Already, Sabine knew she hated the wind. It was a feral beast, one that howled and roared over the hills of Denocte with the force of Gods themselves. If she were to believe her parents reverent fables, that was. At such a tender age it was her prerogative to question everything, and that was not a troublesome quest when the life into which you were born was as capricious as her own. Tales of deities and whispers of great foreign cities had filtered down, down, down into her world until her mind lay full to the brim with turbulence and commotion. Her mother and father had tried to protect their daughter from events that were too winding, and abstruse for such a young child to comprehend, but there was no concealing the truths that surrounded her like cobwebs spun over her dainty head. Her mind ached with the bewilderment of it all; her little heart bruised by the murmurs of her illegitimacy and impurity - corrupted by the sun and a desert mother.
So, as to escape the headiness of it all, Sabine often took to the wild. When Rhoswen was absent, a regular occurrence, the filly would slip forth from the bustle of Denocte's Capitol out into the coming day. At four months old, she was certainly still small, vulnerable, but to her parent's warnings she could never heed. There was too much to see, to hear, to experience. For life was simple out here beneath a diamond sky, beautifully simple. The wind though, now that she couldn't stand! Sparrow-boned limbs scattered across the prairie, bolstering her across the ocean of pale green and closer to the great evergreen treeline up ahead. For the first time in, perhaps, days, Sabine felt herself smile.
@Raum Woo! Bear with me as I get used to playing her ehe.
The air rang with market sounds. There was the rattle of carts, the chime of bells and the scents of smoke and cooked foods. Feet clacked over cobbled stones and bodies brushed by each other. It was a hotbed of activity, a den of thieves and this is why the Crow is here.
In silence he weaves through the crowd. Raum is quicksilver sliding through the throng of bodies. His eyes, the orbs of blue from a sea so many miles away, rove across the grounds.
The sun blazes but the winds are cool. Oh to be here! To be away from a sun that scorches his silver skin was a blessing indeed. Calligo now reclothed him in black, shadows crawling like beetles across his skin. There were few, even with his silver skin, who really saw the Crow as he moved. Raum was silence, his art was the unseen and he passed from cart to cart with barely an eye to follow him. The market din welcomed him in and to searching eyes, there was no Crow to be found here.
But his talent for disappearing had not been passed on to his daughter…
A glint of diamond catches his eye. It is a flash between limbs, a brilliant sparkle of blue as pure as ice. His blue eyes turn to catch another glimmer and another. A ripple of cream hair, neat as a ribbon, dances in the air as the child moves. Deftly Raum turns, those Crow eyes never leaving the path of his daughter. She dances like her mother, she weaves as nimbly as her father, but Raum is used to both and in silence he follows the child as she skips from stall to stall.
Gems glitter in her silver-blue eyes and ricochet off her glacier horns. Oh his child with her fierce eyes, and her defiant soul. Sabine battles the wind upon her spide-thin legs as she skitters from the vendors yard. She knows better and in silence Raum slips a small dagger from a vendor’s table. It is gone before its seller even notices the empty space.
The wayward child breaks from the cover of the citadel to run towards the treeline. Her father follows like a phantom, a shadow she cannot shift and it is only as Sabine slows, as her limbs pause gazelle-alert upon the wood’s edge, that he appears beside her. The small blade, still sheathed within its lavish sleeve of silk and silver, presses whisper-light against the angle of her jaw and throat. “What have I told you about letting your guard down, Sabi?” Her father murmurs softly, warningly. This child, elven and wild, was the daughter of a Crow - the only child not orphaned, but it did not allow her to escape their training.
After a moment the blade falls away from her neck – never a threat, only a lesson – and flips before lying horizontal before her. “This is yours, if you would like.” And the blade was small and fine, so intricately and lightly made. It was silver filigree curling around nestled gems: small and light enough for a child, beautiful enough, he thinks, for his daughter.
“Where does your mother believe you to be now? And how much trouble have you got us both into?” Raum asks, those electric eyes sparking as his eyes trail across his daughter’s red-dusted skin. His lips tip into a smile, new and easy. He was not sure he had ever smiled so easily before his daughter was born, for no love had been this simple.
The clamour of the city did not appeal to this small oaken child. Surrounded by climbing voices in the streets of the Denoctian capitol, Sabine suffocated, for every which way she turned there awaited another face to peer down at her with a face that scorned or pitied for a reason unbeknownst to she: hearing the whispers of her illegitimacy and understanding them were, in Sabine's case, worlds apart. Word travelled fast among the shadowpeople of Caligo's kingdom, and so the notoriety of her mother's story and thus Sabine's very presence within their midst only grew with each passing moon. So, you see, for Sabi the citadel was nothing but a nest of anguish, choler and bewilderment.
As any child, then, she found relief elsewhere: her haven was the pouring expanse of Sideralis, Arma's forest under a swathe of sunlight, or Vitreus lake at sunset. Out here, beneath a sky so wide she could not see where it could possibly begin or end, Sabine was free: free of prickling eyes and hot city air. Alone, she could breathe.
Alone - or so she thought. All too easily her father had caught his daughter unaware as she moved so heedlessly toward the forest ahead. Sabine detected only the slightest falling of shadow before she felt keen press of silver against her narrow little neck - she skidded clumsily into a halt, her chest hitching in shock. But Sabine had nothing to fear, for the blade was accompanied by a voice that instantly soothed the furrow of her brow, and her bluefire eyes glittered as she turned loose to face Raum. "Sorry, Papa."
Of all the people in Sabine's little world, her father was by far the favourite. For Raum was tall and pale and sharp like a sword, but to the girl, he was home. There was always warmth to be found in his smile if she looked closely enough, and she always did. Where her mother was nebulous wildfire, Raum was the ancient stone to endure any weather. Rhoswen was a fickle creature prone to bouts of redhot despair that consistently burned the thread of closeness between them, and as such their bond was tenuous and brittle. Raum was an unlikely guardian: a juxtaposition of rough and smooth, a bite of silver in the dark, but when Sabine looked up at his cool silvern features she saw only salvation. Her first love.
He offered her the blade and her heart hitched, a golden smile blossoming into something pure beyond all definition. It was with great delicacy that Sabine took her father's gift, handling it with the gentle fascination of any child, before letting her tele hang the blade by her side as she looked back up toward Raum. "Mine, forever?" It was so beautiful, not even nature could have crafted something so fine. At the mention of her mother, the smile faded a little - the familiar hand of unease tightening around her throat, "I told her I was going to visit uncle Reich," a glance back at her new treasure, "I don't think she'd be too pleased to know you gave me this, Papa." A secret then. Sabine shivered, and all too soon the innocent excitement of it all overpowered her self-doubt. "Did your father give you a knife too?"
His child skitters, butterfly light across the meadow. The grasses barely stir beneath her slender limbs as she flutters by. Raum thinks there is no wind that can catch her, no light enough to stray from the bright of her. Sabine commands the light and about her the shadows dance; this child of his was light and dark, air and earth.
It is only the tip of his daughter’s new blade that stops her path. Upon those long, long limbs she slips and slides to a sudden stop. The air hisses as her catches in her lungs. A slow smile creeps across the Crow’s silver lips. There is no sharpness, no glint of the steel he inflicts upon everyone else (even Rhoswen). Oh no, this child is the only one who can soften him and inspire a smile so soft, so warm enough it melts the ice of his manner.
Raum waits for her eyes to fall to the blade before slowly it lowers, hovering for her to take, and she does, readily. He has trained his daughter well. Those china-blue eyes drink in the weapon as blue flames lick cool, cool, cool over every intricacy of the fine blade. His child’s smile is bright and brilliant, scattering the darkness seething across his skin when she asks if it is hers forever.
“Of course.” The quicksilver man says with no delay. Then, with a trick he has seen Acton perform so many times, he appears a fine silver belt from behind her small ear and brings it before her. “But every dagger needs a belt in which to be carried.” He turns it to show her a silver buckle upon the end of the short silver band. It was long enough only for a child’s limb. “You wear it about your leg, see?” And her shows her his own, where the blade rests against the silver of his skin. “Then it is always within reach.”
Through sea-blue eyes he watches his daughter’s smile fade at the mention of her mother. A sigh escapes him. He knew the fire of Rhoswen, he had weathered it since he was a child. The Crow knew what it cost to love such a woman. Sabine did not.
His lips lower, smoothing across his daughter’s fawn brow. “I have no doubt she will disapprove.” Then lower, in a whisper, he smirks softly as he meets her blue-sea gaze with his own darker, stormier look. “And that is why it will be our secret. Leave your mother to me, Sabine.”
The Crow watches the dark shadows of conflict that brew in the corners of her eyes and line the delicate carvings of her young face. “She loves you, you know. Things are just hard for her at the moment, Sabi.”
And with that Raum might have left it. But the girl’s curiosity returns and hangs upon her new blade as she asks him of his father. There had been no male figure in Raum’s life. There was no maternal figure either... Raum was an orphan Crow, like them all, until Sabine. She might be the only child amongst the Crows with parents.
“No.” He answers his daughter softly. “I never knew my father, or mother. It is why I am a Crow. Do you remember I told you we were all orphans once? You are the only special one with a mother and a father.”
He paused for a moment, surveying his elven child from on high. “Now tell me, have you been practicing what uncle Acton showed you?”
Two words to breathe happiness into her heart - he is certain and perpetual; a constant that all children need. Long hours she had spent watching the distance gape between Rhoswen and Raum, filling up her lungs with an anxiety that wriggled and tunnelled, but here - alone with him - she felt that dissipate into nothingness. Here they were free from politics and love-so-torn. Behind eggshell eyes Sabine watched her father produce a fine belt to strap about her finer leg, her gaze shadowing his every motion and movement. Eagerly, the blush girl fastened the cord to her limb before slipping into it her new asset - if this was what growing up felt like, Sabi decided she liked it a lot.
"She loves you, you know. Things are just hard for her at the moment, Sabi.”
The girl (innocent and fleeting) was too young to understand, but nodded mutedly anyway, knowing that Raum would not answer her questions no matter how often she put them to him. Something of a sand-drenched land, far north from here, where the sky was bleached blue and the horizon could never be caught. One day soon she would seek the truth and no stone would be left unturned in her quest for it. For now though, she was content to leave the complexities of this life to her parents; there was too much to see, too much to do. Her life so far had not been easy, but listening to her father's own childhood brought a new expression to her gaze: gratitude. Rhoswen was brimstone and ice at times, but she was there. What must it have been like to be alone in the world at such an age?
She might have questioned her father further had he not so swiftly diverted her attention. A smile lifted to Sabi's eyes, a laugh born in her throat - Acton's illusions had fascinated her from the first instance, but it was the more accessible art of self-defence that the golden man had first and foremost brought to her. "I'm not very good at it," she snorted, feeling the creeping fingers of self-consciousness bleeding in, "but yes, I have been practising." She glanced down at the blade resting like a cold promise on her skin, before returning to her father's eyes, "can you show me how to use this, too?"
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