Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.


What complicated? asks Duir for the seventh time, about to earn himself a kick to the ass if he asked again.

I roll my eyes, again, this time, steadily continuing onwards through the quiet forest, aglitter with frost. The blue stone is safe against my shoulder, between the dark flesh and the gleaming bronze which covers it, and while I try to ignore the badgering annoyance of my companion not minding his own business, I ponder it, and its potential consequences, rather than what he wants me to think about.

Being bonded means he knows almost all of my actively occurring thoughts, despite him being much better at disguising what he is thinking of from me; its aggravating, and often makes me want to kick him, like I do now, for being annoying, and making me think about other things to avoid appeasing him. Either way, I’ll be damned if I think about why I’ve been hanging out south, rather than north, as of late.

I blame it on the weather. I refuse to give him anything, the badgering fiend. Doesn’t he know I’m busy and bothered enough with my questing? I don’t have time to dwell on unsolvable problems of an emotional nature in the interim, no matter how much of an obnoxiously nosy tool he is.

His ears tilt back at that accusation, his gaze tilting over to me with his own, deer-brand of perturbation writ across it. Why can’t you just let someone in? Those eyes accuse me, but perhaps it is my own heart (for once) interjecting its opinions in the form of Duir’s silent stare.

It is then that the apparition of a voice, familiar, but haunting, and lost on me in its disembodied state, bites through the air. Immediately stopping in my tracks, I shoot my head up, my ears searching everywhere for the source. Unfortunately, the tall, barren trunks this low to the earth, and the still, silent air in the forest allow the voice to expand and bound about in echoes, so that it comes from everywhere.

That old fear comes back, the one that was born in the desert beneath the shadow of Gaucho, and the flickering shape of his fire-magic. It’s a fear I’ve tried hard to forget, to banish back away where it had hidden before I’d found it, but the nature of the beast is to loiter, waiting for a chance to reappear; occasionally being assaulted, as I was seemingly about to be now, probably doesn’t keep that feeling at bay, either.

My heart picks up its pace, as if to demand it keep beating, to force me to feel the rich cost of its pulse. Duir’s gold-flecked, woodland eyes search the trees with me, his honorable heart thudding in time with my own.

"I don’t answer the questions of apparitions. Show yourself," I demand of the hidden one, wondering already how exactly I might use my magic or blade on someone I can’t fucking see. Can’t very well make nobody do a damn thing, can I?

[ OOC: lirl Orsino is the best influence ever ]