[P] Bring Me Thunder; Bring Me Steel

[Acton]

Acton these violent delights have violent ends Acton, too, took his meaning from success and a sense of purpose - though both of them had to be through less conventional means. He could never have made it as a military man; he had spent too long an orphan on crooked streets, and soot and knife-shine had made it too much into his blood. The buckskin would never willingly follow an order that was presented as such, and served no cause but coin and pleasure. Or so he’d always pictured himself. There was a gnawing worry that his present self was falling short of his past one, and the rats’-feet scratching of the thought went round and round his mind. Acton still didn’t know who he was if he wasn’t a Crow. And the Crows were months fled, now, gone to nothing but feathers, the finest vanishing act he’d ever seen. But the grin he wore when the stranger stepped closer didn’t feel like an act. Nor did his gratification at the set of the stallion’s shoulders, the tight lines of his wings, the thin slash of his mouth. The buckskin did not take his own step forward, but the look in his amber eye was a dare nonetheless. He did not miss the way there was less bite to the man’s next words, and rolled a burnished shoulder in a shrug. “Luckily for us both this is no interrogation.” When he tilted his head, there was something corvid-like in the black of his mask, the gleam of his eye. He laughed like a crow, too, brief and coarse, at the question that came next. “Gods, no. That would suit nobody.” Almost he added that he was only bored; instead he cast a glance overhead, as if in idle assessment of something the clouds concealed. “We’ve had far more things to worry about lately than a solitary stranger. No offense.”   @Blyse