezes through the city streets but she was certain now that it was the man she'd seen raise the deadsteed and deny her answer and spark a whole other kind of curiosity so raw she believed it to have been the spur for her most unstealthy chase.
It vanished from her nose. The scent. Replaced now by the sump in the alley she found herself in. She shouldered a wall, slid against it and huffed breaths to steady her breathing. Why had the scent just stopped as if swept away by gale force winds? It was absent so long she feared she'd been chasing a memory.
…
Siin's senses gave him odd chills. There was something in these empty streets he didn't want around Halycind.
Empty?
Havvenchael's nights were never empty. Especially not in the Seventh Sector and especially not during May Rising. Ever. Why had they become empty...and so dark? Something he was sorely unused to was out here and he rushed his feet to find his pup.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
...
It had been many many days since Ladi Gru Has and, if she were honest with herself, the only reason she’d been interested in the necromancer was for his conjuring arts. But she had a whole aBn to ask of the magic arts, now, so she no longer needed to know anything else from anyone else.
Her memory then betrayed her again and served up the rich timber of the necromancer’s voice. A huff of something similar to desire struck her up the middle and she covered her breaths with a palm. “No. I can't want that voice...I want my caster. What is happening?” Behind her palm she laughed at herself. He had sounded so powerful in the streets of Ladi Gru Has, spilling on about the bones of the dead. She let her silly head lean back to the bricks. His voice. Like thunder. And that borderguard’s will had melted like creamed ice.
“Wait that wasn’t him.”
She was confused.
She had started drinking again way too soon.
She was looking for someone. Wasn't she? Someone special? She wanted to find that one. Wanted to soothe her curiosities.
Wanted that scent to return.
A cold breath whispered down the left of her neck hairs and before she could bark in fright, a black hand slapped itself over her open mouth.
“You are a trying child.”
Something in her still drunk loins burst a heated flare for frightening her, she looked to the cold steel of his dark grey eyes. Base attraction outranked self preservation and he watched it grow in her gaze. A hateful lust or a lustful hate, he couldn't have been sure but it was raw and had no fear.
“Inside.” His voice rumbled. And he swept her through the stone of the building she stood against.
The transport felt odd for where she once felt wall, she felt only a rush of air like plumes of smoke and choking soot. Inside, she coughed into his palm as she was slammed hard against the edge of a wooden workbench in the pressing of his form against hers. She could only just see past the meat of his velvet sleeved arm that the wall they’d passed through remained solid.
“Why do you seek me?” His whispers seemed to rumble inside of her body as he revealed her lips from his heavy fingers.
“Answer me.”
She was unsure if drink or transport had pushed her eyesight askew, but it shook as if he were speaking directly into her skull. She saw his smokey lips moving so he had to have been speaking outloud but she could have sworn she heard him in her bones.
A cold, quaking loneliness to it...like that of oblivion.
What sort of Power had she sought? She looked up at him for a long time. Thin smokes danced across the contours of his face. She could just make out features that surprisingly hadn't frighten her. Then, in a wobbly stare, Halycind examined that craft darkened hand.
“You're...one of them, aren't you?” Her voice was small and full of wonder.
“One of what?” His breath was ice as his inquiry travelled through her skin. Tiny reactionary shivers didn't unsteady her gaze on the make of his palm, however. The curl of his fingers. The bulk in his hand. The weight of it. Her ears reeled and that odd yearning jumped through her middle again.
“One of those god-things the little girl spoke of.” She outed as she stared into the lines of his palm all coursed with black crawling smoke.
“You thought that was a child?” He scoffed.
“Was it not?”
“It's nothing now. The Engineer of Death will create another...as is her hobby.” He shared in a sort of scathing chortle.
Hesitation prehended her for she wanted to know so much. “The Engineer of Death? Someone you work for? More of those god-things?”
“You know nothing of deep knowledge, puppy.” He snatched his palm away. “And the pursuit of it will kill you one day.” He turned as if to send her back through the wall.
Halycind grabbed at his wrist. She could not arrest her eyes crawling up the velvety blue sleeve of his brawny arm. It was rich looking and glittered smartly of the nights ambiance in the dim light.
“Fff. My father knew what he liked to call deep knowledge...but it didn't kill him, unfortunately.” She growled back at him. “But he was a wuss, anyway. If I’d had just a piece of that power.”
“Oooh, telling the truth in your drunkenness, I see.”
“If only to crush the heads of wicked men. Taphsel didn't deserve to die that way.”
“And my stupid father didn't do anything to save his best friend’s life. So called ‘Shield’. More like wussified wuss!”
“You've a deep wish to be Immortal, hmm?”
“Are you sure the knowledg’n of knowing deep knowledge about you will kill me?” She slurred in a whisper. Her eyes did not leave his as she pulled his palm upward. The fibers of her being recognized their grey depths as the infinitude of pure Void. And he let her grow familiar with them. His eyes. Something in this gaze made her believe their moment, this now, between them...had always been immortal.
“It always does.” He whispered, hurt and soured.
The darkened thing let her raise his palm to her face once more as she now stared into it, let the tip of her nose touch the tip of his relaxed thumb, let her peel a hot tongue out onto the frosty surface of his open hand.
A huff rushed from him that signaled a warning of such youthful ignorance. It blew, to her cheek, the loose hairs of her mussed wolaenki but she made no movement to stop. She thought she was asking questions she should of him. But she was not having the reactions he knew she should have been having to his answers.
He watched her languish in the taste of him.
She could only liken the flavour to the pungency of roses with an uncharacteristic freshness like the juice of citrus fruits not native to her homeland. This man was clean. Well kept in all the cold darkness of his craft. Someone she loved smelled of citrus.
“You were raised in Buraamira.” She uttered. "Buraamira." Her mind drifted to someone she was missing. She couldn’t shake the weight of how utterly wrong this moment felt but something else, some other will had taken a hold of her.
Out of either frustration with her impertinence or distaste of encroachment, that large cold palm slide a clench around her throat. The grip forced her eyes up to him.
Where there should have been fear, there was none. Nothing but the gaze of a wolf and the quivering breaths of an aching curiosity. What could she possibly want with him?
They stared at each other for a time longer than most would deem appropriate for either interrogation or intimidation. This little wolf pup felt herself bold enough to hold steady against his slowly closing grip. And then that gaze was slowly turning his grip warm against the rushing blood in the veins of her strong, quivering throat.
She saw the acquiescence wash over his shadowed form just as he shoved a cold kiss into her.
A kiss suddenly deeper than she'd expected, suddenly more passionate than she'd figured he would deliver to a stranger. But she seemed no stranger to him at the moment. She was stricken with the shock in the skill and strength and tenderness of it. His kiss was that of a man's but the reverberating sensation it sent crawling, thundering, and rumbling under her skin was that of something entirely else. It felt like the moons themselves had set all their pull onto her veins. Then she had to know it. She had to know the depths of the Void.
She was rough, now. Hungry, rough and strong.
Kissing her, the darkened one scooped the girl up with a one-handed heft and sat her on the edge of the cedar table so she could claw at him tighter and kiss him level.
...
Siin's eyes had to have been lying to him as he peered through the window of the apothecary’s shop. She couldn't have been giving their kiss to someone else...something else.
Then that thought was gone, as if it had never been born. A sting ran wild in his brain and he held his head attempting to understand the sudden rush of words he was hearing.
She was never yours.
"Haly?" Siin tried to utter but an odd darkness was sweeping the whole of his insides as if it knew every part of his body.
Let her go.
With one freed palm, the shadowed one made to darken all the windows of the shop he held Halycind in. With a sweeping curling shroud he then returned his palm to grip the meat of her thighs on this table.
...
His pup was gone. Gone from his sight. And Siin wasn't sure if he'd even seen the truth of it all. Or what had even told him to let her go.