renwick

the last of our kind

Darkness is no stranger to him, Renwick had been born to it. A Kingdom of Night, of Darkness and Shadows. It has no sinister hold upon him, for he's learned to dance in the dark by kindled firelight and fireflies. Learned to speak the language of lost things, worn their armour and marched to war with the night as his witness. Against the dawn, against the sun, against the misconstruction of the dark and it's denizens.

He's returned from war with more shadows trailing after him than his own. Smiling with crooked teeth.

Down here, he's reminded of those shadows. He cannot see them, but they skitter and skirt the magefire burning blue and brilliant across the cavern walls. Laughter eerily similar to the sound of water dripping from ceiling to floor, hiding in plain sight. Renwick comes to the Caves to reflect, unbothered by sinister reputation and the laughing maws of skeletons long made. Eyeless sockets swallowing unnatural light, watching without seeing. Denoctian's keep strange companions, and the dead in the grandscheme of things are not so strange at all. He comes down here to think, to feel small rather than grand. Not a knight, but flesh and bone. No titles and no lords.

To exist without measures and expectations.

It's liberating. 

Rarely, one can find other souls down here. More often than not, they keep to themselves, Renwick turns a blind eye to those in cloaks, to those that walk on crooked legs. Whose patchwork smiles follow him long after  he's turned the corner, their vacant eyes seared into his skin. Standing over the bones of the other unfortunates who come to do business, trading coin and goods. Others eek out a quiet, somber living to keep nourishing their already thin frames, and none question a denoctian in the shadows. Renwick walks onward, down and down, away from the light whose tender warm embrace cannot reach. Flickering and winking out as stars overhead do, one at a time, unnoticed by both the dreamer and the restless. Silent, save for the ragged exhale of his breathing, in and out, in and out. A pendulum in a grandfather clock he can scarcely remember but knows his aging sire had once stood staring listlessly in front of. No doubt waiting until it stopped.

He's not expecting to run into a spectre of his past. Of something that had for a time, and still does, taken him and made him foolish. Made him a man instead of a soldier. Narrowing the world down to a single focal point. An ash rose in a garden of marigolds, brilliant, bold and beautiful.

Seraphina blooms before him, as gilt hooves caress wet stone and come to an abrupt, aborted stop. Struck, as if an archer had skewered him neatly upon a well aimed arrow to the heart.

Different. Remade.

But she looks as she always did.

Lovely, lethal and lonesome.

Most would take the latter as insult, and Renwick would call them fools bold as brass. Intensity burning in the churning pits of his molten eyes, one day away from spilling forth down the glass cut of his cheekbones, all mirth and fools gold. It comes forward reverently as any bell chime sweet prayer ever could. She's lonesome in the way grand temple statues are lonesome. Their silhouette commands the space, turning men to mice beneath their glory. Their vaunted faces hallowed and holy, a moment in time frozen. Giving glimpses into the heroes they're charged to forever emulate, allowing a fleeting moment of connection between the worshipful and divine. All the sorrow, all the wonder, all that solemn charge etched by master crafters into stone.

She may wear no crown upon her brow, but she inspires as the dawn does. It's the not the first time he's had such thoughts, yet it comes forth all the same. Up upon those windswept dunes with Solis' searing gaze as his witness, gazing at white flames and smoking ash. Seraphina looks like the divine come again, with the whorls of her white hair ablaze around her. Mismatched eyes the embodiment of the sun and the moon.

She whose silver hair burns brighter than the sun.

Here he is, weathering the passage as time as cliffs weather the capricious whims of the ocean. There she is, marble and gold. Will she recognise? Age has blessed him to be sure, he does not grey where others turn sheet white beneath time's ardent reclaimation of youth. Still, he's no southern lad fresh as spring grass to the joust, and he's no wretched thing on spindled legs and crooked of back. He's thickly corded muscle and scars, campaigns and regrets, weeping solterran gold in a shroud of denoctian night. He still wears those damned flowers in his hair, they have bloomed along with him. A calling card from the cradle, to the joust, to the battlefield and to the grave. From spring, to summer, to autumn. Through winter til the spring comes again. Now he wears Black Hellebores, Tuberoses and Amaryllis.

"Sera?"

Down here, there are no divine witnesses to their reunion, save for the unholy thing he spies with unblinking intensity, who must surely be cut from a similar cloth to those whom equines spend their lives longing to connect with. There is only the sickly things curling and coiling beneath clear pools. Sightless and longing still, for things they cannot know or comprehend. Driven by instinct, barely concealed hunger smiling between jagged, crooked teeth. What would they know of their significance. Of the moment unravelling above the surface of their Kingdom?

They know nothing, and thus this fated red string moment will go unrecorded. It will pass as all things do, experienced between the souls present and nothing more. Fondly remembered, pivotol in the dance but otherwise glossed over.

Caverns have strange connotations, and so do their inhabitants. They can be the death of a man, an apt metaphor for the state of mind if he was so inclined to halt upon his own state of being in this moment. Never ending searches for belonging and purpose, floors worn smooth by the equines who came before and come again, as flesh and wraith, ghoul and spectre. Once could wittle away their years down here, just as one can retreat into the long corridors of their mind and return sightless, empty, forgotten. Is Seraphina imitating heroes of old entering the labyrinth, slaying beasts she cannot see? Wandering the dark ways until she's lost, waiting for the wayfarer to point her way back home? Or has she come for solace, a reprieve from the ails of above?

So much rattles forth in his painted breast, yet he manages to wrangle them in his throat. Wrap the long tendrils of self-control around them and crumble them to dust, and what does not crumble, relents and scurries back the way it came. Leaving him speechless, a living statue himself among magefire and ancient stone. A spring fed squire, instead of the hardened veteran of a hundred battles.

A mouse encased within a temple.

But what a wonderful thing to be struck silent by.