"Cosa? Sto forse sentendo di nuovo cose strane?"
“呃……好吧？现在大家都在说家乡话了？”(Uh... Okay? We speaking our mother tongue now??)
The girl scratched her head while looking for a stool.
Not long after, she found one, and took seat beside Sue and possibly Basil.
The girl scratched her head while looking for a stool.
Not long after, she found one, and took seat beside Sue and possibly Basil.
Watari’s brush had been moving with the patient steadiness of river-work. A line laid down. A pause to breathe. Another line to answer it. The board before him held the tavern in its first quiet becoming. Rafters suggested by soft angles. Hearthlight reduced to a warm stain that bled outward, as if the room’s comfort were something that could be poured and measured. He had been painting the ordinary thing that men forget to honor; a place that survived by small mercies and stubborn timber.
Then the air took on a different weight. It was not merely cold. It was intent made temperature. The lantern’s honeyed pool seemed to harden at its edges. Smoke hesitated beneath the rafters, as though even it had learned caution. The hearth continued to roar, yet it no longer felt like a welcome. It felt like a witness, bright-eyed and unable to look away.
His ears turned first. Not in alarm. In recognition. A hunter’s reflex, gentled by years and sharpened by memory. The room’s chatter did not cease, yet it thinned around a new silence, the way grass bends when something large passes through it. Ixqueya stood in the aisle of the tavern’s attention. Winter moved with her, not as chaotic storm but as hushed doctrine. Frost had found the floorboards and traced a pale corridor, a quiet signature that did not ask permission. To Watari, it looked like a trail on open ground after a night of hard sky; clear. Honest.
He let the brush hover above the board. Pigment trembled at the tip, dark as turned soil. His mouth softened, and a warm smile came to him without effort. It sat strangely beside the severity that clung to her. It was a human thing. A stubborn thing. The last hearth he carried that no winter had yet taken. He dipped the brush once, careful and unhurried. He dabbed it against the lip of his jar, as if to remind his hand that it still served creation. Not butchery. Not orders shouted into dust. He set the brush to the board and drew a short line, simple and true. A beam’s shadow. A corner’s patience. A mark that said the world was still mundane, even when the uncanny walked into it.
Only then did he lift his gaze fully to her. The room's light found her armor and broke upon it. White carapace, pale as bone given polish. Black seams that were precise and pitiless. Necro-ice inlays held a colder light that did not belong to flame. It made the air around it feel thinner. It made the room’s warmth seem almost embarrassed. His artist’s eye caught the way the plates fit and locked, not as decoration, but as a system. The suit looked grown rather than forged, as if some patient craft had learned to coax hard truth from living matter.
He saw the headdress flare above her, feathered and edged with winterglass. It carried the impression of a crown that had been earned by surviving what would have killed gentler women. He saw glyphwork upon her face, turquoise lines exact as a vow. Carmine accents like old blood made ceremonial. Her weapons, too, were part of her essence. The mace. The shield. Not merely armaments, but articles of faith given weight. In her, nothing seemed incidental. Even beauty was harnessed. Even that posture was law in it's own right.
Watari’s smile did not fade. It became quieter. More careful. He had known generals who wore cruelty like perfume, and saints who wore kindness like armor. Ixqueya did not wear either. She wore winter. That was simpler. That was harder. He answered her greeting in the same tongue she had used, his voice low enough that it would not compete with the room. “Cuix in cihuātl hualā tlācxitlaniz?”
The question rose lightly, even when its meaning did not. It carried a small humor, the kind that survives in veterans because without it the heart turns to stone. He let a chuckle follow, brief and warm. It was not derision. It was repayment. Coin returned in kind to the soft chortle she had loosed a moment before. Then he paused again, and the artist in him took the reins.
His eyes, dark brown and steady, studied her with the long attention of someone trying to understand the shape of a storm. Not with tavern hunger. Not with the flinching appraisal of men who measure danger and call it dislike. He looked as if he were memorizing a mountain before crossing it, accepting that it would not move for him. The white of her armor drew his gaze back, and with it the thought that came unbidden. White was a difficult color. It forgave nothing. It showed every stain. It demanded cleanliness or it demanded consequence. And on her, it did not look innocent. It looked deliberate.
He spoke, gentle and plain, as if speaking to a blade laid bare. “White flatters you.” His eyes traced the lines of her silhouette where plate met seam, where hard geometry served living curve without apology. “It is fitting. For one as cold as you are. For one who thinks with clean edges.” He did not linger on the thought too long. He did not presume closeness. He only gave the truth as he saw it, the way an artist offers a likeness and lets the subject decide whether it is an honor or an insult. After that, he let his gaze wander. Not to dismiss her. To take the room back into himself. To find his footing in the ordinary again.
He looked at the tavern as it endured around her presence. Timber beams groaned under their own age. Floorboards bowed with long habit. Smoke gathered beneath the rafters and made a second ceiling, lower and darker than the first. Lanternlight pooled in amber circles. It touched hands. It touched rims of cups. It never quite reached the corners where old debts slept. Patrons leaned inward, instinctively protective of their warmth, as if heat were coin and winter a thief.
He saw a fisherman in the next booth wipe his nose after a sneeze, blinking against the bite of haze. He saw a dog’s wary eye slide along the aisle and then look away, as if the animal had judged that some things are best left unchallenged. He heard murmurs thin where her cold had sharpened the air. He heard the hearth crackle, and it sounded less like comfort now. More like ceremony. All of it was paintable. All of it was a scene that would look almost gentle on a board, if one did not know what walked within it.
Watari’s hand found his brush again, not yet moving. He held it as one might hold a needle above cloth, ready to stitch the moment into permanence. He thought, briefly, of other rooms. War-tents that stank of horse and sweat. Command pavilions where maps were spread like flayed skins. Makeshift halls taken from human towns, their hearths lit under banners that did not belong. He thought of desert revolts, where heat made mirages out of men. He thought of Hextor’s invasion, where the world felt sick at the edges, as if rot had learned to speak. He thought of the defiled, and how even brave hearts learned new forms of quiet in their presence.
In those years, he had served her grandmother. He had been a general then. He had spoken with authority and sent people to their endings with a nod. He had learned how easily a name becomes a number, and how quickly a number becomes a grave. He had carried victories that tasted of ash. He had carried losses that never truly set down. Now he carried paint. He carried patience. He preferred it. It was not absolution. It was simply a different kind of duty.
He turned his attention back to Ixqueya and lifted his chin a fraction. The gesture was open, offered without insistence. “What brings the lady of purgatory to this quaint establishment in the middle of nowhere?” His eyes flicked toward the bar, to the dull line of bottles and the barkeep’s guarded posture. “May I buy you a drink. Or something steadier than drink.” He gestured with his brush hand, careful not to fling pigment. The motion was small, more invitation than command. It was the courtesy of someone who understood what it meant to share a fire when the world outside is sharp.
His smile returned, a little brighter now, as if he were willfully placing warmth between them and seeing whether it would survive. “I have learned,” he added softly, “that silence can be a fine companion. It can also be a cruel one. If you came here for reasons heavier than the road, then let the room be ordinary for a moment. Let it serve you, instead of staring at you.” And with that he did not press further. He let the offer hang in the lanternwash. He kept his brush poised above the board, ready to paint again. Ready to record the tavern’s mundane heart, even with winter standing brutishly in its aisle.
Then the air took on a different weight. It was not merely cold. It was intent made temperature. The lantern’s honeyed pool seemed to harden at its edges. Smoke hesitated beneath the rafters, as though even it had learned caution. The hearth continued to roar, yet it no longer felt like a welcome. It felt like a witness, bright-eyed and unable to look away.
His ears turned first. Not in alarm. In recognition. A hunter’s reflex, gentled by years and sharpened by memory. The room’s chatter did not cease, yet it thinned around a new silence, the way grass bends when something large passes through it. Ixqueya stood in the aisle of the tavern’s attention. Winter moved with her, not as chaotic storm but as hushed doctrine. Frost had found the floorboards and traced a pale corridor, a quiet signature that did not ask permission. To Watari, it looked like a trail on open ground after a night of hard sky; clear. Honest.
He let the brush hover above the board. Pigment trembled at the tip, dark as turned soil. His mouth softened, and a warm smile came to him without effort. It sat strangely beside the severity that clung to her. It was a human thing. A stubborn thing. The last hearth he carried that no winter had yet taken. He dipped the brush once, careful and unhurried. He dabbed it against the lip of his jar, as if to remind his hand that it still served creation. Not butchery. Not orders shouted into dust. He set the brush to the board and drew a short line, simple and true. A beam’s shadow. A corner’s patience. A mark that said the world was still mundane, even when the uncanny walked into it.
Only then did he lift his gaze fully to her. The room's light found her armor and broke upon it. White carapace, pale as bone given polish. Black seams that were precise and pitiless. Necro-ice inlays held a colder light that did not belong to flame. It made the air around it feel thinner. It made the room’s warmth seem almost embarrassed. His artist’s eye caught the way the plates fit and locked, not as decoration, but as a system. The suit looked grown rather than forged, as if some patient craft had learned to coax hard truth from living matter.
He saw the headdress flare above her, feathered and edged with winterglass. It carried the impression of a crown that had been earned by surviving what would have killed gentler women. He saw glyphwork upon her face, turquoise lines exact as a vow. Carmine accents like old blood made ceremonial. Her weapons, too, were part of her essence. The mace. The shield. Not merely armaments, but articles of faith given weight. In her, nothing seemed incidental. Even beauty was harnessed. Even that posture was law in it's own right.
Watari’s smile did not fade. It became quieter. More careful. He had known generals who wore cruelty like perfume, and saints who wore kindness like armor. Ixqueya did not wear either. She wore winter. That was simpler. That was harder. He answered her greeting in the same tongue she had used, his voice low enough that it would not compete with the room. “Cuix in cihuātl hualā tlācxitlaniz?”
The question rose lightly, even when its meaning did not. It carried a small humor, the kind that survives in veterans because without it the heart turns to stone. He let a chuckle follow, brief and warm. It was not derision. It was repayment. Coin returned in kind to the soft chortle she had loosed a moment before. Then he paused again, and the artist in him took the reins.
His eyes, dark brown and steady, studied her with the long attention of someone trying to understand the shape of a storm. Not with tavern hunger. Not with the flinching appraisal of men who measure danger and call it dislike. He looked as if he were memorizing a mountain before crossing it, accepting that it would not move for him. The white of her armor drew his gaze back, and with it the thought that came unbidden. White was a difficult color. It forgave nothing. It showed every stain. It demanded cleanliness or it demanded consequence. And on her, it did not look innocent. It looked deliberate.
He spoke, gentle and plain, as if speaking to a blade laid bare. “White flatters you.” His eyes traced the lines of her silhouette where plate met seam, where hard geometry served living curve without apology. “It is fitting. For one as cold as you are. For one who thinks with clean edges.” He did not linger on the thought too long. He did not presume closeness. He only gave the truth as he saw it, the way an artist offers a likeness and lets the subject decide whether it is an honor or an insult. After that, he let his gaze wander. Not to dismiss her. To take the room back into himself. To find his footing in the ordinary again.
He looked at the tavern as it endured around her presence. Timber beams groaned under their own age. Floorboards bowed with long habit. Smoke gathered beneath the rafters and made a second ceiling, lower and darker than the first. Lanternlight pooled in amber circles. It touched hands. It touched rims of cups. It never quite reached the corners where old debts slept. Patrons leaned inward, instinctively protective of their warmth, as if heat were coin and winter a thief.
He saw a fisherman in the next booth wipe his nose after a sneeze, blinking against the bite of haze. He saw a dog’s wary eye slide along the aisle and then look away, as if the animal had judged that some things are best left unchallenged. He heard murmurs thin where her cold had sharpened the air. He heard the hearth crackle, and it sounded less like comfort now. More like ceremony. All of it was paintable. All of it was a scene that would look almost gentle on a board, if one did not know what walked within it.
Watari’s hand found his brush again, not yet moving. He held it as one might hold a needle above cloth, ready to stitch the moment into permanence. He thought, briefly, of other rooms. War-tents that stank of horse and sweat. Command pavilions where maps were spread like flayed skins. Makeshift halls taken from human towns, their hearths lit under banners that did not belong. He thought of desert revolts, where heat made mirages out of men. He thought of Hextor’s invasion, where the world felt sick at the edges, as if rot had learned to speak. He thought of the defiled, and how even brave hearts learned new forms of quiet in their presence.
In those years, he had served her grandmother. He had been a general then. He had spoken with authority and sent people to their endings with a nod. He had learned how easily a name becomes a number, and how quickly a number becomes a grave. He had carried victories that tasted of ash. He had carried losses that never truly set down. Now he carried paint. He carried patience. He preferred it. It was not absolution. It was simply a different kind of duty.
He turned his attention back to Ixqueya and lifted his chin a fraction. The gesture was open, offered without insistence. “What brings the lady of purgatory to this quaint establishment in the middle of nowhere?” His eyes flicked toward the bar, to the dull line of bottles and the barkeep’s guarded posture. “May I buy you a drink. Or something steadier than drink.” He gestured with his brush hand, careful not to fling pigment. The motion was small, more invitation than command. It was the courtesy of someone who understood what it meant to share a fire when the world outside is sharp.
His smile returned, a little brighter now, as if he were willfully placing warmth between them and seeing whether it would survive. “I have learned,” he added softly, “that silence can be a fine companion. It can also be a cruel one. If you came here for reasons heavier than the road, then let the room be ordinary for a moment. Let it serve you, instead of staring at you.” And with that he did not press further. He let the offer hang in the lanternwash. He kept his brush poised above the board, ready to paint again. Ready to record the tavern’s mundane heart, even with winter standing brutishly in its aisle.
Watari Devante wrote:
Watari’s brush had been moving with the patient steadiness of river-work. A line laid down. A pause to breathe. Another line to answer it. The board before him held the tavern in its first quiet becoming. Rafters suggested by soft angles. Hearthlight reduced to a warm stain that bled outward, as if the room’s comfort were something that could be poured and measured. He had been painting the ordinary thing that men forget to honor; a place that survived by small mercies and stubborn timber.
Then the air took on a different weight. It was not merely cold. It was intent made temperature. The lantern’s honeyed pool seemed to harden at its edges. Smoke hesitated beneath the rafters, as though even it had learned caution. The hearth continued to roar, yet it no longer felt like a welcome. It felt like a witness, bright-eyed and unable to look away.
His ears turned first. Not in alarm. In recognition. A hunter’s reflex, gentled by years and sharpened by memory. The room’s chatter did not cease, yet it thinned around a new silence, the way grass bends when something large passes through it. Ixqueya stood in the aisle of the tavern’s attention. Winter moved with her, not as chaotic storm but as hushed doctrine. Frost had found the floorboards and traced a pale corridor, a quiet signature that did not ask permission. To Watari, it looked like a trail on open ground after a night of hard sky; clear. Honest.
He let the brush hover above the board. Pigment trembled at the tip, dark as turned soil. His mouth softened, and a warm smile came to him without effort. It sat strangely beside the severity that clung to her. It was a human thing. A stubborn thing. The last hearth he carried that no winter had yet taken. He dipped the brush once, careful and unhurried. He dabbed it against the lip of his jar, as if to remind his hand that it still served creation. Not butchery. Not orders shouted into dust. He set the brush to the board and drew a short line, simple and true. A beam’s shadow. A corner’s patience. A mark that said the world was still mundane, even when the uncanny walked into it.
Only then did he lift his gaze fully to her. The room's light found her armor and broke upon it. White carapace, pale as bone given polish. Black seams that were precise and pitiless. Necro-ice inlays held a colder light that did not belong to flame. It made the air around it feel thinner. It made the room’s warmth seem almost embarrassed. His artist’s eye caught the way the plates fit and locked, not as decoration, but as a system. The suit looked grown rather than forged, as if some patient craft had learned to coax hard truth from living matter.
He saw the headdress flare above her, feathered and edged with winterglass. It carried the impression of a crown that had been earned by surviving what would have killed gentler women. He saw glyphwork upon her face, turquoise lines exact as a vow. Carmine accents like old blood made ceremonial. Her weapons, too, were part of her essence. The mace. The shield. Not merely armaments, but articles of faith given weight. In her, nothing seemed incidental. Even beauty was harnessed. Even that posture was law in it's own right.
Watari’s smile did not fade. It became quieter. More careful. He had known generals who wore cruelty like perfume, and saints who wore kindness like armor. Ixqueya did not wear either. She wore winter. That was simpler. That was harder. He answered her greeting in the same tongue she had used, his voice low enough that it would not compete with the room. “Cuix in cihuātl hualā tlācxitlaniz?”
The question rose lightly, even when its meaning did not. It carried a small humor, the kind that survives in veterans because without it the heart turns to stone. He let a chuckle follow, brief and warm. It was not derision. It was repayment. Coin returned in kind to the soft chortle she had loosed a moment before. Then he paused again, and the artist in him took the reins.
His eyes, dark brown and steady, studied her with the long attention of someone trying to understand the shape of a storm. Not with tavern hunger. Not with the flinching appraisal of men who measure danger and call it dislike. He looked as if he were memorizing a mountain before crossing it, accepting that it would not move for him. The white of her armor drew his gaze back, and with it the thought that came unbidden. White was a difficult color. It forgave nothing. It showed every stain. It demanded cleanliness or it demanded consequence. And on her, it did not look innocent. It looked deliberate.
He spoke, gentle and plain, as if speaking to a blade laid bare. “White flatters you.” His eyes traced the lines of her silhouette where plate met seam, where hard geometry served living curve without apology. “It is fitting. For one as cold as you are. For one who thinks with clean edges.” He did not linger on the thought too long. He did not presume closeness. He only gave the truth as he saw it, the way an artist offers a likeness and lets the subject decide whether it is an honor or an insult. After that, he let his gaze wander. Not to dismiss her. To take the room back into himself. To find his footing in the ordinary again.
He looked at the tavern as it endured around her presence. Timber beams groaned under their own age. Floorboards bowed with long habit. Smoke gathered beneath the rafters and made a second ceiling, lower and darker than the first. Lanternlight pooled in amber circles. It touched hands. It touched rims of cups. It never quite reached the corners where old debts slept. Patrons leaned inward, instinctively protective of their warmth, as if heat were coin and winter a thief.
He saw a fisherman in the next booth wipe his nose after a sneeze, blinking against the bite of haze. He saw a dog’s wary eye slide along the aisle and then look away, as if the animal had judged that some things are best left unchallenged. He heard murmurs thin where her cold had sharpened the air. He heard the hearth crackle, and it sounded less like comfort now. More like ceremony. All of it was paintable. All of it was a scene that would look almost gentle on a board, if one did not know what walked within it.
Watari’s hand found his brush again, not yet moving. He held it as one might hold a needle above cloth, ready to stitch the moment into permanence. He thought, briefly, of other rooms. War-tents that stank of horse and sweat. Command pavilions where maps were spread like flayed skins. Makeshift halls taken from human towns, their hearths lit under banners that did not belong. He thought of desert revolts, where heat made mirages out of men. He thought of Hextor’s invasion, where the world felt sick at the edges, as if rot had learned to speak. He thought of the defiled, and how even brave hearts learned new forms of quiet in their presence.
In those years, he had served her grandmother. He had been a general then. He had spoken with authority and sent people to their endings with a nod. He had learned how easily a name becomes a number, and how quickly a number becomes a grave. He had carried victories that tasted of ash. He had carried losses that never truly set down. Now he carried paint. He carried patience. He preferred it. It was not absolution. It was simply a different kind of duty.
He turned his attention back to Ixqueya and lifted his chin a fraction. The gesture was open, offered without insistence. “What brings the lady of purgatory to this quaint establishment in the middle of nowhere?” His eyes flicked toward the bar, to the dull line of bottles and the barkeep’s guarded posture. “May I buy you a drink. Or something steadier than drink.” He gestured with his brush hand, careful not to fling pigment. The motion was small, more invitation than command. It was the courtesy of someone who understood what it meant to share a fire when the world outside is sharp.
His smile returned, a little brighter now, as if he were willfully placing warmth between them and seeing whether it would survive. “I have learned,” he added softly, “that silence can be a fine companion. It can also be a cruel one. If you came here for reasons heavier than the road, then let the room be ordinary for a moment. Let it serve you, instead of staring at you.” And with that he did not press further. He let the offer hang in the lanternwash. He kept his brush poised above the board, ready to paint again. Ready to record the tavern’s mundane heart, even with winter standing brutishly in its aisle.
Then the air took on a different weight. It was not merely cold. It was intent made temperature. The lantern’s honeyed pool seemed to harden at its edges. Smoke hesitated beneath the rafters, as though even it had learned caution. The hearth continued to roar, yet it no longer felt like a welcome. It felt like a witness, bright-eyed and unable to look away.
His ears turned first. Not in alarm. In recognition. A hunter’s reflex, gentled by years and sharpened by memory. The room’s chatter did not cease, yet it thinned around a new silence, the way grass bends when something large passes through it. Ixqueya stood in the aisle of the tavern’s attention. Winter moved with her, not as chaotic storm but as hushed doctrine. Frost had found the floorboards and traced a pale corridor, a quiet signature that did not ask permission. To Watari, it looked like a trail on open ground after a night of hard sky; clear. Honest.
He let the brush hover above the board. Pigment trembled at the tip, dark as turned soil. His mouth softened, and a warm smile came to him without effort. It sat strangely beside the severity that clung to her. It was a human thing. A stubborn thing. The last hearth he carried that no winter had yet taken. He dipped the brush once, careful and unhurried. He dabbed it against the lip of his jar, as if to remind his hand that it still served creation. Not butchery. Not orders shouted into dust. He set the brush to the board and drew a short line, simple and true. A beam’s shadow. A corner’s patience. A mark that said the world was still mundane, even when the uncanny walked into it.
Only then did he lift his gaze fully to her. The room's light found her armor and broke upon it. White carapace, pale as bone given polish. Black seams that were precise and pitiless. Necro-ice inlays held a colder light that did not belong to flame. It made the air around it feel thinner. It made the room’s warmth seem almost embarrassed. His artist’s eye caught the way the plates fit and locked, not as decoration, but as a system. The suit looked grown rather than forged, as if some patient craft had learned to coax hard truth from living matter.
He saw the headdress flare above her, feathered and edged with winterglass. It carried the impression of a crown that had been earned by surviving what would have killed gentler women. He saw glyphwork upon her face, turquoise lines exact as a vow. Carmine accents like old blood made ceremonial. Her weapons, too, were part of her essence. The mace. The shield. Not merely armaments, but articles of faith given weight. In her, nothing seemed incidental. Even beauty was harnessed. Even that posture was law in it's own right.
Watari’s smile did not fade. It became quieter. More careful. He had known generals who wore cruelty like perfume, and saints who wore kindness like armor. Ixqueya did not wear either. She wore winter. That was simpler. That was harder. He answered her greeting in the same tongue she had used, his voice low enough that it would not compete with the room. “Cuix in cihuātl hualā tlācxitlaniz?”
The question rose lightly, even when its meaning did not. It carried a small humor, the kind that survives in veterans because without it the heart turns to stone. He let a chuckle follow, brief and warm. It was not derision. It was repayment. Coin returned in kind to the soft chortle she had loosed a moment before. Then he paused again, and the artist in him took the reins.
His eyes, dark brown and steady, studied her with the long attention of someone trying to understand the shape of a storm. Not with tavern hunger. Not with the flinching appraisal of men who measure danger and call it dislike. He looked as if he were memorizing a mountain before crossing it, accepting that it would not move for him. The white of her armor drew his gaze back, and with it the thought that came unbidden. White was a difficult color. It forgave nothing. It showed every stain. It demanded cleanliness or it demanded consequence. And on her, it did not look innocent. It looked deliberate.
He spoke, gentle and plain, as if speaking to a blade laid bare. “White flatters you.” His eyes traced the lines of her silhouette where plate met seam, where hard geometry served living curve without apology. “It is fitting. For one as cold as you are. For one who thinks with clean edges.” He did not linger on the thought too long. He did not presume closeness. He only gave the truth as he saw it, the way an artist offers a likeness and lets the subject decide whether it is an honor or an insult. After that, he let his gaze wander. Not to dismiss her. To take the room back into himself. To find his footing in the ordinary again.
He looked at the tavern as it endured around her presence. Timber beams groaned under their own age. Floorboards bowed with long habit. Smoke gathered beneath the rafters and made a second ceiling, lower and darker than the first. Lanternlight pooled in amber circles. It touched hands. It touched rims of cups. It never quite reached the corners where old debts slept. Patrons leaned inward, instinctively protective of their warmth, as if heat were coin and winter a thief.
He saw a fisherman in the next booth wipe his nose after a sneeze, blinking against the bite of haze. He saw a dog’s wary eye slide along the aisle and then look away, as if the animal had judged that some things are best left unchallenged. He heard murmurs thin where her cold had sharpened the air. He heard the hearth crackle, and it sounded less like comfort now. More like ceremony. All of it was paintable. All of it was a scene that would look almost gentle on a board, if one did not know what walked within it.
Watari’s hand found his brush again, not yet moving. He held it as one might hold a needle above cloth, ready to stitch the moment into permanence. He thought, briefly, of other rooms. War-tents that stank of horse and sweat. Command pavilions where maps were spread like flayed skins. Makeshift halls taken from human towns, their hearths lit under banners that did not belong. He thought of desert revolts, where heat made mirages out of men. He thought of Hextor’s invasion, where the world felt sick at the edges, as if rot had learned to speak. He thought of the defiled, and how even brave hearts learned new forms of quiet in their presence.
In those years, he had served her grandmother. He had been a general then. He had spoken with authority and sent people to their endings with a nod. He had learned how easily a name becomes a number, and how quickly a number becomes a grave. He had carried victories that tasted of ash. He had carried losses that never truly set down. Now he carried paint. He carried patience. He preferred it. It was not absolution. It was simply a different kind of duty.
He turned his attention back to Ixqueya and lifted his chin a fraction. The gesture was open, offered without insistence. “What brings the lady of purgatory to this quaint establishment in the middle of nowhere?” His eyes flicked toward the bar, to the dull line of bottles and the barkeep’s guarded posture. “May I buy you a drink. Or something steadier than drink.” He gestured with his brush hand, careful not to fling pigment. The motion was small, more invitation than command. It was the courtesy of someone who understood what it meant to share a fire when the world outside is sharp.
His smile returned, a little brighter now, as if he were willfully placing warmth between them and seeing whether it would survive. “I have learned,” he added softly, “that silence can be a fine companion. It can also be a cruel one. If you came here for reasons heavier than the road, then let the room be ordinary for a moment. Let it serve you, instead of staring at you.” And with that he did not press further. He let the offer hang in the lanternwash. He kept his brush poised above the board, ready to paint again. Ready to record the tavern’s mundane heart, even with winter standing brutishly in its aisle.
Ixqueya’s mouth bent, just barely, at the sound of mtoher dialect leaving a southerner’s throat without stumbling. A smirk, thin as a knife’s first glint.
“So you have not let it rot out of you.” Her voice carried controlled austerity. “Good. It remains a superior tongue. It cuts cleaner. It wastes less air.” The corner of her mouth held the smirk a moment longer. “Try not to bruise it with steppe slang.”
A pause. Then the jest sharpened.
“And you are still a Nokhoi.” Her gaze traveled him with a magistrate’s appraisal. “A southerner, no less. Most of your people are a degenerate brood. Inbred nematodes wriggling in the warm mud of their own excuses.” The line landed with deliberate cruelty. It was only half sincere. Her eyes admitted the remainder. “You, however, have persisted for decades as an exception. Cut from a different cloth. That distinction has cost you. It has also spared you.”
Her smirk faded. The change was so rare it felt like an eclipse, brief and disorienting. For an instant, her face held something close to neutrality. Almost human. Almost unarmored. She seemed to realize it at the same time the room did. A few patrons blinked as if they had seen a candle gutter without wind.
“Perhaps you should have painted that,” she added, as if commenting on an accounting error. Then she reclaimed herself, expression settling back into its familiar severity. The resting contempt returned. Clean. Uninviting. A mask that fit better than mercy ever had.
When his compliment about white reached her, it met that mask and slid off.
“It figures a painter would be drawn to color before motive.” Her tone remained cool, with a faint edge of amusement. “If the palette pleases you, thank Tonatiuh. He lectured me on color theory as if it were scripture and I was a stubborn novice. I listened. Occasionally.”
As she spoke, the tavern continued its small survivals around them. A spoon scraped a bowl too slowly. Someone at the bar attempted laughter and failed. Frost filmed the rim of a nearby cup, then retreated when its owner clutched it like a talisman. Lantern glass clouded in patches where warm breath met her wake. Even the smoke seemed to behave differently near her. It did not curl with its earlier laziness. It thinned. It climbed as if chastened.
Ixqueya’s gaze wandered, not in idle curiosity, but in clinical inventory. A fisherman’s cracked knuckles. A barmaid’s careful distance. The barkeep’s eyes that never stopped counting exits. The banal motions of people who believed their lives were important because they were small. She watched Watari’s fascination with it all and found it briefly incomprehensible.
Then she dismissed it with the same unkind certainty she reserved for most living habits.
The mindless mental ambling of a mongrel, she told herself. A dog worrying a bone because it cannot conceive of the graveyard it came from.
Her attention returned. Her cold blue eyes locked on his brighter gaze. The exchange held without touch. Without tenderness. Still it felt like a sacrament conducted in silence. Ice and ember. Life and death. A waltz performed on the thin line where a prayer becomes a threat.
She let that interplay exist for a heartbeat. Then she broke it with a quip, as if refusing to let the moment pretend it mattered too much.
“Buy me a drink, if you insist.” Her lips twitched. Not quite a smile. “I will eat and drink you into bankruptcy. Shelve the bravado. Spare me the pleasantries.” Her chin lifted slightly. “Spend that coin on a maiden. Or a lord more your type. You have the face of a man who knows how to invest attention where it will return dividends.”
The levity did not linger. It was swept away as quickly as breath in winter.
Her gaze narrowed. The room felt colder for it, as though some unseen window had been opened to the night.
“Tell me something more useful,” she said, voice lowering into a tone that carried verdicts. “Sukegei. What did the Blood Fox see in him, to waste training on a moral reprobate.” The contempt in her expression was effortless. Old. Well practiced. “Your mother is not renowned for charity. She does not nurture strays for the pleasure of kindness. If she sharpened that licentious mongrel, she did it for a reason.”
Ixqueya held his gaze, unblinking. The hearth crackled behind her like a affidavit coerced to listen.
“So.” A soft finality, akin to an arbiter commanding testimony. “What is the reason.”
Mathius came out of the dishonor his his hair tied back and spashes of water were on his apron and sweat was on his face. He bloated his face with a separate hand towel and he discarded it into the laundry bin.
He approached Sue and Basil with a bit of a grin. A sad and longing grin. He reached up and patted Sue's pelt on her head. "As time passes, the more I doubt you'll ever get to meet Azumi and Ren. You remind me so much of Azumi. Usually when I'd say her name, she would poof in and make a joke, then start chasing her tails"
He approached Sue and Basil with a bit of a grin. A sad and longing grin. He reached up and patted Sue's pelt on her head. "As time passes, the more I doubt you'll ever get to meet Azumi and Ren. You remind me so much of Azumi. Usually when I'd say her name, she would poof in and make a joke, then start chasing her tails"
"DAMNIT!"
His repulsors failed in mid air sending War Machine careening through the front door and slamming against a wall. He got to his feet. He was wearing the Mark II War Machine that he had modified, but apparently he didn't fully connect the couplers to the arc power source, and the repulsors cut out. He stood and the suit opened.
"Well.....at least the door is self-repairing. One of the few good things about this place being an inter-transdimensional....thing..."
His repulsors failed in mid air sending War Machine careening through the front door and slamming against a wall. He got to his feet. He was wearing the Mark II War Machine that he had modified, but apparently he didn't fully connect the couplers to the arc power source, and the repulsors cut out. He stood and the suit opened.
"Well.....at least the door is self-repairing. One of the few good things about this place being an inter-transdimensional....thing..."
"It's 'multiuniversal convergence nexus'. That means this is one of the points where all universes meet. Well, one of the few. Welcome back, Andrew. Theo left a little while ago."
...Xueqing seemed to be asleep. On a stool.
Well, she must have been through much today to be tired out shortly after her entrance. It was impressive how she managed to keep her balance while sleeping peacefully.
She seemed vulnerable at this point.
Well, she must have been through much today to be tired out shortly after her entrance. It was impressive how she managed to keep her balance while sleeping peacefully.
She seemed vulnerable at this point.
Watari’s brow rose, slow and mild, as if her words were no more than cinders lifted by a passing draft. He did not bristle. He had worn harsher speech than this beneath more pitiless welkins. He had listened to worse from dying men. A barbed jest did not reach deep enough to find purchase in him. His hand kept its labor. The brush moved with a measured grace that did not match the war-sinew in his forearm. It was the old discipline of a rider’s wrist repurposed. The bristles kissed the board. A thin line became a beam’s shadow. A soft wash became the hearth’s breathing glow. Forms gathered as if coaxed out of smoke. The tavern’s homely shape began to resolve into a living place, stubborn and enduring, like a hamlet clinging to a hillside while storms argued with it.
He spoke without looking away from the scene for long. “I respect your people.” The words were plain. “Giants are not barbarous. Not in truth. Only in the mouths of those who have never learned to see past their own fear.” His brush slid again, laying down the deepened brown of timber where the kiss of the light failed to reach. He painted the wear of hands on wood. The small, patient scarring of time. “Your culture is different,” he continued. “It is severe. It is beautiful, in the way winter is beautiful. Not gentle. Not asking to be understood. It simply is.”
He paused long enough to wet the brush and draw it clean through the water, letting pigment loosen and swirl like silt in a shallow stream. His gaze remained calm. It did not evade her. It did not cling. It held the middle distance where thought lives. “And I have always been fond,” his voice softening into something that sounded almost like reverence, “of the Tree of Life. Of the Undying Tree. It is an intriguing pillar. Philosophical. Theological. It does not pretend decay is the enemy. It makes decay into a door.”
He turned the brush in the cup with a slow spin, bristles whispering against tin. He did not lift it at once. He watched the water cloud, then settle, as if even disorder could be taught to rest. From the edge of his vision he caught that rare smirk, thin as a blade’s first light. He answered it with a warmth that did not ask permission. He did not press it into something heavier than it was. “I cannot paint something so winsome as a genuine smirk,” he said, and the humor in him carried the ease of a man who had survived too much to be so eoffrtlessly embarrassed. “Some things are meant to pass. They are better as fleeting weather. Kept in one memory. Not nailed to a board like a butterfly.”
He let the brush go and left it standing in the cup. Then he raised his eyes fully, and the lantern’s honeyed glow caught his face and made it seem, for a moment, less carved by campaigns. “I am Nokhoi,” he said. “And I am proud.” The tavern’s small noises continued around them. A spoon scraped porcelain. A log shifted in the hearth. Smoke climbed and thinned beneath the rafters. None of it interrupted him. His voice did not need to be loud to hold weight.
“When the defiled assaulted our world,” he went on, “it was my people who answered the Verdant Dynasty’s call. Our warbands rode when others debated. When Xandera’s command went out, our banners followed. Not because we loved the work. Because we understood what it meant to let rot spread unchallenged.” His gaze dipped briefly, not in shame, but in memory. He had seen banners burn. He had watched triumph sour into ash. He had learned that survival is often purchased with ugly coin.
“I am thankful for your mother,” he said, and he gave the statement the seriousness of an oath. “The Lichqueen is, ironically, one of the few reasons there is still life in this world. Perhaps in others as well. Who can say where the consequences of her will truly end.” He did not dress it in apology. He did not sharpen it into praise. He let it stand as a hard fact. A stone placed on a grave. Heavy. Necessary.
When he spoke of Tonatiuh, there was a shift in him toward curiosity, the way a traveler’s mind leans toward a name he intends to remember. “I do not know this Tonatiuh,” he admitted. “I only know my sister speaks of him. And the Lady of Spice, Indemira, favors his habilment.” His mouth quirked. “For a man who works with needles and threads, he seems to wield influence like a general carrying a standard.”
He looked back to his board, as if ensuring the hearth’s glow was truthful, then returned his attention to Ixqueya with a faint brightening in his eyes. “Someday I would like to meet him. It takes a strong will to educate a Jorgenskull.” He let the jest land with just enough firmness to be felt. “Your line is famed for stubbornness.” Then he added, gently, and with that same warm audacity that did not fit beside her deportment.
“It is good you have friends. You need not hide it. I can hear it in the way you speak of him.” His smile grew a fraction. “It seems even the Hoarfrost Mistress can let her mask slip on occasion.” It was a small counter-stroke. Not cruel. Not timid. A nudge meant to bruise pride lightly rather than flatter it. Something in Watari suspected she could use the contact, like a blade benefits from a stone. He retrieved his brush and returned to the painting, adding the curve of a bench, the dull glint of pewter, the shadow beneath a table where boots had scuffed the floor. He had noticed her inventory of the room. The way she measured exits. The way she weighed strangers as if each were an entry in a ledger. He had not expected that attention from someone so stiff. It amused him.
“And they call me a stick in the mud,” he murmured, eyes alight with mirth as he worked. “If that is true, what does it make you.” His grin widened, sudden and unguarded. It did not mock her. It acknowledged her. “As for drinking me into bankruptcy.” He glanced briefly toward the bar, toward the bottles waiting to be purchased. “That would be costly. Thankfully, I offered knowing you do not care much for alcohol.” His voice carried an easy gentleness. “You are not exactly the life, or the afterlife, of the party.”
He let the humor sit for a breath, then softened it into something honest. “But that is all right. I like you the way you are.” He did not make the words coy. “Frigid. Dry. Determined. Those are acceptable qualities. Better than most.” He shrugged, returning to his work as if this were all as ordinary as weather. A veteran’s ease. A poet’s stubborn affection for the world as it is, not as it should be. Then her question about Sukegei settled between them with the weight of testimony. Even the hearth’s crackle sounded like punctuation against it.
Watari’s brush slowed. He drew one last line to complete the edge of a table in the painting, as though he refused to leave anything unfinished when speaking of old campaigns. Then he exhaled. “Who knows what goes through my mother’s head.” His tone held no resentment. Only acceptance. “I gave up long ago trying to unravel that enigma. She was my mother. She was also her own storm.” He looked up, eyes steady.
“If I had to wager, I would guess this. Sukegei is useful. Vulgarity is loud. Usefulness is quieter.” His gaze returned to the board, and he placed a small touch of light on a tankard’s rim, making it gleam. A mundane mercy. “Back then we needed swords more than we needed morality. Those days were dark. I hope they are behind us.” He let a beat pass. Then he lifted his eyes to her again, and his voice took on a practical attentiveness, as if he were meeting her on her own ground without turning it into a contest. “Speaking of what is not behind us.” He held the brush poised, ready to paint, ready to listen. “How is your investigation coming along?”
He spoke without looking away from the scene for long. “I respect your people.” The words were plain. “Giants are not barbarous. Not in truth. Only in the mouths of those who have never learned to see past their own fear.” His brush slid again, laying down the deepened brown of timber where the kiss of the light failed to reach. He painted the wear of hands on wood. The small, patient scarring of time. “Your culture is different,” he continued. “It is severe. It is beautiful, in the way winter is beautiful. Not gentle. Not asking to be understood. It simply is.”
He paused long enough to wet the brush and draw it clean through the water, letting pigment loosen and swirl like silt in a shallow stream. His gaze remained calm. It did not evade her. It did not cling. It held the middle distance where thought lives. “And I have always been fond,” his voice softening into something that sounded almost like reverence, “of the Tree of Life. Of the Undying Tree. It is an intriguing pillar. Philosophical. Theological. It does not pretend decay is the enemy. It makes decay into a door.”
He turned the brush in the cup with a slow spin, bristles whispering against tin. He did not lift it at once. He watched the water cloud, then settle, as if even disorder could be taught to rest. From the edge of his vision he caught that rare smirk, thin as a blade’s first light. He answered it with a warmth that did not ask permission. He did not press it into something heavier than it was. “I cannot paint something so winsome as a genuine smirk,” he said, and the humor in him carried the ease of a man who had survived too much to be so eoffrtlessly embarrassed. “Some things are meant to pass. They are better as fleeting weather. Kept in one memory. Not nailed to a board like a butterfly.”
He let the brush go and left it standing in the cup. Then he raised his eyes fully, and the lantern’s honeyed glow caught his face and made it seem, for a moment, less carved by campaigns. “I am Nokhoi,” he said. “And I am proud.” The tavern’s small noises continued around them. A spoon scraped porcelain. A log shifted in the hearth. Smoke climbed and thinned beneath the rafters. None of it interrupted him. His voice did not need to be loud to hold weight.
“When the defiled assaulted our world,” he went on, “it was my people who answered the Verdant Dynasty’s call. Our warbands rode when others debated. When Xandera’s command went out, our banners followed. Not because we loved the work. Because we understood what it meant to let rot spread unchallenged.” His gaze dipped briefly, not in shame, but in memory. He had seen banners burn. He had watched triumph sour into ash. He had learned that survival is often purchased with ugly coin.
“I am thankful for your mother,” he said, and he gave the statement the seriousness of an oath. “The Lichqueen is, ironically, one of the few reasons there is still life in this world. Perhaps in others as well. Who can say where the consequences of her will truly end.” He did not dress it in apology. He did not sharpen it into praise. He let it stand as a hard fact. A stone placed on a grave. Heavy. Necessary.
When he spoke of Tonatiuh, there was a shift in him toward curiosity, the way a traveler’s mind leans toward a name he intends to remember. “I do not know this Tonatiuh,” he admitted. “I only know my sister speaks of him. And the Lady of Spice, Indemira, favors his habilment.” His mouth quirked. “For a man who works with needles and threads, he seems to wield influence like a general carrying a standard.”
He looked back to his board, as if ensuring the hearth’s glow was truthful, then returned his attention to Ixqueya with a faint brightening in his eyes. “Someday I would like to meet him. It takes a strong will to educate a Jorgenskull.” He let the jest land with just enough firmness to be felt. “Your line is famed for stubbornness.” Then he added, gently, and with that same warm audacity that did not fit beside her deportment.
“It is good you have friends. You need not hide it. I can hear it in the way you speak of him.” His smile grew a fraction. “It seems even the Hoarfrost Mistress can let her mask slip on occasion.” It was a small counter-stroke. Not cruel. Not timid. A nudge meant to bruise pride lightly rather than flatter it. Something in Watari suspected she could use the contact, like a blade benefits from a stone. He retrieved his brush and returned to the painting, adding the curve of a bench, the dull glint of pewter, the shadow beneath a table where boots had scuffed the floor. He had noticed her inventory of the room. The way she measured exits. The way she weighed strangers as if each were an entry in a ledger. He had not expected that attention from someone so stiff. It amused him.
“And they call me a stick in the mud,” he murmured, eyes alight with mirth as he worked. “If that is true, what does it make you.” His grin widened, sudden and unguarded. It did not mock her. It acknowledged her. “As for drinking me into bankruptcy.” He glanced briefly toward the bar, toward the bottles waiting to be purchased. “That would be costly. Thankfully, I offered knowing you do not care much for alcohol.” His voice carried an easy gentleness. “You are not exactly the life, or the afterlife, of the party.”
He let the humor sit for a breath, then softened it into something honest. “But that is all right. I like you the way you are.” He did not make the words coy. “Frigid. Dry. Determined. Those are acceptable qualities. Better than most.” He shrugged, returning to his work as if this were all as ordinary as weather. A veteran’s ease. A poet’s stubborn affection for the world as it is, not as it should be. Then her question about Sukegei settled between them with the weight of testimony. Even the hearth’s crackle sounded like punctuation against it.
Watari’s brush slowed. He drew one last line to complete the edge of a table in the painting, as though he refused to leave anything unfinished when speaking of old campaigns. Then he exhaled. “Who knows what goes through my mother’s head.” His tone held no resentment. Only acceptance. “I gave up long ago trying to unravel that enigma. She was my mother. She was also her own storm.” He looked up, eyes steady.
“If I had to wager, I would guess this. Sukegei is useful. Vulgarity is loud. Usefulness is quieter.” His gaze returned to the board, and he placed a small touch of light on a tankard’s rim, making it gleam. A mundane mercy. “Back then we needed swords more than we needed morality. Those days were dark. I hope they are behind us.” He let a beat pass. Then he lifted his eyes to her again, and his voice took on a practical attentiveness, as if he were meeting her on her own ground without turning it into a contest. “Speaking of what is not behind us.” He held the brush poised, ready to paint, ready to listen. “How is your investigation coming along?”
Mathius nudged her gently "you can take a room upstairs" he said softly
"...?" Feeling the nudge, Xueqing woke up, and you can clearly see from her face she was drowsy.
After having heard Mathius' words, she nodded. "...sure, thank you." Then, she slowly got off the stool, and went upstairs...
After having heard Mathius' words, she nodded. "...sure, thank you." Then, she slowly got off the stool, and went upstairs...
Andrew Rhodes wrote:
"DAMNIT!"
His repulsors failed in mid air sending War Machine careening through the front door and slamming against a wall. He got to his feet. He was wearing the Mark II War Machine that he had modified, but apparently he didn't fully connect the couplers to the arc power source, and the repulsors cut out. He stood and the suit opened.
"Well.....at least the door is self-repairing. One of the few good things about this place being an inter-transdimensional....thing..."
His repulsors failed in mid air sending War Machine careening through the front door and slamming against a wall. He got to his feet. He was wearing the Mark II War Machine that he had modified, but apparently he didn't fully connect the couplers to the arc power source, and the repulsors cut out. He stood and the suit opened.
"Well.....at least the door is self-repairing. One of the few good things about this place being an inter-transdimensional....thing..."
"What did you break this time, Andrew?"
"I was working on the Mark II and I forgot to tighten down the couplers, so the repulsirs solution off mid-flight. I opened the drag fins so I could have a controlled crash-landing. Thank God I had MARVIN on"
"Ah."
Watari Devante wrote:
Watari’s brow rose, slow and mild, as if her words were no more than cinders lifted by a passing draft. He did not bristle. He had worn harsher speech than this beneath more pitiless welkins. He had listened to worse from dying men. A barbed jest did not reach deep enough to find purchase in him. His hand kept its labor. The brush moved with a measured grace that did not match the war-sinew in his forearm. It was the old discipline of a rider’s wrist repurposed. The bristles kissed the board. A thin line became a beam’s shadow. A soft wash became the hearth’s breathing glow. Forms gathered as if coaxed out of smoke. The tavern’s homely shape began to resolve into a living place, stubborn and enduring, like a hamlet clinging to a hillside while storms argued with it.
He spoke without looking away from the scene for long. “I respect your people.” The words were plain. “Giants are not barbarous. Not in truth. Only in the mouths of those who have never learned to see past their own fear.” His brush slid again, laying down the deepened brown of timber where the kiss of the light failed to reach. He painted the wear of hands on wood. The small, patient scarring of time. “Your culture is different,” he continued. “It is severe. It is beautiful, in the way winter is beautiful. Not gentle. Not asking to be understood. It simply is.”
He paused long enough to wet the brush and draw it clean through the water, letting pigment loosen and swirl like silt in a shallow stream. His gaze remained calm. It did not evade her. It did not cling. It held the middle distance where thought lives. “And I have always been fond,” his voice softening into something that sounded almost like reverence, “of the Tree of Life. Of the Undying Tree. It is an intriguing pillar. Philosophical. Theological. It does not pretend decay is the enemy. It makes decay into a door.”
He turned the brush in the cup with a slow spin, bristles whispering against tin. He did not lift it at once. He watched the water cloud, then settle, as if even disorder could be taught to rest. From the edge of his vision he caught that rare smirk, thin as a blade’s first light. He answered it with a warmth that did not ask permission. He did not press it into something heavier than it was. “I cannot paint something so winsome as a genuine smirk,” he said, and the humor in him carried the ease of a man who had survived too much to be so eoffrtlessly embarrassed. “Some things are meant to pass. They are better as fleeting weather. Kept in one memory. Not nailed to a board like a butterfly.”
He let the brush go and left it standing in the cup. Then he raised his eyes fully, and the lantern’s honeyed glow caught his face and made it seem, for a moment, less carved by campaigns. “I am Nokhoi,” he said. “And I am proud.” The tavern’s small noises continued around them. A spoon scraped porcelain. A log shifted in the hearth. Smoke climbed and thinned beneath the rafters. None of it interrupted him. His voice did not need to be loud to hold weight.
“When the defiled assaulted our world,” he went on, “it was my people who answered the Verdant Dynasty’s call. Our warbands rode when others debated. When Xandera’s command went out, our banners followed. Not because we loved the work. Because we understood what it meant to let rot spread unchallenged.” His gaze dipped briefly, not in shame, but in memory. He had seen banners burn. He had watched triumph sour into ash. He had learned that survival is often purchased with ugly coin.
“I am thankful for your mother,” he said, and he gave the statement the seriousness of an oath. “The Lichqueen is, ironically, one of the few reasons there is still life in this world. Perhaps in others as well. Who can say where the consequences of her will truly end.” He did not dress it in apology. He did not sharpen it into praise. He let it stand as a hard fact. A stone placed on a grave. Heavy. Necessary.
When he spoke of Tonatiuh, there was a shift in him toward curiosity, the way a traveler’s mind leans toward a name he intends to remember. “I do not know this Tonatiuh,” he admitted. “I only know my sister speaks of him. And the Lady of Spice, Indemira, favors his habilment.” His mouth quirked. “For a man who works with needles and threads, he seems to wield influence like a general carrying a standard.”
He looked back to his board, as if ensuring the hearth’s glow was truthful, then returned his attention to Ixqueya with a faint brightening in his eyes. “Someday I would like to meet him. It takes a strong will to educate a Jorgenskull.” He let the jest land with just enough firmness to be felt. “Your line is famed for stubbornness.” Then he added, gently, and with that same warm audacity that did not fit beside her deportment.
“It is good you have friends. You need not hide it. I can hear it in the way you speak of him.” His smile grew a fraction. “It seems even the Hoarfrost Mistress can let her mask slip on occasion.” It was a small counter-stroke. Not cruel. Not timid. A nudge meant to bruise pride lightly rather than flatter it. Something in Watari suspected she could use the contact, like a blade benefits from a stone. He retrieved his brush and returned to the painting, adding the curve of a bench, the dull glint of pewter, the shadow beneath a table where boots had scuffed the floor. He had noticed her inventory of the room. The way she measured exits. The way she weighed strangers as if each were an entry in a ledger. He had not expected that attention from someone so stiff. It amused him.
“And they call me a stick in the mud,” he murmured, eyes alight with mirth as he worked. “If that is true, what does it make you.” His grin widened, sudden and unguarded. It did not mock her. It acknowledged her. “As for drinking me into bankruptcy.” He glanced briefly toward the bar, toward the bottles waiting to be purchased. “That would be costly. Thankfully, I offered knowing you do not care much for alcohol.” His voice carried an easy gentleness. “You are not exactly the life, or the afterlife, of the party.”
He let the humor sit for a breath, then softened it into something honest. “But that is all right. I like you the way you are.” He did not make the words coy. “Frigid. Dry. Determined. Those are acceptable qualities. Better than most.” He shrugged, returning to his work as if this were all as ordinary as weather. A veteran’s ease. A poet’s stubborn affection for the world as it is, not as it should be. Then her question about Sukegei settled between them with the weight of testimony. Even the hearth’s crackle sounded like punctuation against it.
Watari’s brush slowed. He drew one last line to complete the edge of a table in the painting, as though he refused to leave anything unfinished when speaking of old campaigns. Then he exhaled. “Who knows what goes through my mother’s head.” His tone held no resentment. Only acceptance. “I gave up long ago trying to unravel that enigma. She was my mother. She was also her own storm.” He looked up, eyes steady.
“If I had to wager, I would guess this. Sukegei is useful. Vulgarity is loud. Usefulness is quieter.” His gaze returned to the board, and he placed a small touch of light on a tankard’s rim, making it gleam. A mundane mercy. “Back then we needed swords more than we needed morality. Those days were dark. I hope they are behind us.” He let a beat pass. Then he lifted his eyes to her again, and his voice took on a practical attentiveness, as if he were meeting her on her own ground without turning it into a contest. “Speaking of what is not behind us.” He held the brush poised, ready to paint, ready to listen. “How is your investigation coming along?”
He spoke without looking away from the scene for long. “I respect your people.” The words were plain. “Giants are not barbarous. Not in truth. Only in the mouths of those who have never learned to see past their own fear.” His brush slid again, laying down the deepened brown of timber where the kiss of the light failed to reach. He painted the wear of hands on wood. The small, patient scarring of time. “Your culture is different,” he continued. “It is severe. It is beautiful, in the way winter is beautiful. Not gentle. Not asking to be understood. It simply is.”
He paused long enough to wet the brush and draw it clean through the water, letting pigment loosen and swirl like silt in a shallow stream. His gaze remained calm. It did not evade her. It did not cling. It held the middle distance where thought lives. “And I have always been fond,” his voice softening into something that sounded almost like reverence, “of the Tree of Life. Of the Undying Tree. It is an intriguing pillar. Philosophical. Theological. It does not pretend decay is the enemy. It makes decay into a door.”
He turned the brush in the cup with a slow spin, bristles whispering against tin. He did not lift it at once. He watched the water cloud, then settle, as if even disorder could be taught to rest. From the edge of his vision he caught that rare smirk, thin as a blade’s first light. He answered it with a warmth that did not ask permission. He did not press it into something heavier than it was. “I cannot paint something so winsome as a genuine smirk,” he said, and the humor in him carried the ease of a man who had survived too much to be so eoffrtlessly embarrassed. “Some things are meant to pass. They are better as fleeting weather. Kept in one memory. Not nailed to a board like a butterfly.”
He let the brush go and left it standing in the cup. Then he raised his eyes fully, and the lantern’s honeyed glow caught his face and made it seem, for a moment, less carved by campaigns. “I am Nokhoi,” he said. “And I am proud.” The tavern’s small noises continued around them. A spoon scraped porcelain. A log shifted in the hearth. Smoke climbed and thinned beneath the rafters. None of it interrupted him. His voice did not need to be loud to hold weight.
“When the defiled assaulted our world,” he went on, “it was my people who answered the Verdant Dynasty’s call. Our warbands rode when others debated. When Xandera’s command went out, our banners followed. Not because we loved the work. Because we understood what it meant to let rot spread unchallenged.” His gaze dipped briefly, not in shame, but in memory. He had seen banners burn. He had watched triumph sour into ash. He had learned that survival is often purchased with ugly coin.
“I am thankful for your mother,” he said, and he gave the statement the seriousness of an oath. “The Lichqueen is, ironically, one of the few reasons there is still life in this world. Perhaps in others as well. Who can say where the consequences of her will truly end.” He did not dress it in apology. He did not sharpen it into praise. He let it stand as a hard fact. A stone placed on a grave. Heavy. Necessary.
When he spoke of Tonatiuh, there was a shift in him toward curiosity, the way a traveler’s mind leans toward a name he intends to remember. “I do not know this Tonatiuh,” he admitted. “I only know my sister speaks of him. And the Lady of Spice, Indemira, favors his habilment.” His mouth quirked. “For a man who works with needles and threads, he seems to wield influence like a general carrying a standard.”
He looked back to his board, as if ensuring the hearth’s glow was truthful, then returned his attention to Ixqueya with a faint brightening in his eyes. “Someday I would like to meet him. It takes a strong will to educate a Jorgenskull.” He let the jest land with just enough firmness to be felt. “Your line is famed for stubbornness.” Then he added, gently, and with that same warm audacity that did not fit beside her deportment.
“It is good you have friends. You need not hide it. I can hear it in the way you speak of him.” His smile grew a fraction. “It seems even the Hoarfrost Mistress can let her mask slip on occasion.” It was a small counter-stroke. Not cruel. Not timid. A nudge meant to bruise pride lightly rather than flatter it. Something in Watari suspected she could use the contact, like a blade benefits from a stone. He retrieved his brush and returned to the painting, adding the curve of a bench, the dull glint of pewter, the shadow beneath a table where boots had scuffed the floor. He had noticed her inventory of the room. The way she measured exits. The way she weighed strangers as if each were an entry in a ledger. He had not expected that attention from someone so stiff. It amused him.
“And they call me a stick in the mud,” he murmured, eyes alight with mirth as he worked. “If that is true, what does it make you.” His grin widened, sudden and unguarded. It did not mock her. It acknowledged her. “As for drinking me into bankruptcy.” He glanced briefly toward the bar, toward the bottles waiting to be purchased. “That would be costly. Thankfully, I offered knowing you do not care much for alcohol.” His voice carried an easy gentleness. “You are not exactly the life, or the afterlife, of the party.”
He let the humor sit for a breath, then softened it into something honest. “But that is all right. I like you the way you are.” He did not make the words coy. “Frigid. Dry. Determined. Those are acceptable qualities. Better than most.” He shrugged, returning to his work as if this were all as ordinary as weather. A veteran’s ease. A poet’s stubborn affection for the world as it is, not as it should be. Then her question about Sukegei settled between them with the weight of testimony. Even the hearth’s crackle sounded like punctuation against it.
Watari’s brush slowed. He drew one last line to complete the edge of a table in the painting, as though he refused to leave anything unfinished when speaking of old campaigns. Then he exhaled. “Who knows what goes through my mother’s head.” His tone held no resentment. Only acceptance. “I gave up long ago trying to unravel that enigma. She was my mother. She was also her own storm.” He looked up, eyes steady.
“If I had to wager, I would guess this. Sukegei is useful. Vulgarity is loud. Usefulness is quieter.” His gaze returned to the board, and he placed a small touch of light on a tankard’s rim, making it gleam. A mundane mercy. “Back then we needed swords more than we needed morality. Those days were dark. I hope they are behind us.” He let a beat pass. Then he lifted his eyes to her again, and his voice took on a practical attentiveness, as if he were meeting her on her own ground without turning it into a contest. “Speaking of what is not behind us.” He held the brush poised, ready to paint, ready to listen. “How is your investigation coming along?”
Ixqueya received his unruffled brow the way a crypt receives incense. With indifference that was not quite indolence. With patience that was not quite mercy. The tavern’s warmth continued to officiate behind iron bars. Yet in her vicinity it felt relegated. A brazier reduced from monarch to acolyte. Flames still declaimed. Sparks still vaulted upward like brief seraphs. They perished before they could become prayer. Smoke accumulated beneath the rafters in a low, fuliginous canopy, as if the ceiling itself had grown penitential.
He continued painting. That, more than his speech, was the irritation. Most men interrupted their own labor to perform respect. He did not. His brushwork remained metronomic. A rider’s discipline translated into artistry. Bristles kissed wood. Pigment became timber-shadow. A wash became hearth-breath. The tavern emerged on the board like a palimpsest made legible. Homely endurance. Scarred furniture. Light pooling where it was permitted. Darkness persisting where it had tenure.
Ixqueya watched him as one watches a doctrinal anomaly. A southerner who did not genuflect. A Nokhoi who did not bray. A veteran whose composure was not theatrical. It was tempered. Heat-cured. The sort of restraint that survives campaigns because it has outlived hysteria. She had been reared to regard his lineage as a slurry of appetites and loud excuses. A wretched stock. Ignoble. Useful only as fodder or noise. Yet the man before her refused the expected script. He spoke plainly. He worked steadily. He offered esteem without supplication.
That was the first hook of the puzzle. He did not beg to be believed.
When he said giants were not barbarous, she felt no gratitude. Only a thin, private contempt for a world in which such a statement still counted as courage. His phrasing was simple. Its simplicity gave it weight. He spoke as if describing weather, not arguing a case. She noted that. She also noted what he did not do. He did not weaponize admiration. He did not turn her people into spectacle. He did not ask for absolution for praising them.
Then he invoked the Undying Tree.
The name touched a deeper chamber in her. Not sentiment. Structure. The Undying Tree was not a comforting parable. It was a funerary calculus. It did not flatter the living. It disciplined them. Decay was not tragedy. It was taxonomy. The clerk-work of the cosmos. Tallies made in marrow. Collections made in silence. Most outsiders either saccharined that doctrine or recoiled from it. Watari did neither. He spoke of rot without squeamishness. He spoke of passage without romantic fog. He made it sound like a door because he had likely watched that door open.
Against her will, a form of praise surfaced. Not kindness. Recognition.
An aberrant man. An outlier. A rare refinement from a base vein.
She permitted the thought one heartbeat, then filed it away. Praise, ungoverned, becomes indulgence. Indulgence becomes error.
Her gaze slid over the tavern again. Mugs held like reliquaries. Hands guarding heat as if it were coin. A spoon scraping porcelain with the slow insistence of poverty. A dog’s wary eye that understood hierarchy without catechism. The room bent around her presence like a congregation that did not like its own piety.
When she spoke, it was quiet. It carried anyway.
“You offer respect as if it were a gift.” Her voice had the chill lucidity of a verdict. “It is not. It is the minimum toll for speaking intelligently.” She let her eyes rest on him. “You are correct. Fear is the preferred theologian of the small. It baptizes ignorance and calls it certainty.”
His description of severity as beauty earned him the faintest narrowing of her eyes. Not displeasure. Calibration.
“Do not make winter into ornament.” Her tone sharpened. “Winter is not beautiful because it is cruel. It is beautiful because it is incorruptible. It performs ablation. It strips pretense. It reveals the load-bearing beams of a soul.”
He had spoken of the Undying Tree with reverence. She did not permit him to keep that reverence untested.
“And do not handle the Tree like a curiosity.” She leaned a fraction into the wall. The tavern’s air seemed to grow more rarefied. “It is not a philosophy to admire from a safe hearth. It is a praxis. It costs. It collects. It does not negotiate. If you truly understand that, you will stop describing decay as if it exists to comfort you.”
Then he said he was thankful for her mother. He named the Lichqueen. He meant it as stone on a grave. Heavy. Necessary.
Ixqueya’s expression did not flare. It refined. Her stillness became narrower. More judicial.
“No.” One syllable. Final.
Her eyes held his without blinking.
“Xandera is not my mother.” The correction was delivered with patrician precision, the sort that makes error feel like a stain. “She is my sovereign. Your mother is the Blood Fox. Do not confuse womb with throne. Men who blur categories do not live long. They become cautionary inscriptions.”
He spoke of Tonatiuh with curiosity. Ixqueya’s mouth threatened a smile, then chose austerity instead.
“You do not know him.” A faint, almost cruel amusement entered her voice. “Be grateful. He will take your measure with his eyes before your greeting ends. He will decide what you should become. He will call it benevolence.” She glanced, briefly, toward the white of her own carapace. “If my palette pleases you, credit him. He teaches color theory like a priest teaches sin. Loudly. With unearned certainty. The results are acceptable. That is why he remains in my orbit.”
Then he spoke of friends. Of masks. Of liking her as she was. He tried to turn her into something intimate. Something containable.
Ixqueya’s face settled into its most perfected contempt. Not anger. Administration.
“You are not a confessor.” Her voice cooled further. “Do not pretend pastoral office. You do not get to diagnose me as though I were a patient.” She let a pause fall. Heavy as wet wool. “As for liking me. Keep that sentiment for those who require it. I do not.”
His jest about drink and bankruptcy drew a brief glance toward the bar. Bottles lined like petty idols. Glass altars for men who wanted forgetfulness to feel sacramental.
Then came Sukegei. Useful. Vulgarity loud. Utility quiet. The soldier’s answer. Pragmatic. Incomplete.
Ixqueya’s eyes sharpened. The hearth cracked behind her like punctuation.
“Useful is not explanation.” Her voice lowered into a colder register. “It is the word men use when they wish to conceal motive behind function.” Her gaze pinned him. “Your mother does not train men out of charity. She trains them to be spent. If she shaped Sukegei, she intended a return.”
At last, his question. Her investigation.
Ixqueya’s attention moved through the tavern again, swift as an audit. The man whose laughter arrived a heartbeat late. The woman whose fingers hovered near a pocket with rehearsed caution. The barkeep’s posture that suggested old lessons in ducking. Ordinary life. The preferred vestment of conspiracy. Rot rarely entered with trumpets. It arrived as habit.
“It advances.” Her words were clipped. Exact. “Quietly. The docks are staged. Commerce is being used as a dirge a ritual meant to distract. The props change. The hands do not.” She paused. Considered how much to reveal. “Objects are moving that do not behave like inert cargo. They draw consequence. They invite attentions that should not exist.”
Her gaze returned to Watari. The puzzle remained. A man of ignoble provenance. Yet disciplined. Clear-eyed. Strangely principled in the way only veterans can be, when principle has been scoured down to what still functions.
She let him feel, for a moment, the rare weight of her recognition. Not warmth. Not approval. Acknowledgment.
“You are an irritant to my assumptions,” she said softly. “That is not an insult. It is the closest thing to praise you will receive from me.”
Then she concluded, voice turning again to iron.
“If Sukegei is near this flow, your mother placed him there because degeneracy is light. Light things pass through narrow doors.” Her eyes did not blink. “That leaves two possibilities. He is an instrument. Or he is a sacrifice who has not yet learned he is already dead.”
She held him, smoke and fire behind them. Winter between them.
“So tell me.” Her tone was calm. Implacable. “Which role is he playing.”
Watari let her words fall where they wished. He did not reach out to catch them, nor did he turn aside from them. They settled in him like fine snow, yet doing little to change the shape of the man beneath. He had seen sharper speech thrown in brighter anger. He had heard decrees spoken in tents where maps were laid like flayed skins. He had learned that contempt, when it is practiced often, becomes routine. It may chill, yet it rarely instructs.
His brush did not falter, as per usual. In the flickering light of his corner, he worked as steadily as a mason setting stones in a wall that must outlast him. The tavern, for all its noise and smell and small hunger, began to gather itself upon the board. Almost as if its spirit had been waiting to be named. Timber-dark became timber-true. The hearth’s core became a living red that breathed outward into amber. Smoke was not merely haze; it was a low cloudbank pressed beneath rafters. It turned the ceiling into a dusk that never quite lifted. Light pooled where it was allowed. Shadow remained where it had earned tenure. Even the scarring of the tables came through.
Beyond his board, the room continued its homely endurance. A spoon scraped a bowl with the slow insistence of poverty. A boot shifted while a bench creaked. Over it all, the hearth remained, yet near Ixqueya it felt diminished. Almost as if she had judged it; a monarch reduced to an acolyte. Flames still spoke. Sparks still leapt upward like brief bright birds. They perished before they could become anything worthy of notice.
He listened to her correction and accepted it without protest. Pride did not rise in him like a wounded animal. He let the mistake die cleanly. “You are right,” he said, quietly. “I spoke wrongly.” He rinsed his brush. The water clouded with pigment, a small storm in a cup. He swirled it once. The motion was slow and careful, like stirring silt without waking what sleeps beneath. “I do not blur womb with throne,” he added. “Not when it matters. Habit betrayed me. Not intent.” He knew that Xandera was her mother, but her status as a symbol as the lich queen superseded maternal classification.
He set the brush back to the board and finished the stroke he had begun, because he had carried one lesson from war into every peaceful craft. Do not leave a line unfinished when danger is near. Ruin loves gaps. Only then did he lift his eyes to her fully. The lantern's glow warmed the brown of them until they looked like polished wood held too long near fire. His face remained composed as an old tree is beneath wind that has broken younger branches.
Then, as if her inquiry and the tavern’s hush were not the only things that mattered in the world. Watari asked her a question that belonged to quieter seasons. “What do you think of my work?” It was not a plea. Not a bid for recognitiopn. It was the simple curiosity of a craftsman placing his labor before a mind he knew to be sharp, and therefore worth the risk of honesty.
He tipped the board slightly. Watari did not offer it into her hands. He did not step into her gravity. He merely angled it so she could see what he had made of this place. The hearth rendered as a living core rather than a decorative blaze. Lanternlight laid down in honest pools. Smoke as a low canopy of brume. Patrons suggested by posture and weight, not stolen likeness. The room held as it truly was; not noble. It was simply enduring.
“I have painted battle, and battle always lies. It is too loud. Too hungry for meaning. Too eager to make blood into a story that sounds clean.” His gaze dropped to the board for a brief spell, as if he were checking a line for fairness. “This is harder. The ordinary does not shout its name. It has to be listened into shape.” He let that rest. The tavern breathed around it. Fire crackled. A patron attempted laughter and failed, choking on his poison of choice.
Then he returned to her question, as one returns from a window to a blade laid on the table. “As for Sukegei.” His voice remained calm. It carried the plainness of a soldier. “I do not know, with certainty, which role he is playing. If I claimed certainty, I would be lying. You do not seem fond of lies.” He did not soften the admission. He let it stand like a post driven into ground. “I have seen men used as instruments, and I have seen men offered as sacrifices who did not know the altar had already been built. Sometimes the difference is only in the patience of the hand that holds them.”
His brush moved again, almost absent-mindedly, adding a thin line of shadow beneath a bench. A small act. A grounding act. As if to keep his words from drifting. “My mother trains for returns. She does not sharpen blades out of kindness. She sharpens them to be used.” His eyes lifted to Ixqueya again. “If Sukegei is near the flow you describe, then yes. He is there because he can pass where heavier men cannot. Because he draws attention and survives it.” He added one more quiet stroke, a gleam on a tankard rim, the kind of detail that makes a scene feel lived rather than staged.
“If you force me to choose. I would wager he is intended as an instrument first. Sacrifices are chosen for reliability. He is not reliable. He is stubborn. He is lucky. He is infuriatingly hard to kill cleanly.” A faint, dry humor touched his mouth and faded, like sunlight briefly finding a crack in cloud. “But instruments can become sacrifices. Especially when the hand holding them grows impatient. If your net tightens, then roles change. Men discover too late that the door they were meant to slip through has become a trap.”
Watari’s gaze drifted across the tavern for a breath. The counting barkeep. The late-laughing man. The woman whose fingers hovered near her pocket as if rehearsing theft or fear. Ordinary life wearing secrecy like a heavy cloak. “You asked which role he is playing.” His voice gained a firmer edge. “The better question is who is holding the script. Whatever is moving that should not move. Those are the hands that decide whether a man is expendable or not.”
He did not flatter her. He did not fear her. He spoke as one veteran to another force in the field. “And you...You are the kind of winter that strips pretense. If he is near this flow, he will not stay ambiguous for long. You will make him reveal what he is, or you will break him until he does.” He paused. Firelight shifted on the wall. The tavern seemed to lean in, not because it cared for truth, but because it always listened when danger spoke.
Watari tipped the board again, almost imperceptibly. He returned to the earlier thread rather than abandoning it. “So...Tell me. What do you see in it. Does my painting hold the room honestly. Or have I given it too much flair?" He chuckled. Watari's eyes meeting her polar ones. Not as an equal predator, but as a comrade. A fellow soul who understands the bitter winds of death and the tang of iron on winter's wind after a battle.
His brush did not falter, as per usual. In the flickering light of his corner, he worked as steadily as a mason setting stones in a wall that must outlast him. The tavern, for all its noise and smell and small hunger, began to gather itself upon the board. Almost as if its spirit had been waiting to be named. Timber-dark became timber-true. The hearth’s core became a living red that breathed outward into amber. Smoke was not merely haze; it was a low cloudbank pressed beneath rafters. It turned the ceiling into a dusk that never quite lifted. Light pooled where it was allowed. Shadow remained where it had earned tenure. Even the scarring of the tables came through.
Beyond his board, the room continued its homely endurance. A spoon scraped a bowl with the slow insistence of poverty. A boot shifted while a bench creaked. Over it all, the hearth remained, yet near Ixqueya it felt diminished. Almost as if she had judged it; a monarch reduced to an acolyte. Flames still spoke. Sparks still leapt upward like brief bright birds. They perished before they could become anything worthy of notice.
He listened to her correction and accepted it without protest. Pride did not rise in him like a wounded animal. He let the mistake die cleanly. “You are right,” he said, quietly. “I spoke wrongly.” He rinsed his brush. The water clouded with pigment, a small storm in a cup. He swirled it once. The motion was slow and careful, like stirring silt without waking what sleeps beneath. “I do not blur womb with throne,” he added. “Not when it matters. Habit betrayed me. Not intent.” He knew that Xandera was her mother, but her status as a symbol as the lich queen superseded maternal classification.
He set the brush back to the board and finished the stroke he had begun, because he had carried one lesson from war into every peaceful craft. Do not leave a line unfinished when danger is near. Ruin loves gaps. Only then did he lift his eyes to her fully. The lantern's glow warmed the brown of them until they looked like polished wood held too long near fire. His face remained composed as an old tree is beneath wind that has broken younger branches.
Then, as if her inquiry and the tavern’s hush were not the only things that mattered in the world. Watari asked her a question that belonged to quieter seasons. “What do you think of my work?” It was not a plea. Not a bid for recognitiopn. It was the simple curiosity of a craftsman placing his labor before a mind he knew to be sharp, and therefore worth the risk of honesty.
He tipped the board slightly. Watari did not offer it into her hands. He did not step into her gravity. He merely angled it so she could see what he had made of this place. The hearth rendered as a living core rather than a decorative blaze. Lanternlight laid down in honest pools. Smoke as a low canopy of brume. Patrons suggested by posture and weight, not stolen likeness. The room held as it truly was; not noble. It was simply enduring.
“I have painted battle, and battle always lies. It is too loud. Too hungry for meaning. Too eager to make blood into a story that sounds clean.” His gaze dropped to the board for a brief spell, as if he were checking a line for fairness. “This is harder. The ordinary does not shout its name. It has to be listened into shape.” He let that rest. The tavern breathed around it. Fire crackled. A patron attempted laughter and failed, choking on his poison of choice.
Then he returned to her question, as one returns from a window to a blade laid on the table. “As for Sukegei.” His voice remained calm. It carried the plainness of a soldier. “I do not know, with certainty, which role he is playing. If I claimed certainty, I would be lying. You do not seem fond of lies.” He did not soften the admission. He let it stand like a post driven into ground. “I have seen men used as instruments, and I have seen men offered as sacrifices who did not know the altar had already been built. Sometimes the difference is only in the patience of the hand that holds them.”
His brush moved again, almost absent-mindedly, adding a thin line of shadow beneath a bench. A small act. A grounding act. As if to keep his words from drifting. “My mother trains for returns. She does not sharpen blades out of kindness. She sharpens them to be used.” His eyes lifted to Ixqueya again. “If Sukegei is near the flow you describe, then yes. He is there because he can pass where heavier men cannot. Because he draws attention and survives it.” He added one more quiet stroke, a gleam on a tankard rim, the kind of detail that makes a scene feel lived rather than staged.
“If you force me to choose. I would wager he is intended as an instrument first. Sacrifices are chosen for reliability. He is not reliable. He is stubborn. He is lucky. He is infuriatingly hard to kill cleanly.” A faint, dry humor touched his mouth and faded, like sunlight briefly finding a crack in cloud. “But instruments can become sacrifices. Especially when the hand holding them grows impatient. If your net tightens, then roles change. Men discover too late that the door they were meant to slip through has become a trap.”
Watari’s gaze drifted across the tavern for a breath. The counting barkeep. The late-laughing man. The woman whose fingers hovered near her pocket as if rehearsing theft or fear. Ordinary life wearing secrecy like a heavy cloak. “You asked which role he is playing.” His voice gained a firmer edge. “The better question is who is holding the script. Whatever is moving that should not move. Those are the hands that decide whether a man is expendable or not.”
He did not flatter her. He did not fear her. He spoke as one veteran to another force in the field. “And you...You are the kind of winter that strips pretense. If he is near this flow, he will not stay ambiguous for long. You will make him reveal what he is, or you will break him until he does.” He paused. Firelight shifted on the wall. The tavern seemed to lean in, not because it cared for truth, but because it always listened when danger spoke.
Watari tipped the board again, almost imperceptibly. He returned to the earlier thread rather than abandoning it. “So...Tell me. What do you see in it. Does my painting hold the room honestly. Or have I given it too much flair?" He chuckled. Watari's eyes meeting her polar ones. Not as an equal predator, but as a comrade. A fellow soul who understands the bitter winds of death and the tang of iron on winter's wind after a battle.
Watari Devante wrote:
Watari let her words fall where they wished. He did not reach out to catch them, nor did he turn aside from them. They settled in him like fine snow, yet doing little to change the shape of the man beneath. He had seen sharper speech thrown in brighter anger. He had heard decrees spoken in tents where maps were laid like flayed skins. He had learned that contempt, when it is practiced often, becomes routine. It may chill, yet it rarely instructs.
His brush did not falter, as per usual. In the flickering light of his corner, he worked as steadily as a mason setting stones in a wall that must outlast him. The tavern, for all its noise and smell and small hunger, began to gather itself upon the board. Almost as if its spirit had been waiting to be named. Timber-dark became timber-true. The hearth’s core became a living red that breathed outward into amber. Smoke was not merely haze; it was a low cloudbank pressed beneath rafters. It turned the ceiling into a dusk that never quite lifted. Light pooled where it was allowed. Shadow remained where it had earned tenure. Even the scarring of the tables came through.
Beyond his board, the room continued its homely endurance. A spoon scraped a bowl with the slow insistence of poverty. A boot shifted while a bench creaked. Over it all, the hearth remained, yet near Ixqueya it felt diminished. Almost as if she had judged it; a monarch reduced to an acolyte. Flames still spoke. Sparks still leapt upward like brief bright birds. They perished before they could become anything worthy of notice.
He listened to her correction and accepted it without protest. Pride did not rise in him like a wounded animal. He let the mistake die cleanly. “You are right,” he said, quietly. “I spoke wrongly.” He rinsed his brush. The water clouded with pigment, a small storm in a cup. He swirled it once. The motion was slow and careful, like stirring silt without waking what sleeps beneath. “I do not blur womb with throne,” he added. “Not when it matters. Habit betrayed me. Not intent.” He knew that Xandera was her mother, but her status as a symbol as the lich queen superseded maternal classification.
He set the brush back to the board and finished the stroke he had begun, because he had carried one lesson from war into every peaceful craft. Do not leave a line unfinished when danger is near. Ruin loves gaps. Only then did he lift his eyes to her fully. The lantern's glow warmed the brown of them until they looked like polished wood held too long near fire. His face remained composed as an old tree is beneath wind that has broken younger branches.
Then, as if her inquiry and the tavern’s hush were not the only things that mattered in the world. Watari asked her a question that belonged to quieter seasons. “What do you think of my work?” It was not a plea. Not a bid for recognitiopn. It was the simple curiosity of a craftsman placing his labor before a mind he knew to be sharp, and therefore worth the risk of honesty.
He tipped the board slightly. Watari did not offer it into her hands. He did not step into her gravity. He merely angled it so she could see what he had made of this place. The hearth rendered as a living core rather than a decorative blaze. Lanternlight laid down in honest pools. Smoke as a low canopy of brume. Patrons suggested by posture and weight, not stolen likeness. The room held as it truly was; not noble. It was simply enduring.
“I have painted battle, and battle always lies. It is too loud. Too hungry for meaning. Too eager to make blood into a story that sounds clean.” His gaze dropped to the board for a brief spell, as if he were checking a line for fairness. “This is harder. The ordinary does not shout its name. It has to be listened into shape.” He let that rest. The tavern breathed around it. Fire crackled. A patron attempted laughter and failed, choking on his poison of choice.
Then he returned to her question, as one returns from a window to a blade laid on the table. “As for Sukegei.” His voice remained calm. It carried the plainness of a soldier. “I do not know, with certainty, which role he is playing. If I claimed certainty, I would be lying. You do not seem fond of lies.” He did not soften the admission. He let it stand like a post driven into ground. “I have seen men used as instruments, and I have seen men offered as sacrifices who did not know the altar had already been built. Sometimes the difference is only in the patience of the hand that holds them.”
His brush moved again, almost absent-mindedly, adding a thin line of shadow beneath a bench. A small act. A grounding act. As if to keep his words from drifting. “My mother trains for returns. She does not sharpen blades out of kindness. She sharpens them to be used.” His eyes lifted to Ixqueya again. “If Sukegei is near the flow you describe, then yes. He is there because he can pass where heavier men cannot. Because he draws attention and survives it.” He added one more quiet stroke, a gleam on a tankard rim, the kind of detail that makes a scene feel lived rather than staged.
“If you force me to choose. I would wager he is intended as an instrument first. Sacrifices are chosen for reliability. He is not reliable. He is stubborn. He is lucky. He is infuriatingly hard to kill cleanly.” A faint, dry humor touched his mouth and faded, like sunlight briefly finding a crack in cloud. “But instruments can become sacrifices. Especially when the hand holding them grows impatient. If your net tightens, then roles change. Men discover too late that the door they were meant to slip through has become a trap.”
Watari’s gaze drifted across the tavern for a breath. The counting barkeep. The late-laughing man. The woman whose fingers hovered near her pocket as if rehearsing theft or fear. Ordinary life wearing secrecy like a heavy cloak. “You asked which role he is playing.” His voice gained a firmer edge. “The better question is who is holding the script. Whatever is moving that should not move. Those are the hands that decide whether a man is expendable or not.”
He did not flatter her. He did not fear her. He spoke as one veteran to another force in the field. “And you...You are the kind of winter that strips pretense. If he is near this flow, he will not stay ambiguous for long. You will make him reveal what he is, or you will break him until he does.” He paused. Firelight shifted on the wall. The tavern seemed to lean in, not because it cared for truth, but because it always listened when danger spoke.
Watari tipped the board again, almost imperceptibly. He returned to the earlier thread rather than abandoning it. “So...Tell me. What do you see in it. Does my painting hold the room honestly. Or have I given it too much flair?" He chuckled. Watari's eyes meeting her polar ones. Not as an equal predator, but as a comrade. A fellow soul who understands the bitter winds of death and the tang of iron on winter's wind after a battle.
His brush did not falter, as per usual. In the flickering light of his corner, he worked as steadily as a mason setting stones in a wall that must outlast him. The tavern, for all its noise and smell and small hunger, began to gather itself upon the board. Almost as if its spirit had been waiting to be named. Timber-dark became timber-true. The hearth’s core became a living red that breathed outward into amber. Smoke was not merely haze; it was a low cloudbank pressed beneath rafters. It turned the ceiling into a dusk that never quite lifted. Light pooled where it was allowed. Shadow remained where it had earned tenure. Even the scarring of the tables came through.
Beyond his board, the room continued its homely endurance. A spoon scraped a bowl with the slow insistence of poverty. A boot shifted while a bench creaked. Over it all, the hearth remained, yet near Ixqueya it felt diminished. Almost as if she had judged it; a monarch reduced to an acolyte. Flames still spoke. Sparks still leapt upward like brief bright birds. They perished before they could become anything worthy of notice.
He listened to her correction and accepted it without protest. Pride did not rise in him like a wounded animal. He let the mistake die cleanly. “You are right,” he said, quietly. “I spoke wrongly.” He rinsed his brush. The water clouded with pigment, a small storm in a cup. He swirled it once. The motion was slow and careful, like stirring silt without waking what sleeps beneath. “I do not blur womb with throne,” he added. “Not when it matters. Habit betrayed me. Not intent.” He knew that Xandera was her mother, but her status as a symbol as the lich queen superseded maternal classification.
He set the brush back to the board and finished the stroke he had begun, because he had carried one lesson from war into every peaceful craft. Do not leave a line unfinished when danger is near. Ruin loves gaps. Only then did he lift his eyes to her fully. The lantern's glow warmed the brown of them until they looked like polished wood held too long near fire. His face remained composed as an old tree is beneath wind that has broken younger branches.
Then, as if her inquiry and the tavern’s hush were not the only things that mattered in the world. Watari asked her a question that belonged to quieter seasons. “What do you think of my work?” It was not a plea. Not a bid for recognitiopn. It was the simple curiosity of a craftsman placing his labor before a mind he knew to be sharp, and therefore worth the risk of honesty.
He tipped the board slightly. Watari did not offer it into her hands. He did not step into her gravity. He merely angled it so she could see what he had made of this place. The hearth rendered as a living core rather than a decorative blaze. Lanternlight laid down in honest pools. Smoke as a low canopy of brume. Patrons suggested by posture and weight, not stolen likeness. The room held as it truly was; not noble. It was simply enduring.
“I have painted battle, and battle always lies. It is too loud. Too hungry for meaning. Too eager to make blood into a story that sounds clean.” His gaze dropped to the board for a brief spell, as if he were checking a line for fairness. “This is harder. The ordinary does not shout its name. It has to be listened into shape.” He let that rest. The tavern breathed around it. Fire crackled. A patron attempted laughter and failed, choking on his poison of choice.
Then he returned to her question, as one returns from a window to a blade laid on the table. “As for Sukegei.” His voice remained calm. It carried the plainness of a soldier. “I do not know, with certainty, which role he is playing. If I claimed certainty, I would be lying. You do not seem fond of lies.” He did not soften the admission. He let it stand like a post driven into ground. “I have seen men used as instruments, and I have seen men offered as sacrifices who did not know the altar had already been built. Sometimes the difference is only in the patience of the hand that holds them.”
His brush moved again, almost absent-mindedly, adding a thin line of shadow beneath a bench. A small act. A grounding act. As if to keep his words from drifting. “My mother trains for returns. She does not sharpen blades out of kindness. She sharpens them to be used.” His eyes lifted to Ixqueya again. “If Sukegei is near the flow you describe, then yes. He is there because he can pass where heavier men cannot. Because he draws attention and survives it.” He added one more quiet stroke, a gleam on a tankard rim, the kind of detail that makes a scene feel lived rather than staged.
“If you force me to choose. I would wager he is intended as an instrument first. Sacrifices are chosen for reliability. He is not reliable. He is stubborn. He is lucky. He is infuriatingly hard to kill cleanly.” A faint, dry humor touched his mouth and faded, like sunlight briefly finding a crack in cloud. “But instruments can become sacrifices. Especially when the hand holding them grows impatient. If your net tightens, then roles change. Men discover too late that the door they were meant to slip through has become a trap.”
Watari’s gaze drifted across the tavern for a breath. The counting barkeep. The late-laughing man. The woman whose fingers hovered near her pocket as if rehearsing theft or fear. Ordinary life wearing secrecy like a heavy cloak. “You asked which role he is playing.” His voice gained a firmer edge. “The better question is who is holding the script. Whatever is moving that should not move. Those are the hands that decide whether a man is expendable or not.”
He did not flatter her. He did not fear her. He spoke as one veteran to another force in the field. “And you...You are the kind of winter that strips pretense. If he is near this flow, he will not stay ambiguous for long. You will make him reveal what he is, or you will break him until he does.” He paused. Firelight shifted on the wall. The tavern seemed to lean in, not because it cared for truth, but because it always listened when danger spoke.
Watari tipped the board again, almost imperceptibly. He returned to the earlier thread rather than abandoning it. “So...Tell me. What do you see in it. Does my painting hold the room honestly. Or have I given it too much flair?" He chuckled. Watari's eyes meeting her polar ones. Not as an equal predator, but as a comrade. A fellow soul who understands the bitter winds of death and the tang of iron on winter's wind after a battle.
Ixqueya regarded the proffered board with hoatfrost stillness. It was as though Watari had angled not a painting toward her but some oblique shrine demanding adjudication. Her gaze descended in an unhurried arc. Frost-blue irises dilated, contracting with the slow, inexorable appraisal. The lantern’s aureate luminance refracted within them for a heartbeat and then perished. It extinguished like a votive smothered beneath a pall.
What he had rendered was an ecclesiastically insignificant chamber. A mundane alehouse exhaling its habitual mélange of tallow, sweat, and the sticky torpor of lives led without consequence. Tables scarified by dull knives. Rafters sagging with the accumulated ballast of smoke. A hearth that beat not as a symbol of communal grace but as a crude myocardial contraction. It perpetuated warmth through a structure unworthy of reverence. No liturgies. No martyrdoms. No imperial edicts carved in stone. Only the quotidian detritus of survival.
Yet his devotion to it had a strange, disconcerting accuracy.
“You expend prodigious exertion,” Ixqueya murmured, “on a chamber whose entire metaphysic will be annulled by the next strong frost.” Her tone was dry. “A space destined to be effaced by time, and you immortalize it as though it possessed vocation or sacrament.”
Still, she humored him. She leaned infinitesimally forward, examining the interplay of shadow and varnish he had coaxed into reluctant coherence.
“You do not embalm it in sentiment,” she conceded. “Commendable. False sanctity is an abomination greater than squalor.” One finger, clawed in white-and-onyx chitin, traced an intangible semicircle above the board. “The hearth you have captured correctly. It is not hospitality. It is the rudimentary organ keeping this decrepit carcass marginally animate.”
Her eyes glided toward the rafters he had coated in umbered haze.
“And the smoke, does not ascend like benediction. It stagnates. It broods. As if the structure itself distrusts the firmament.” A narrow inclination of her chin. “You listen to the environment with unnerving fidelity. That is… rare.”
A fractional pause. Then: “Your fixation remains aberrant. You could be chronicling cathedra, coronations, cataclysms. Instead you immortalize a room that reeks of mildew and proletarian regret. Either you squander your aptitude, or you possess a shrewd instinct for where decay incubates its slow apostasy.”
His commentary on Sukegei lingered like a parasitic filament in her thoughts. Hard to kill. Useful to some clandestine mulling. A volatile blade whose edge was never quite what it appeared.
“You are correct,” she conceded reluctabtly. “If he is entangled with those heliolatrous degenerates, then his spine is already bent toward a false altar.” Her voice thinned into a glacial monotone. “The devotees of that so-called Lord of Light specialize in weaponizing the morally infirm. They take fractured psyches, lacquer them in zeal, and hurl them at problems requiring neither zeal nor thought.”
Then she looked him fully in the face; an act she offered rarely, and never cheaply.
“Humor me, do you place credence in that luminalry postor? Do you genuflect to the Tree of Life and the Tree of Undying as mere philosophical scaffolding? Or have you conjured some private cosmogony to justify outliving better men?”
The question was not contemptuous; it was diagnostic.
“You are far too perspicacious to be doctrinally vacant,” she said. “Men always bow to something. Whether idol, memory, principle, or trauma. The delusion of self-sovereignty is merely an unwritten theology.”
Her next breath crystalized mid-air before dissolving.
“Power is an ephemeral construct,” she continued. “A consensual hallucination ratified by frightened minds. Crowds agree, temporarily, that sigils possess gravitas. That thrones exude inevitability, that scriptures confer absolution. They forget they authored the reverence themselves.”
A scoff escaped her. Soft. Serrated.
“Democracy. Dynastic absolutism. Priesthoods. Philosophical canons,” she listed, each term delivered like a judicial indictment. “All are legitimized by credulous assemblies desperate for architecture in their fear.”
Her eyes grew stiller, if that were possible.
“There is only one sovereignty that does not require acclaim. Death.” No theatricality softened the statement. It was arithmetic. “It does not solicit homage. It does not negotiate. It does not convene councils. It arrives. It tabulates. It repossesses.”
She regarded the common patrons he had painted. The soon-to-be cadavers in waiting.
“Perhaps that is the sole tragic elegance of the mortal condition. The immortally challenged alone perceive valuation. They awaken knowing the ledger closes. Their cowardice is honest. Their courage is interim. Their love is a brief heresy against entropy.”
At last she returned her gaze to him.
“So I ask again,” Ixqueya said, voice now a frost-laden verdict." Her scrutiny sharpened into a fine point. “When the fire guttered and the snows pressed in, and no one remained to witness your pieties. Whom or what would you be serving then?”
A final glance toward the tavern’s rendered face.
“Does your art answer that,” she asked, “or is it merely the occupation of hands seeking to distract a mind unwilling to articulate its creed?”
"Yo Theo, why does she talk like that Thanos guy?" He pointed at Ixqueya
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
The subtle spice of a mentholatum smoke filled the air as the cacophony of varied strategems and the work of war cast a resonant symphony of its own, the beating heart of war as it were, a scene played out in myriad forms across the annals of history for so long as there had been life there had been conflict. It was a fact the Lord General was well accustomed to, each must earn its keep upon the realm and the universe yielded naught to one who hadn't the audacity to stake the claim.... and keep it. Only one thing was acceptable to the Imperium, a persistent forward push and in their diction, the term retreat was all but taboo, a strategic necessity, a happenstance oft not repeated more than once. The doctrines of commanders had varied such and such though Aleksandr, characteristic of his Mordian heritage, sought clockwork efficiencies in his warmachine which stood in stark contrast of the traditional doctrines of the massed assault, he garnered where a bludeon took many hits to maim, a warhammer, a truly honed weapon, intended to get the job done precisely and in as few hits as possible.
They were the Astra Militarum, excellence was not the expectation it was the standard, on the other side of which lay only two fates, death or summary execution nevertheless, advances in a new sector were customarily challenging, unexpected lapses in progress spurning strategic contingencies, myriad acts of heroism spurned upon vox-casters to hold the morale not that Aleksandr was particularly concerned about that of hsi own. To the Lord General's eye, war had been tediously gamified and it was a matter of wit and resolve, the ever-precarious gambit unto which territories and lives were laid on the line but then, excellence was the standard, withdrawal and advance, assault and defense, interception and interdiction, terminologies were better described then when they saw action. The schola progenium had played one part in orienting him to the realities of war, but the greatest tutor had been experience and his time in the trenches as Commissar was not forgotten. But the great game was played with far higher stakes at this table, necessitating what was an axiom what described the Lord General; Tactical Discretion.
In the Grim Darkness of this millenium, each foe presented itself anew, countless strata of varying edicts and battle formations each unpredictable and menacingly effective in its own right, every foe bringing the devastations of their own arsenal to the front leaving humans to do what they did best; improvise, adapt, overcome . Ofcourse, not all was left to chance, the Lord General laid upon each battlefield a meticulously master-crafted magnum opus that in some ways did not vary in their degree of detail from the work of that eccentric tailor that had just been lingering around, but ofcourse, War was a far more endearing and passionate endeavor than cloth craft and such and such. Nothing brought the General as much satisfaction as a well planned surgical strike excising away the buboe which was the ambition of the foe, with fire, plasma, las and more, a palette that he exercised with fervid and furious intent upon that eternal canvas, the auspicious arena, the field of honor. What a privilege and an honor it was to serve the Emperor so, he loved his job.
The only shame was he could not frequent that place as much as he would have liked, for the duties of the office now beckoned to him like wanton wench having acquiesced a new suitor.
✠✠✠
" What news from the front, was that Tau expedition in the southern zone dealt with? "
He inquired taking momentary pause from the smoking pipe as he reclined upon the auscpicious pulpit what which bore the imperial seal, that surely hung above them all, symbolically if not in forme.
" No, your grace. No engagement was recorded by the perimeter patrol, they departed soon after, we speculate it was an impromptu scouting party with some other motive. They did not intend on being discovered, directed by intel our augur arrays were directed to the area with the machine spirits running a more scrutinizing protocol that was able to diffuse the scrying noise put in place by the xenos, we were able to get a lock and I presume they were well aware, this likely prevented an exchange since the perimeter patrol was not appropriately equipped ... er... supposedly. "
Aleksandr pondered for a moment, his semblance conveying neither displeasure nor approval
" Hmn... very well... see to it that I am not mocked... caution is to be exercised for the principle strategy of that particular breed of xenos is to strike from out of sight, we should anticipate that we are being watched, stagger the patrols, change the routines, Commodore, you have my approval to start conducting regular sorties in that zone utilizing our augur-craft. And... have a basilisk division deployed at the second line, so we have the capacity to strike back if caught unawares... "
The officers receiving command nodded dilligently
" In the meanwhile make our claim against the manufactora in Noumensyd for the debt the locals owe us "
Aleksandr added, taking a slow drag off his smoking pipe
At once, your lordship
Aleksandr, issued a slow exhale of the smoke, before returning to thought
" Still no word of that man of Regac's ? He who took the Thrones ? "
Inquired the Lord General
" No, your lordship "
Was the precarious and somewhat hushed response of a subordinate
" Nor will there be... "
Was the sly response issued from a Colonel Martellan, brooding in the corner amidst other officers
" This was a ploy of Regac's to take the thrones and blame another, this man is well hid and your Lordship's money well spent... I wager it.
A subtle grin appeared over Aleksandr's features.
" You have a rare grasp of the conspirator's mind, Martellan... and are to be commended on it. Better us than the Tau, doubtless sowing discord by virtue of bolstering notions of resistance. "
✠✠✠
" Some speak of certainties and others seek to defy them, for better or for worse, there are those who inspire poetic allegory and those who write and sing of it and better to be in the former camp, excess consideration of intricacies whittles the mind, what matters truthfully is absolution in the present. The Emperor beckons us to live while we live, oblivion is a certainty but it is also the end and better therein to invest in the journey than to dream about ends... on my part, I do not wish to keep company with the dead, so long as the heart beats and there is vivacity, Emperor willing we shall go on with vigor. And nothing quite inspires vigor as.... Amasec "
Ruby waves cascaded into crystalline chalice, sweeping unto themselves as rich crimson settled, an exquisite vintage nonetheless, the grape that had given its life for such delectable ends was not without its meaning and the bottle itself paid homage to the vine, to some meaningless theatrical eulogy, to others an epitaph, an edifice of celebration, perspective is what differed, the only flaw was to be so grounded in one or the other, to live excessively or to give in to lamentations and obsess over death. Aleksandr had no sympathies for heartless neuters, a contradiction into themselves, a cry for grandeur ill-earned, a beckoning for adorations unmerited, the expectation of reverence by virtue of ill-fulfilled privilege, misconstrued and ill-afforded by parasites with ulterior motives what would easily be confused for true respect and then in subtle jest to make challenges upon it, but a cliff was neither daunted by the roar of the wave nor did it afford its audience.
In truth, a profound sense of self-respect could be easily mistaken for pride, but the former needn't supplication, it was equally at home upon the throne or within the trench, for its virtue was act, not record. These things became increasingly incomprehensible, hubris was easily afforded to those who narrowed the confines of their horizons to absolute truths, in one forme or the other. And why should one not aspire to some measure of greatness, posterity would not afford recognition to those not emboldened to seek some measure of glory or to defy the mundane simplitude, the principle greatness therein was that a portion of the quill that writ fates was present in the hands of even the unlikeliest of souls. There were those to call Alexander proud whom had not marched the deserts at Opis, there were those to call Caesar proud whom had not baptised themselves in the frigid Rubicon, but were they proud to aspire to something more than themselves and to not be contented with anything less than the world and if kings and conquerors were truly forgotten then they would have no place in the histories of civilizations and peoples far removed from them by centuries.
Carpe Diem... Carpe... Diem.
Or forever be unto those whom should say, it was luck, it was fortune, it was favor, it was far too difficult, it was not known... and so forth. But to be granted a day and not invest it in some measure of achieving greatness was in and of itself not necessarily virtue. The theatrics were well-merited, the bravado festive and unperturbed, the passion unabashed and the will indomitable. The Emperor had not left in his stead those whom should see the galaxy surrendered to others, his gilded visage beckoned conquest and battle to every soul in the Imperium, for therein was progress, the endless, unforgiving, glorious march. And in the end, to possess dignity was to have something to be dignified about, it phased not the wise and self-assured but infuriated those whom had something to envy.
✠✠✠
The lord general issued a slow swirl to the sanguine concoction, a fresh measure of Lho-substrate added to the smoking pipe, easing himself for a moment. The wall decorated with the skulls of various xeno and heretic, trophies taken from past foes and great battles, they were game unto him. Frigid eyes scowered the horizon beyond the window.
" Arpat will be ours "
He muttered, before eyes shifted to the great library beside him, the deeds of the imperiums great heroes, treatises on strategies and great battles and anecdotal volumes on varied disciplines of science, technology and medicine.
" Your Lordship "
Stated one of Aleksandr's subordinates coming forth with a large case, undoing the clips before bowing down on one knee presenting the contents to the Lord General. A gilded galvanic rifle, a true masterpiece of mechanicus ingenuity.
" Ah, Archibald, you've been missed old friend... "
The Lord General added, addressing the rifle.
" The magnificent trait of the galvanic rifle is that it kills yet leaves the corpse intact, well-suited for the mechanicus to conduct their experiments or... for a trophy hunter to process their quarry. Tell them to ready the lander and we'll see if those feral orks continue to be a problem "
✠✠✠
Mathius Kothinto wrote:
Mathius came out of the dishonor his his hair tied back and spashes of water were on his apron and sweat was on his face. He bloated his face with a separate hand towel and he discarded it into the laundry bin.
He approached Sue and Basil with a bit of a grin. A sad and longing grin. He reached up and patted Sue's pelt on her head. "As time passes, the more I doubt you'll ever get to meet Azumi and Ren. You remind me so much of Azumi. Usually when I'd say her name, she would poof in and make a joke, then start chasing her tails"
He approached Sue and Basil with a bit of a grin. A sad and longing grin. He reached up and patted Sue's pelt on her head. "As time passes, the more I doubt you'll ever get to meet Azumi and Ren. You remind me so much of Azumi. Usually when I'd say her name, she would poof in and make a joke, then start chasing her tails"
Sue looked at Mathius with surprise, her fox-tail wagging softly while she listened to him. "Azumi, huh? It sounds like you miss her a lot..." She nuzzled her pelt-head into his hand. "I hope she comes back, maybe, one day."
You are on: Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » Trixie's Bar (Everyone welcome)