It was not as if the Haruspex was ever alone. Alone was a powerful word that he did not like to use, not now when he had so many on his side.

Ashamin had been alone, and he had suffered through cold, and this was nothing like that at all. This was just a lack of accompaniment, a temporary state of being that he could count on going away. He would at some point turn around and go home. There, tracing lines of charcoal dust on a stone ground, would be his companion. Ashamin would hang his sarong and necklace on the outcropping of ice that had stubbornly refused to melt, let his coil slide off of his tail, and he would rest. Eventually, all that would come to pass.  

So when he pulled his figure under the multicolored shade of the rotunda's vast and strong roof and found the space uninhabited, he was not crippled with the fear of permanent abandonment he might have once felt. He had met Cashmere here and worried about that feeling but come to the conclusion that with Lochan and his herd behind him, he would always have a home. Now, eyes wide in the hours of his nocturnal waking, he could think back to that safety and be assured.

From his painted figure hung a web of scars and trophies, recently attained. Amulets--the function of which he was still uneducated in--were clipped to the sarong that clutched his breast with warmth. His electric coils hummed faintly, occasionally illuminating his tail with faint blue streaks in the dark. The necklace, on which he wore the fang of the Bear God, swung to and fro as he wandered the rotunda. The warmth of the even floor beneath his hooves was a comfort, but the night itself provided too little cold in this season for him to really appreciate it. Such things as heat and cold were only distinguishable with contrast. Here, in the dark night that just barely shed patterns of color on the floor and the Haruspex's quad-colored frame, there was barely any contrast at all. Everything was shadow: the delicate absence of light in which the Haruspex saw best.

His black eyes were filled with pupil, not that anyone could have made out the difference in either light or gloom. He gazed with an absent sort of calm out over the faintly illuminated nature outside the Rotunda's scope. Ashamin wanted to lie down in it, stretch himself until he became indistinguishable from the roots and rotting corpses of too slow prey. The battles had tired him but still he longed for another fight, as if the constant discipline to practice was becoming more of a need. The urge, to fight and to maybe one day lose horribly, was difficult to quell.

He mused that once you had made up your mind to die, no matter how much changed and turned you from that fate, it became difficult to ever live without the thought of it. It was good that he wasn't really alone; someone needed to watch over his soul.

All Ashamin needed was the possibility of a rustle of a figure in the brush, maybe he had heard nothing at all. Still he called out, his voice steadier than it would have been just seasons before but plagued with the exhaustion of too much blood recently shed.

"Who goes? Come, show yourself. I'm seeking a challenge tonight."