[P] Bring Me Thunder; Bring Me Steel

[Acton]

Acton these violent delights have violent ends The satisfaction he felt as he watched the stranger react to the barrier he’d made was thin and fleeting, patchy smoke compared to what he would have felt once. Acton was changing as much as Novus, and his growing pains seemed to him just as ugly. Even so he wore a crooked kind of grin as the man’s wings beat back against the flames, a wind to which they did not (could not) bow. As the dark figure danced back, the buckskin ambled forward, until he stood just behind the row of leaping, heatless fire. It was a different kind of spark that leapt beneath his skin to hear the stranger’s voice, the tone of it reminding him of a hundred back-alley brawls. This was the kind of meeting Acton always sought out when he began to feel like a stranger in his skin. “If I had one you wouldn’t have to ask,” he said, and released his hold on the magic. Without even a flicker the flames were gone as though they’d never been, and the buckskin smiled like a knife at the man. Now that he was closer it was clear how big he was, wings spread like an eagle, and Acton was surely a fool to provoke him - but Acton had always been a fool, and at least it felt familiar. “Where were you headed in such a hurry?” His own voice was smooth and unruffled, a contrast to the (not unwarranted) acid of the other’s; the answer itself wasn’t important. If the man felt like getting somewhere quickly, he’d use his wings to do it, and no one but Caligo’s thunderbirds could stop him. Information was only a secondary goal. All Acton wanted to do was provoke, to push and push until he felt less like a fuse and more like a firework, bright and hot and brief as a falling star but oh, so glorious as he burned.   @Blyse   yes! it may have been part of what made me go this route :p