Acton

Acton was always wearing a mask. 

Normally that wouldn’t have stopped him from putting on another one tonight - something over-the-top and fantastic, something bold and red and loud loud loud. But for the moment he hasn’t done it; worry keeps him from it. 

It was a concern that gnawed at his stomach like a rat or a virus, something awful and fatal. Somewhere out there, he knew, was Raum - but he did not know what the Ghost wanted. He only knew it was dangerous, and terrible, and maybe his responsibility to stop. Oh, but the buckskin had always hated to bear the weight of anything, and now it was his brother-in-arms, the only Crow left of the whole sharp-beaked, black-hearted flock. 

So for once Acton didn’t feel like partying. For once he was sober, weaving among a crowd of silk and whispers and laughter and touch and letting it all bounce off him like nothing more than torchlight. For all the magic of the evening, for all the strange beauty that Isra had bestowed among the Keep, Acton might as well have been making his way through the crooked back alleys of Denocte. 

He wasn’t grinning, then, when he slipped into a new room (this one all black and white, save for the costumes, save for himself) and cast his gaze across it, searching the shadows as much as the masks. They all looked like strangers, done up as they were, but then his bright eyes snagged on a silver mare all done up in gold. At last he did smile, and step toward her. His dark hair was an unbound cloud around him, his burnished coat unadorned; he was naked among the many, but for the mask he forever bore. 

“Is that supposed to be a disguise?” he said in her ear, his own voice low and rough as gunpowder. There was music around them, a pounding beat from a drummer he couldn’t see, a female voice smokier than his own. 






@Seraphina