Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
Raymond had not yet washed the flower maiden's blood out of his red coat. It stood out in dark, ruddy brown streaks matted through the hair of his face and body where he'd had to get directly engaged. Not that he liked being bloody - it itched, foreign and unpleasant as a needle pressing into the slope of his back - but there simply had not been time.
Time is precious; the ranger had always known that. Lately, though, its value seemed unquantifiable.
It would be nice to learn how to sleep again.
He had stolen through Denocte under cover of darkness, passing like a shadow where normally he would strut, his progress marked only by the slow tumble of the stars and moon far overhead. Where he went, he'd left bread crumbs - small, meaningless scribbles, not even fit to turn a crow's head - tracing an obscure path, decipherable only by two pairs of eyes, to where he waited now.
Not far from here, to the south, he had run across the young Hydra injured by a hungry catamount. Not far in the other direction, the Arma mountains loomed dark and indistinct to the north in the pre-dawn light. He kept watch now in the rolling foothills between both of those worlds, the purple mirror of Vitreus lake laid out in almost sinister silence across the empty distance between him and the capitol. His red coat, dull brown in the twilight gloom and broken up as it was by the shadow of someone else's misery painted into its surface, made him for once nearly invisible against the scrubby backdrop.
But what he awaited would not be hunting by sight alone.
She would hunt with her heart, and by the unwavering grip of a life well-shared.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
Raymond had not yet washed the flower maiden's blood out of his red coat. It stood out in dark, ruddy brown streaks matted through the hair of his face and body where he'd had to get directly engaged. Not that he liked being bloody - it itched, foreign and unpleasant as a needle pressing into the slope of his back - but there simply had not been time.
Time is precious; the ranger had always known that. Lately, though, its value seemed unquantifiable.
It would be nice to learn how to sleep again.
He had stolen through Denocte under cover of darkness, passing like a shadow where normally he would strut, his progress marked only by the slow tumble of the stars and moon far overhead. Where he went, he'd left bread crumbs - small, meaningless scribbles, not even fit to turn a crow's head - tracing an obscure path, decipherable only by two pairs of eyes, to where he waited now.
Not far from here, to the south, he had run across the young Hydra injured by a hungry catamount. Not far in the other direction, the Arma mountains loomed dark and indistinct to the north in the pre-dawn light. He kept watch now in the rolling foothills between both of those worlds, the purple mirror of Vitreus lake laid out in almost sinister silence across the empty distance between him and the capitol. His red coat, dull brown in the twilight gloom and broken up as it was by the shadow of someone else's misery painted into its surface, made him for once nearly invisible against the scrubby backdrop.
But what he awaited would not be hunting by sight alone.
She would hunt with her heart, and by the unwavering grip of a life well-shared.
@Calliope | Set after Raymond's reunion with Ruth and before the disastrous weather event.
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
