The morning hadn't started with it's usual fanfare, there hadn't been no sarcastic whispers or the chill of a ghost prodding at him impatiently as he pulled himself from another night's rest. No silvery figures had greeted his moon glow eyes when they'd opened. It'd been a slow realisation as he'd stretched his legs out infront of himself and dragged his sluggish body to it's feet, head tilted toward the resting figure of his bard as he debated whether he should wake the stallion or leave him be. Any other day he might have leaned close, cleared his throat and serenaded him with a bastardized shanty they had picked up along the roads, not in the glorious cadence he was famous for, but the sultry tunes of a strangled deer at dawn.
Uncharacteristcally, to go along with the already unusual day, he left Iliad be. No doubt he would show up later, invited or otherwise, sarcasm on that barbed wire tongue of his. Though this time he hopes there won't be a song to go with the god awful noise the crude instrument had the audacity to scream and call it music. Large wings caught the early morning breeze and he drifted the shore with lazy strokes of his large wings, pale eyes focused on nothing in particular. It isn't until he landed, one foot after the other in one elegant swoop and sank down into the sand did the terrible realization hit. Like Iliad had dropped one of his 3am ballads on his head without warning.
There is no ghostly faces phasing in and out of his sights, no echoed voices to join the song of the ocean waves and the gulls overhead. Had they ever been this quiet? Was this a new tactic because he'd uprooted them again, following the wanderlust he and his companion held in their core? An ear dipped back and he snorted out loud. "Very funny guys," he called out, glancing back and forth between the waves and the expanse of sand behind him, "you've made your point, you're mad. You can come out now." The necromancer conceded, trying to sound genuine but fell a fraction short. When nothing happened, no hint of their faces on the wind with amusement etched on their features, his ears tipped backwards once more and he reached within himself. Instead of grasping at the tendrils of silver and white within himself, he grasped at nothing. Empty air. A hollow hole in his breast devoid of the very essence he'd been born with. The panic is immediate after that, brows furrowed and shot up as he hauled himself to his feet. Where was it? Where had it gone? Did magic just disappear like that, surely it couldn't. It wasn't like he'd been gifted it out of the blue by some old crone on the road, he'd been blessed since birth. Again he reached within himself, this time his grasp is a ragged claw raking over earth, earth that gave him nothing. The hollow feeling persisted, and all he got in return for a vague feeling of nausea, similar to he hangover he'd endured moons ago, after sipping a bad batch of ale in some run down inn they'd holed up in for the night.
He'd never been attached to Iliad, in the sense that he could never be aprt from him. They had been independent from each other before they met, and they had remained as such. Not to say he doesn't like Iliad, there is an easy friendship that has formed between them, a quiet understanding of where they've come from. Today, he's never been more glad in his life when he spotted the Bard's figure overhead. "Iliad!" He tried to instill his usual brand of mirth into his call, but even that failed him. "Come to serenade me with one of those horrible ballads for leaving you in bed?" Tried was the key word, because when he replayed his own voice back in his head, he sounded positively miserable.
"their speech goes here and this is the color"
NICODEMUS
Throw me to the wolves
& I'll come back leading the pack
