...
He is like that of the Great, Big, and Terrible Things that will soon be upon her sky. Pin-cushioning all of the Night Worshippers in with their Great, Big, and Terrible wings, their teeth, their horns and wilderness, their talons which will sweep these small, simple people up-up!
And Away.
Albrecht is just another part of the darkness which spreads like disease throughout the pass. There is a type of anger that fills him that is dangerous because it is cold, quiet, and under diamond-hard pressure - it will produce results if results must be produced. This rage will find a way, come Hell or High Water. Blood will be for blood.
Especially if it upsets anything that he has lined up for himself.
Dragons, Albrecht muses to himself, dragons cannot possibly be that bad - only as bad as their owners make them. He has never lived a life where a dragon was free and allowed to be capable of such devastation. Horses were never allowed to be free enough to own dragons either. He has no type of response for her other than the air he sucks through his teeth. For such a small, short motion it makes a larger noise than he expects it to. Some kind of metaphorical steam must escape him and it does so in a loud, '--TSCH', but he rolls into it and away as smoothly as a peaceful wave over a dawn-glow shore.
"Denocte is notorious for its wide distribution of ... hooligans. You cannot trust a Denoctian's loyalty even if you were to weigh it at face value in gold." There it is, that is his fire which burns with the only kind of promise he can keep -- getting what's his. Albrecht wants to spit, but he isn't that kind of guy and - instead - licks his dry lips and swallows the opinions he has - that he feels he needs to express as a form of distaste for what has happened here.
"You witnessed this?" He fixes her with a serious stare, his jackal eyes couldn't look more interested now than if he were spying opportunity that would strike him rich. "How is it you survived and so many others did not? Assuming these are all graves that you have dug." Mounds and mounds, dips, blips, and seams scar, score, and scratch up the black earth. If it could bleed, it would.
Because it doesn't, that makes Albrecht feel like magic isn't even a thing anymore.
Maybe everything does need to burn?
What time is lunch? -- and, where is his connection?
He drops the sack of jewels into the ashes of what might be something's haphazard grave, he doesn't care to look. Isra the unicorn flinches when the weight of it makes a deep, dull thud onto the ground -- and the step forward that he takes makes her lighter on her feet. Something about that makes him smile an almost too-knowing smile at her, the kind that violates strangers in the ways that keep them awake at night. Even though everything about him reflects a man keeping his space and making no effort to harm her, he - like Tempus (or so he believes Tempus to be-like) - radiates both black and obscene with clear and present danger.
"Matter of fact - I don't think I have seen someone quite like you around here before. What are you? Are you some kind of a thing that comes from the sea?" He steps forward to try his limits, to know his strength, to find his Right where it is so very wrong. Can he scare her? Is she that small and simple that she will let him force her to her knees in this ash, render her submissive, feed her to wolves if wolves will even eat her.
It is not the mystical nature of her blue, her horn, or the way she spins words like the women in his dreams do that drives him to ask her. His voice isn't soft or inquiring. It isn't harsh, cold, or without heart. General interest is what makes him command her to answer him in the most polite way he can afford. "How do I know you did not start this fire?"
Maybe she is from Hell, he thinks, --like most women are.
ALBRECHT
this is what you came for. this is what you get
