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.



@Sabine yaaay Daddy Crow alert.

 

  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?”


@Sabine all the adorbs