[P] Bring Me Thunder; Bring Me Steel

[Acton]

Acton these violent delights have violent ends Chance and gamble was all Acton had known. That was his comfort zone, the murky gray that required no measure of soul-searching. The buckskin did not believe in black and white, only what could and could not be done with the right group, the right tools. Which is why, stripped of that group when most of the Crows had vanished with their former king, Denote’s erstwhile magician found himself uncomfortably unmoored. He hadn’t grown to like it in the time since summer, when things had first begun to topple south, but at least he didn’t go on days-long benders anymore. He missed Bexley, and he missed Raglan, and he missed Raum (though Denocte’s silver Ghost was still around somewhere, just even more of a haunt than normal). Most of all, maybe, he missed knowing what he was going to do with his day, his week, his black-soot, coin-bright life. With no one left to give him direction, Acton wandered like a boy, like maybe his answers were around the next bend or buried beneath a copse of silver-barked trees. Of course they weren’t. At last, with the spring sun full and warm on his back, Acton set to what had always been his idle activity: practicing his illusions. The air was cooler, here, at the foothills of the Armas, and the lake was a smooth silver mirror a mile distant. Here with no audience, the buckskin spun his long-ignored trade. Rivers of colored scarves poured from the air and scattered into a flock of crows; a deck of shuffled cards always turned up the King of Hearts no matter which was flipped. As he warmed to his work so did his illusions: colored some, crackling but heatless flames, a spill of golden coins. All of it hollow, hollow, hollow. The knowledge of it - that none of it mattered, that not much did anymore - put that familiar heat licking back under his skin until his blood ran hotter than his false fire ever could. He might have just burned himself out, alone as a single struck match - but then a flicker of motion drew his eye, and his magic vanished as he turned to watch the pegasus land, hooves like striking flint as they set him down at a flat gallop. Ordinarily Acton might not have done what he did (at least not with a stranger), but he narrowed his eyes at the closing distance between them and licked his lips, wondering. He had not tested the range of his magic in some time - and with a thought, a little twist of wherever the magic lived (his gut? his heart? his chimney-dark soul?) he set up a line of bright fire a dozen or so yards before the figure. Any inspection would show it was heatless, scentless, nothing but a mirage - but the stallion was moving too fast to study, and Acton watched with a thin and black curiosity as he maintained the barrier of false fire.   @Blyse   excuse this asshole