"All you want to do is dance out of your skin into another song not quite about heroes, but still a song where you can lift your spear and say 'yes' as it flashes."
The sun rises on another Delumine morning, spilling over the horizon in the warm yellows and sleepy blues of a winter dawn. Snow has finally broken through Viride's thick canopy and there is not much of it spread across the forest floor, but there is enough, and that's all that matters.
Andras is among it, perched in a bent old tree that makes a Y just wide enough for him to spread his wings and balance with the trunk to catch him if he sways too far to one side. A dawn this late in the year is so dark for so long that he might hardly be seen to be there at all except for the silhouette of his outstretched wings on the forest floor, and the glint of his glasses as he waits, poised like a cat on a fence, impatient and agitated.
There are dark things in Viride. Black things as black as Andras' rumbling heart and more.
Poachers, Emersyn had said, in a dusty, crowded room of the library where Andras had glowered from the corner with his wings crossed over his chest. Possibly multiple poachers, she had clarified. Andras with his gritting teeth and his smouldering rage had not needed to be told to hung - King Ipomoea could not have stopped him if he tried.
Andras draws in a breath so deep and so loud that he doesn't hear the footsteps until they are upon him, or below him: Mathias, tromping through the woods like the soldier he is, or was. He lets out the breath in a sharp sigh. Mathias.
He grits his teeth.
A lot has changed since they were boys in a courtyard full of birds. Too much for a system as fragile as Andras, too much for a little black horse with a big black heart and an anger so loud it shakes in his bones when he breathes -- so Andras has been ducking out of rooms and folding into corners when the other passes. (And if Andras is doing it with less than stealth, so what? Does he care? Should he?) Frowning, Andras leans forward to see.
"Oh good," he says, leaning just far enough that he tips out of the tree, open wings full of air that floats him gently toward the forest floor. Andras lands in a splash of wet snow and soggy leaves. Andras stares at Mathias for a moment - perhaps too long of a moment (searching for something to say?) - before his face pulls itself into a series of grim, impatient angles.
Andras doesn't wait. He is an arrow cocked back in a bow, singing against the string. His rage sings along with it. When he starts walking he does not look back. "Let's go then."
@Mathias
Anyone else is welcome to join this patrol thread if you want!
I'M JUST THE PRODUCT OF A LIVING HELL and i don't want to live like this anymore
His hands tremble when he dons the armor for the first time in months.
They fumble over once-familiar straps and buckles, tracing against the aged iron with a touch like that of a lover turned stranger -- how long has it been since he felt any real purpose when he had secured the faceplate over his head, had worn the battered greaves into a fight? When he lifts his head, he can see the specks of sand shedding from the armor that had been hidden away in a Solterran cave for months now, and yet donning them feels like slipping back into an old skin.
His movements are a methodical march as he moves towards Viride, the walk of a soldier born into an endless war -- and oh, how his forges have rekindled an ancient anger in his breast. Delumine is his home, at least of sorts, and the creatures there had been the first to accept him into their midst without questions for the way he still smelled of salt and sand and blood.
He had found his favorite bird crumpled in the snow that morning in a pool of her own blood, the majority of her beautiful feathers plucked, and he had seen red when he had realized whoever it was had lured her down with his own bag of bird seed. He’d finally begun to put together the rumors that he’d been hearing, the whispers of poachers in the forest, the posters he’d seen placed around the library with a bounty that’d he’d never paid much mind to.
Now, he smells of salt and sand again as he enters into the clustered forest, a borrowed short sword strapped to his side -- not quite as sharp as Solterran steel, but it would do for this particular hunt. He isn’t stupid -- a lifetime of living with only rage as a companion meant a lifetime of being alert -- and he catches the glint of Andras’ glasses before the black pegasus comes drifting out of the trees like a ghost.
(He’s noticed the avoidance, as well, the way the two of them have been dancing around the halls to pass each other, tucking into corners and behind shelves. He isn’t quite sure how he feels about this cat-and-mouse game, the way it makes his heart beat quicker in his chest whenever he saw the shadow slipping into a new hiding place, and so he’d feigned ignorance and continued about his way as though he simply hadn’t noticed.)
His smile is a snarl, and yet -- there is something akin to approval when he sees the grimness in the warden’s eyes, the way their faces mirror each other as the hunt sings around them. He sets off in that soldier’s march after the pegasus, and he is silent in the way that a wolf was silent when prowling, scanning the brush and the trees for any sign of the poacher’s activity.
He almost misses it in the snow.
“Andras.” A quiet snarl, a voice made of teeth pitched low to avoid being overhead. He bumps his shoulder against the pegasus a little too rough (because in the thrill of the hunt, he cannot keep himself from reaching out with the way his blood sings in his veins) and points towards a set of scraped bark and depressions in the snow.
and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding
Mathias smiles--or, doesn't smile so much as he bares his teeth, savage and feral as he has ever been. Something in Andras falls back into place, something that had been dislodged. It matches the tone of his own rage, this humming beast that owns him, in a way that feels right, and good, and comfortable. As Mathias falls in line behind him Andras breathes a huff that he had meant to be a sigh, or something like it.
It feels like home, as much as anything has - which isn't saying much, but there we have it.
They walk.
For a while there is nothing but the woods and the snow. The only reminder Andras has that Mathias is there at all is the crunch of his footsteps and the plates of Mathias' armor clunking rhythmically along behind him. It creates some strange song of stillness and war, like drums in the dark, or a crackling fire.
Andras has been staring for days at dead faces, so many faces he cannot breathe without thinking of one carefully captured part or another, drawn just as it had lay stretched across the ground. He wonders how much death a person has to look at before it becomes a part of them. He wonders if he will start to look like their king, haunted and sweating. He wonders what he will do when the season has passed, or two seasons, or more, and there is no more of this -- no hunts, no meetings, no bodies in the dirt.
He looks back over his shoulder.
He will have to deal with this, the silence, then.
He would rather be haunted.
Mathias shoves him. Not hard, but hard enough that a ripple of electricity runs down his back, starting first at his withers and fizzling down to the base of his tail. "What." he says, impatiently, turning fully now. Mathias is staring at the ground, armored and grave, and it takes a moment for Andras to see them, the tracks. Once he has he can see nothing but.
Tracks and dead faces. Enemies of sleep, he thinks. "Follow them," he says, unfolding his wings. "I'll look from up there." Andras pumps them once, then twice, until he has surged toward the canopy with this speck of viride laid out like a map. He lands in the arms of one tall tree after another, following Mathias as he goes. Waiting.
I'M JUST THE PRODUCT OF A LIVING HELL and i don't want to live like this anymore
If he is discomforted by the snow, and the mud, and the trees, he doesn’t show it except for the slightly stiff way one leg swings forward with every step, a well-hidden limp caused by the way the cold gnaws at old wounds. Despite the way he marches despite this catch in his gait, he has never been a soldier. A soldier required discipline, obedience -- they were traits that had been strangled out of him young, giving rise to obstinate disobedience and the burning hatred of anything that resembled order. He had been a mercenary at best, a criminal at worst, always, always so fiercely independent and broken that he’d been unable to remain with any one group for too long.
For Andras, he thinks… he might be, might be willing to bend beneath the will of another, to serve a court with his body and his blood. Not just Andras, but for the king with feathers on his feet who smiled at him as though he weren’t some broken, bastard creature, for the birds who gathered around him every morning and sang for their breakfast as though they trusted him not to hurt them, for Sam who smiled at him every morning and reminded him of all the ways he could be gentle when his blood sang with rage.
His body is howling now, a chorus of wolves slipped loose of their bindings -- except the chain that connects them to Andras, because they heel to his command in a way they have rarely if ever been tamed, his body turning towards the trail without a second thought. He does not acknowledge the command otherwise, does not smile or respond, only unsheathes his sword from its scabbard and continues to march forward with grim determination.
(He will panic later, in the safety of his own space, when there are no curious eyes around to pry into what might make the soldier tremble so -- that he might react so quickly, without even a snarl of opposition, without any of his trademark defiance.
He is changing, and it involves Sam, and Andras, and the way Dawn itself has welcomed him, this bastard creature that smells of smoke and war, without questioning him on where he has come from and what he has seen.)
The scent of blood hangs in the air, and it sends a ripple of anticipation across his skin. There is something ahead of them -- a trap, or perhaps even an enemy -- and he holds his sword at the ready.
