It is difficulties that show what we are.

The war room is a place of grim grandeur and an ever-present testimony to the rather dulcet history of Delumine.  Other courts have seen heads on pikes, bodies of the innocent frozen into statues of stone, stolen queens, murdered kings, beaten and abused children, famine and plague .. the list goes on.  Emersyn often wonders what the war rooms of other surrounding kingdoms look like, certainly nothing like her own.  Tapestries of silk hang against silent walls.  There are no vibrations of war or strife to bring life to the quiet, crypt-like air.  What terrible things has Delumine seen?  What terrible things will it see? 

Emersyn's work is meticulously laid out before her like a master builder about to begin her work.  Every document lists a victim, a crime, and with it several other leaves of information vein out around it.  The round table is painted in monochromatic gore in the form of words, numbers, diagrams, dog-eared journals, statistics, historical reports, magical findings. Reasons why, suspicions as to who, theories of where - where the poachers go when they are through with Viride, with Delumine, sources-sources-sources.   Her reach extends from coast to coast but so far it means nothing, absolutely nothing.

A young aid slips in and delivers a fresh pot of hot grog that, by smell alone, arouses the Emissary's senses.  Behind the aid, a familiar form appears at the doors.  "Never thought we would be using this room." She says in a tone that cannot be interpreted for impolite or friendly.  Emersyn's winter-blue eyes shine like twin stars as they glance up from the paperwork to see Andras.  "I take it you are not here to tell me that the patrols have turned anything else up?"  She knows the answer, at least she thinks she does, but even still she does not let on to anything.  The woman is a closed book and maintains best that way.  

"I found number fourteen.  Right outside my front door on my way home from the meeting.  I couldn't sleep so I brought my work here."  Rucha, her wings (and a part of her other work), clamber around on the ceiling like a shapeless bat, the straps of the harness move like arms as they hang upside down and wait for a command.  Their sentience is something to be wary of, for they can be quite meddlesome when they have nothing to do.  For now, they rest and they wait.  But a singular buckle reaches down in an attempt to touch the wings on warden's back.  Emersyn flexes her own control over it and sends the wings out of the way like a troublesome child.  They obey, for now.

The latest detailed report draws the shape of what looks like another horse - but is not upon further inspection.  It could be mistaken as a kelpie, but Emersyn has identified it as something far more horrible than a water horse, a Uisge.  Vicious, always.  Wild, always.  Untameable, naturally.  And far too savage to be considered a citizen.  She suspects it lived within the enchanted waters of Viride, and, like all the sorry beasts to have been slain on Dawn soil, it too was timeless.  Just like all of the others, it is not a complete autopsy, the heart is missing and so are its eyes.

"What would anybody want with a Uisge?  Besides to kill it for sport."

She doesn't mention that the heart is a powerful component in alchemy, and that it can powers spells meant to raise the dead.  Or that the eyes can be useful in scrying on enemies.  All of it necromancy, but she doesn't breathe a word about it, she wonders how smart her peers are.  She'd rather see Andras come up with his own theories, just so she knows what kind of a mind she is working with.

"Please, help yourself to some grog and tell me, what do you make of all this?"


~~~

@Andras  Uh...

and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding

"Where is the war room?" Andras had asked, through clenched teeth.

'I don't know,' an exceedingly unfortunate concierge begins to stay, looking up from some paperwork or other. He had been charting guests, writing dates and time in fine but easily read script. When he sees Andras, and his own vague discomfort reflected in the Warden's glasses, he says instead, 'That way.' and gestures down the long, quiet hall, 'Around the corner.'

Andras smiles mirthlessly, inclines his head in thanks, and skulks through the foyer like a wraith.

---

The door creaks as it opens. The room that greets him is like a church, not quite opulent but lacking the wear of much use, clean in a way that Andras appreciates and ringing with the sort of quiet dignity that comes with decades of peace--or not even peace, but neutrality, such as it is, and with every cost it accompanies. 

When Emersyn speaks it echoes, 'never thought we would be using this room' bouncing from wall to wall, off the table, off the covered windows, off the walls of his raging heart. When the last murder had come and gone the borders were closed, a manhunt was mounted, and still this room sat untouched, poised in perfect silence, empty as the vacuum of space. He thinks of the king and his rigid silence, eyes like a ghost's eyes, the rock that had dropped straight into Andras' stomach, the rock that still sits there now. 

Andras takes his place next to Emersyn. There is no crackling static, no humming blue light. He cannot be fire when the room is so cold. "Tracks." he answers, gravely. "Inconclusive ones."

The body count ticks over to fourteen, higher and higher by the day. The--poacher, killer, whatever it is, whatever they are--drop mangled animals on doorsteps, in the open, as if it no longer matters if they are seen or unseen, wanted or not, hunted or not. As if they are laughing. If Andras had had a rock in his stomach it is now a boulder, hard and dark and cold, and the weight of it sets his teeth on edge.

"So they know, then. That we're looking." The room holds his statement in the air as if it does not quite know what to do with the idea. Andras is imagining traps laid out in the open, the smiles of predators, the audacity it takes to toss a corpse on someone's doorstep, as a message? As a thread? Sparks bounce off the static that forms at his withers and leaps clear to the tip of his wings. It extends toward her fluttering wings as they rise out of reach.

Andras doesn't look. He doesn't care. He does not even notice the quiet of a heart at odds, a heart that is pointed like an arrow into the woods, smiling, saying, let me go. He will not notice until much later, after poachers and murderers, after meetings and war rooms, when there is nothing for his rage to point at but itself, screaming.

She speaks again, and Andras levels a grim stare at her, frowning. His tongue is on the back of his teeth now, an unkind glint behind the glare of his lenses. He has been toyed with enough, lately. His patience, barely existent at the best of times, wears thinner and thinner by the day.

He grits his teeth, grits then hard, until they ache. When his jaws creak apart it is to say "I don't know, why does anyone want a magical thing? I've read through your reports, I've seen this--frankly chilling--mass grave and it is conspicuously lacking in squirrels, or deer, or any animal of any mundane sort." 

At her invitation, Andras picks up a mug and looks at it pensively, angrily. "What would anyone want with a unicorn?"

Call The Police

The silence that fills the room is so many things; terrible things, wild revelations, seven-year curses, the silence before a disaster strikes, or maybe it is Emersyn rolling ideas around in her head like a worry-stone, over and over and over again - until a raw thought becomes a diamond.  Something clear.  Something concise.  Something with .. a lot of angles.

“Precisely why it is called a murder.  They wanted the unicorn dead.  No missing horn, the motive seems clear enough to me.”   A distinct pitch in her voice denotes a sort of restlessness that often fills the minds of those with fitful spirits.  A violent black sea, one Andras may sail as well.  Emersyn persists with the idea of murder, she is intimately familiar with the word.

Emersyn turns a page in a dusty book with timeless texts within it, it seems enchanted in its own way.  It is unclear what it even is, but the pictographs suggest that it might be a grimoire or a recipe book.  “The eyes and the heart of the Uisge are harvested fresh for uses in Necromancy. No other part shall be collected unless for hexing.”   Emersyn reads the words out loud.  There is a hunger in her that swells, its origins unknown, its intentions even more vague.  Whether she believes in the voodoo of it all or not, Emersyn is bound by no rights or wrongs.

She turns a page.

“How much does something like that sell for on the market place, you think?  I should make my way to Night again.”  Her mind travels far down the road, she goes beyond finding the poacher, she reaches deep into the veins of the hunter to find his secrets.  Where does he go?  Who does he know?  What does he gain from such risky business?  The animals alone that he takes are just as deadly as the forces that now hunt him as if he too were a bounty worth a weight in gold, they are frighteningly strong.  If the warden answers her query, she doesn’t hear it.  She only expects him to stand there and listen to her ponderings.

Another page gets turned.

“I thought for certain aerial sweeps would draw some answers.  It is possible that someone among our own may have something to do with it, but that meeting was such a disaster I hardly doubt anyone there had anything to do with it.”  Turn them on each other with suspicion and wary intrigue, see what that will do as the underlying foundations of a small court fray apart - do it all by inviting them to a community meeting. Emersyn draws a mug near and partakes the sludge that it takes to keep her mind moving at a steady and constant pace.  

“Help yourself, there is plenty.”

She holds a vividly painted field sketch of a deer whose forelegs are a pair of massive colorful wings.  Magic has made it radiant with a coat of the cosmos and horns made of opal, and this is what it might have looked like if it were in a whole piece.  “A powerful component in polyglot spells can be found by harvesting the horns.  They are known as Elderdeer.  It is one of the few that have been historically recorded.   They lived among the Eira and were essentially protected for centuries.  Now we make flutes out of their bones and sell them to children at the marketplaces.”    

Light swings overhead, the wind from outside pushes against the chain which holds the fire.  Dark lines tilt and sway over their looming forms.  “No one has ever been able to prevent this from reoccurring.”   She sets her jaw and exchanges one blue eyed look for another, both dead, both serious, not a shred of humor or gratitude for the other - just a mutual understanding. 


“I do have a problem with all of this." Emersyn debates what she wants to say versus what she needs to say.  The latter gets lost beneath the waves of her fury. 

What she says is less of a secret, and more like a promise.  

“I told Ipomeae that I would not kill anyone for this."  The intelligence is there, but the control is failing.  Desire is wanting.  Fires are burning. And the ice on her soul is gaining depth and width, consuming her.

"But I will."  Emersyn confirms without a doubt.  The room seems to grow several degrees colder with the affirmation of death in the air. 

Then suddenly,


Rabbits billow into the room from the door way, their handler an out of breath pageboy that sheepishly halts at the door as they run in ahead of him.  Each rabbit forfeits their square and she takes each one and lays them out on the table.  Five rabbits out of ten, the message must be short, urgent, or both.

HUNTERS SPOTTED.  SOUTHEAST SHORE. ENTERED VIRIDE AT SUNDOWN. RESPOND IMMEDIATELY.




~~~

@Andras   This design of this creature was partially inspired by this DEERTHING

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