A devil could not marvel in the nuances of fate and the winds that melded, ever so softly, what tides fortune may bring. Indeed, he could have thought of himself a gifted individual if he had cared to suppose all things were lacking in coincidence, but such would be a celestial suggestion, one of which he couldn't be bothered to consider. His luck was that of a thief's luck – menial, just in scraping by, the gilded fortunes of a cunning grin and a swift hand that cheated, if only, the leagues of those whose footsteps were shadowed in death. Never greater a feat – it came to him in waves, in a mockery of destiny, the parody of such pleasurable happenstances that found him never wanting less than the next row of treasures. Erasmus could not be disturbed enough to think of godly intervention, much less to consider his own titan blood that in its whim sought each golden titter of gluttony with a fervent mastery. It was luck to him as much as it was instinct, and neither brought any small epiphany as a man of accepting (though lacking of his own) patience that thwarted superstition.
It was, for a moment of wonder, that the sanctity in the word of coincidence began to leap and bound from the well of curiosity, slopping itself across the casino table with an impetuous grin that beamed over the subtle whisper, “charged to the proprietor's tab” and melted softly into conniving shadows of the skeptical mind. His brow raised, but when her glance passed back to him his was an expression of otherwise neutrality, save for the tense way his eyes focused on everything in the room all at once in graceful sweeping, their calculative measure delving and diving for each candle flicker with hardly a suspicious twitch. At once the table was labored with an imbalance of fortunes, or so he thought, but it wasn't something that made him uneasy as it was something that tugged even harder at his interests. Perhaps, after all, the dealer was sufficient enough in his honesty and fairplay. And perhaps, at a jaunt of that mysterious happenstance that seems to clamber all too swiftly to gather him up in their fortunes, a right-time-at-the-right-place knack of things, she too was a clever fate grasping at golden threads with a thief's timely hands.
Whatever their favors sorted for them in equal or unequal parts, the dagger was now in her possession and it was of little loss to him. If he were honest, all of what he placed on the table were of little loss to him – as it was almost an effortless charade in ownership, each one founded by their own petty means. Erasmus was a king of a nothing empire here on this odd continent, and his opportune engagements found him a simple means by acquiring what others owned. Most were blissfully ignorant. The Night Markets were all too pleasant with its smells and sights and sounds that few felt a need to clutch tightly on their belongings. No doubt they may upon realization later in their dens be more quick to check their peripherals the next time they visited the markets, but that was of no consequence to him. Their grief would find another thief, probably a youth who was not so dexterous. That her newest prize was acquired by means a little more violent than a street-urchin's quick work was an unnecessary detail. The grin that slid across his face as she examined the dagger now as her own was humble, as if he had provided it to her as a gift and not a misfortune. Truly, he marveled that a creature of such hygienic, soft-handed and gentle-voiced luxury found her entertainment with sharp things. It was a cruel misjudgment on his part, considering he had already garnered the feeling that mystery arc'd and spiraled about her like plenty more oddities looming as their own entities, he didn't doubt that there were more than antler-hilt daggers that tuned her appetites.
It was when the startling green-ness of her eyes caught him suddenly that he realized he had been looking at that arterial shadow where her hair once lay in a perfect, manicured row, enthused in the way a vein had quivered in a thin line along the curvature of her neck. Each shade in slope gathered against itself as she turned, and his eyes were quick to meet her own with no less heavy of a glance. They perplexed him more however, the way the dim-lit room couldn't be reflected in them as much as the candlelight did dance in the silhouette of her lashes, and in that mirror shined unnaturally bright. It wasn't the space of color that unnerved him the most, he deduced, but that they were near impossible to read. They were two forged doors through which he couldn't even reach his thief's hands – not for anything tangible, just empty fistfuls of ambiguities and secrecies that kept him rattling the bars like a ravening loon. Surely, if he stared too long, he may resemble that of a paling horror – onesuch vagary that wastes to time in searching and searching, or something darker that makes a man volatile in his thirsts.
To ultimate dismay, an uproar erupted with discourteous fashion – that hobbling rise of gasps that meant to him some event much more dire than spilled wine. In dramatic woe, a cape went a-fluttering, and where its weighted fetters bore back against the carpet there dripped purplish sanguine, its rich scent wafted briefly over the onlookers of this parodied tragedy. It meant little to him. Alcohol was made by renewable means, and one wine bottle was certain to be replaced by another easily in a place so wealthy as this. He returned to the table, but quickly noted the way those green eyes were turned still, sharp as the dagger at her side, to the scene. So wrathful in fact, that he couldn't help but look back to see what it was that stirred her discontent. The offended bottle still spun on its side until it curtsied to a stop, the flow pouring lazily from its mouth. At once a flock of waiters came to assuage the scene, all of an amiable placidity that claimed no foul, and all remiss workings were languidly returned to their former ease. He chuckled, a small pop of humor in his throat as he witnessed the reprieve. A lacquered clockwork of hushed conversations, the clinking crystal china, the distant sound of sinking leather in the lounge as all the club seemed returned to its mettle. At this he realized how the group had thinned since his initial arrival, and he had never thought to question what time they closed. Or had even considered that they closed at all.
When he returned his attentions to the table he too noticed her half-glass and remembered his own, downing it with a quick click of his teeth. The fire water burned smoothly down his throat, sloshing numbingly first against the pockets of his cheeks before its pilgrimage. He was aware of the slight vertigo, a buzz more than a drunken stupor, but it wasn't enough of a fright. It wasn't often he drank, but he couldn't be humbled to consider himself chaste. All too quickly yet, perhaps by waiters that were left embarrassed and interested in letting the prior event fade into forgotten history through an abundance of congeniality and hospitality, (or by letting their clients drink themselves out of the memory, so as not to seek out the stain in the carpet in future ventures) the glass was refilled. He waited a moment that he did not feel loomed over by the apt swiftness and feigned graciousness of passing waiters, passing his offerings onto the table (those signos that looked pitiful beside the brilliance of the sun sigil) and downed another gulp.
He felt her eyes on him, but he couldn't help the way the liquor toyed with his vision and made the sigil glow under the light like a small sun itself. It glimmered in each quiver (was that him moving his eyes or did the table shake?) and sparkled like a thousand reflecting grains of desert sand. For a small moment he almost regretted placing it on the table, for its sheer beauty in person. But his detachment for the material was swift and redeeming, and with a quick shudder he shed his cares for its possession. His attention returned to him, shrugging off the pendant and returning the surrounding world. Each part carried on its own path, trudging with uncertainty into the dark of the club. Some eyes passed over the table and locked, if only for a second, on the sigil before following their mark into other rooms. The sound of the dealer shuffling cards grounded him again, but he became aware of some disturbance. Somewhere on the other side of the table, a silhouette had stopped in their roaming just beyond, and the sun sigil reflected dimly in their eyes. Slowly, those eyes clambered to meet Erasmus. Something about their nature disgruntled him. They were accusatory, disgusted. Or he was left to his whiskey-drawn imagination, but there was a certainty that the curious onlooker was at least looking at him. He made no notion to challenge this new audience, but his tongue rolled in his mouth with the taste of bourbon and the formation of unkind words that were too lazy to trace his lips.
Even before they could manifest in his voice had he wanted, he was aware of a curious tit-tat like light fingertips brushing against the tip of his horn. He was almost numb to it, and his delayed reactions left him to simply muse its nature before he could bother seeing what it was –
a sudden jolt and his ear flicked to his companion's lips, his disarray obvious in the spectral width of his glance, their shock that shifted to frustration, and then to a soft realization as they rolled back over into the green. Hazy and dim, he observed the urgency in her stare as an outright sort of beauty that came to him as a new vision, a new door he hadn't tried. They were severe, penetrative, and the golden rinds of his own sharp eyes bore back into them with a challenge. A grin tread across his lips and he tried her grip teasingly, though enjoyed too well the way her hot breath tickled against the curve of his ear and the way he could almost – too near almost, so excruciatingly almost – feel what her skin felt like against his. Was it soft? Was it warm and pliable softness, the sort that felt too like the welcome of plush and possession that you felt you couldn't have enough? Was it hard as tack backs, needle-sharp as those eyes and grating with a roughness that hurt like pleasure? He felt her grip loosen, but he didn't move more than for a slight twitch from the relieved pressure. The warmth rose and beat against his skin, urging him onward – but he is too much a gentleman yet, yet we must earnestly reiterate. There is the small stirrings of a savagery in him that beckons him on, and as his lips rake against his fangs the motion feels almost too natural. But he does not reach out to her, and the tense fingers of that savagery claw at his insides and recoil back into the deep of his hunger. Though it scowls at him from the dark, the grin remains, and his words are a taunt. “family heirloom."
But a snort comes from across the table, and when he turns he sees that the silhouette from before has materialized in horse-flesh and pride. The man is sun-kissed bronze, a rugged nobility that denotes some nature of royal roughness – if Erasmus had known more of Novus, he would have known the man was a Solterran soldier. Following the snort, a gesture of humor that reached in response to the suggestion that it was a family heirloom, a purse of coins clinked and clattered into his bounty. The way the signos bounced and knotted against the burlap, and the way they laughed to themselves in a way money knows best, the offering came as a summons.
Erasmus knew his words were a bold faced lie. So did the man who joined them across the table. So would the poor drunken sod beside him, if he was well enough. The other man at the table didn't seem like he could be bothered either way. And he wouldn't be so foolish as to think that Aghavni, in all her charm and sharpness even with the dulling of the drink, had been otherwise fooled by the jest. Of all the royalties that Erasmus could have come from in the scrape of The Wilds, none owned something quite so precious as the sigil that shone brightly against the mound of signos. If they had come across it, the primal bastards might have pawned it in an act of worship, not knowing that the mountain clans were the ones double fisting their offerings instead of the gods. Which led him to wonder, though to avoid self-incrimination it couldn't be wondered aloud – where had the bounty hunter found it? The hunter was undoubtedly from the rolling, roving nothingness of The Wilds and couldn't have come across it himself except if by chance or force. Why was it so important that it stirred some disquiet from his companion, and prompted a roughhewn collector to the table?
He looked to the wealth that weighed the table. The man who had joined had almost doubled the former offerings in order to make a late arrival into the game, and Erasmus counted his dues. He never placed an offer for any gamble unless he knew the value was appropriate and this – the sack was plenty, in his opinion more valuable, and for what? What good was a simple medallion that sparkled like a hundred suns? A conversation piece? A shining pendant for vanity's sake?
Another grounding of shuffling cards slicked its way into his focus, and there was a clap to each face as they clicked against the table before each of them.
I think it would be wise to remember that mentioned instance of gratification he endured in his odd sort of luck – a luck of a devil, of a laughing heathen, so uncontested by destiny. It was more than a faith or coincidence. It simply was, as every single fiber of his being was. And as he looked at his cards, their bold faces marked singularly with a scarab that seemed too small, too less, he realized that he again did not have the winning hand. He looked over to the woman's at his side, his eyes briefly glancing over those scarabs as well. Something about them seemed right, more right than his own, but still not quite right enough. He turned back to his glass and found it full again, and must have missed the passing waiter who had murmured something to the effect of an almost empty bottle just a minute before. With a trace of condemnation, he downed the glass again and pushed a card (without turning it over to see what it was) out of his deck. The way it shined seemed right, but he couldn't quite explain how it was right. He looked over at her deck again, the last card clicking into place. “wait." He whispered against her ear, and slipped a card from her deck that didn't seem to quite fit. “Sir, you can't –” “i didn't look." erasmus's harsh voice silenced the dealer, who looked complainantly to Aghavni. "The man's drunk." the new player scoffed, but scowled again when erasmus shrugged meekly and continued trading his card for hers. “just trust me, a minute. simple trade." He looked to her eyes once more, and though they were filled with the constant looming of dread and mischief, in them glistened something like a conniving honesty and a small glimmer of drunken pride concerning his instincts. Once he slipped his card in her deck, he observed it quickly once more and was satisfied in the way the beetle backs gleamed in the chandelier light. With a small half wink, he returned to his own cards and waited for the call to reveal their decks.
One day, his luck would run out.
It was, for a moment of wonder, that the sanctity in the word of coincidence began to leap and bound from the well of curiosity, slopping itself across the casino table with an impetuous grin that beamed over the subtle whisper, “charged to the proprietor's tab” and melted softly into conniving shadows of the skeptical mind. His brow raised, but when her glance passed back to him his was an expression of otherwise neutrality, save for the tense way his eyes focused on everything in the room all at once in graceful sweeping, their calculative measure delving and diving for each candle flicker with hardly a suspicious twitch. At once the table was labored with an imbalance of fortunes, or so he thought, but it wasn't something that made him uneasy as it was something that tugged even harder at his interests. Perhaps, after all, the dealer was sufficient enough in his honesty and fairplay. And perhaps, at a jaunt of that mysterious happenstance that seems to clamber all too swiftly to gather him up in their fortunes, a right-time-at-the-right-place knack of things, she too was a clever fate grasping at golden threads with a thief's timely hands.
Whatever their favors sorted for them in equal or unequal parts, the dagger was now in her possession and it was of little loss to him. If he were honest, all of what he placed on the table were of little loss to him – as it was almost an effortless charade in ownership, each one founded by their own petty means. Erasmus was a king of a nothing empire here on this odd continent, and his opportune engagements found him a simple means by acquiring what others owned. Most were blissfully ignorant. The Night Markets were all too pleasant with its smells and sights and sounds that few felt a need to clutch tightly on their belongings. No doubt they may upon realization later in their dens be more quick to check their peripherals the next time they visited the markets, but that was of no consequence to him. Their grief would find another thief, probably a youth who was not so dexterous. That her newest prize was acquired by means a little more violent than a street-urchin's quick work was an unnecessary detail. The grin that slid across his face as she examined the dagger now as her own was humble, as if he had provided it to her as a gift and not a misfortune. Truly, he marveled that a creature of such hygienic, soft-handed and gentle-voiced luxury found her entertainment with sharp things. It was a cruel misjudgment on his part, considering he had already garnered the feeling that mystery arc'd and spiraled about her like plenty more oddities looming as their own entities, he didn't doubt that there were more than antler-hilt daggers that tuned her appetites.
It was when the startling green-ness of her eyes caught him suddenly that he realized he had been looking at that arterial shadow where her hair once lay in a perfect, manicured row, enthused in the way a vein had quivered in a thin line along the curvature of her neck. Each shade in slope gathered against itself as she turned, and his eyes were quick to meet her own with no less heavy of a glance. They perplexed him more however, the way the dim-lit room couldn't be reflected in them as much as the candlelight did dance in the silhouette of her lashes, and in that mirror shined unnaturally bright. It wasn't the space of color that unnerved him the most, he deduced, but that they were near impossible to read. They were two forged doors through which he couldn't even reach his thief's hands – not for anything tangible, just empty fistfuls of ambiguities and secrecies that kept him rattling the bars like a ravening loon. Surely, if he stared too long, he may resemble that of a paling horror – onesuch vagary that wastes to time in searching and searching, or something darker that makes a man volatile in his thirsts.
To ultimate dismay, an uproar erupted with discourteous fashion – that hobbling rise of gasps that meant to him some event much more dire than spilled wine. In dramatic woe, a cape went a-fluttering, and where its weighted fetters bore back against the carpet there dripped purplish sanguine, its rich scent wafted briefly over the onlookers of this parodied tragedy. It meant little to him. Alcohol was made by renewable means, and one wine bottle was certain to be replaced by another easily in a place so wealthy as this. He returned to the table, but quickly noted the way those green eyes were turned still, sharp as the dagger at her side, to the scene. So wrathful in fact, that he couldn't help but look back to see what it was that stirred her discontent. The offended bottle still spun on its side until it curtsied to a stop, the flow pouring lazily from its mouth. At once a flock of waiters came to assuage the scene, all of an amiable placidity that claimed no foul, and all remiss workings were languidly returned to their former ease. He chuckled, a small pop of humor in his throat as he witnessed the reprieve. A lacquered clockwork of hushed conversations, the clinking crystal china, the distant sound of sinking leather in the lounge as all the club seemed returned to its mettle. At this he realized how the group had thinned since his initial arrival, and he had never thought to question what time they closed. Or had even considered that they closed at all.
When he returned his attentions to the table he too noticed her half-glass and remembered his own, downing it with a quick click of his teeth. The fire water burned smoothly down his throat, sloshing numbingly first against the pockets of his cheeks before its pilgrimage. He was aware of the slight vertigo, a buzz more than a drunken stupor, but it wasn't enough of a fright. It wasn't often he drank, but he couldn't be humbled to consider himself chaste. All too quickly yet, perhaps by waiters that were left embarrassed and interested in letting the prior event fade into forgotten history through an abundance of congeniality and hospitality, (or by letting their clients drink themselves out of the memory, so as not to seek out the stain in the carpet in future ventures) the glass was refilled. He waited a moment that he did not feel loomed over by the apt swiftness and feigned graciousness of passing waiters, passing his offerings onto the table (those signos that looked pitiful beside the brilliance of the sun sigil) and downed another gulp.
He felt her eyes on him, but he couldn't help the way the liquor toyed with his vision and made the sigil glow under the light like a small sun itself. It glimmered in each quiver (was that him moving his eyes or did the table shake?) and sparkled like a thousand reflecting grains of desert sand. For a small moment he almost regretted placing it on the table, for its sheer beauty in person. But his detachment for the material was swift and redeeming, and with a quick shudder he shed his cares for its possession. His attention returned to him, shrugging off the pendant and returning the surrounding world. Each part carried on its own path, trudging with uncertainty into the dark of the club. Some eyes passed over the table and locked, if only for a second, on the sigil before following their mark into other rooms. The sound of the dealer shuffling cards grounded him again, but he became aware of some disturbance. Somewhere on the other side of the table, a silhouette had stopped in their roaming just beyond, and the sun sigil reflected dimly in their eyes. Slowly, those eyes clambered to meet Erasmus. Something about their nature disgruntled him. They were accusatory, disgusted. Or he was left to his whiskey-drawn imagination, but there was a certainty that the curious onlooker was at least looking at him. He made no notion to challenge this new audience, but his tongue rolled in his mouth with the taste of bourbon and the formation of unkind words that were too lazy to trace his lips.
Even before they could manifest in his voice had he wanted, he was aware of a curious tit-tat like light fingertips brushing against the tip of his horn. He was almost numb to it, and his delayed reactions left him to simply muse its nature before he could bother seeing what it was –
a sudden jolt and his ear flicked to his companion's lips, his disarray obvious in the spectral width of his glance, their shock that shifted to frustration, and then to a soft realization as they rolled back over into the green. Hazy and dim, he observed the urgency in her stare as an outright sort of beauty that came to him as a new vision, a new door he hadn't tried. They were severe, penetrative, and the golden rinds of his own sharp eyes bore back into them with a challenge. A grin tread across his lips and he tried her grip teasingly, though enjoyed too well the way her hot breath tickled against the curve of his ear and the way he could almost – too near almost, so excruciatingly almost – feel what her skin felt like against his. Was it soft? Was it warm and pliable softness, the sort that felt too like the welcome of plush and possession that you felt you couldn't have enough? Was it hard as tack backs, needle-sharp as those eyes and grating with a roughness that hurt like pleasure? He felt her grip loosen, but he didn't move more than for a slight twitch from the relieved pressure. The warmth rose and beat against his skin, urging him onward – but he is too much a gentleman yet, yet we must earnestly reiterate. There is the small stirrings of a savagery in him that beckons him on, and as his lips rake against his fangs the motion feels almost too natural. But he does not reach out to her, and the tense fingers of that savagery claw at his insides and recoil back into the deep of his hunger. Though it scowls at him from the dark, the grin remains, and his words are a taunt. “family heirloom."
But a snort comes from across the table, and when he turns he sees that the silhouette from before has materialized in horse-flesh and pride. The man is sun-kissed bronze, a rugged nobility that denotes some nature of royal roughness – if Erasmus had known more of Novus, he would have known the man was a Solterran soldier. Following the snort, a gesture of humor that reached in response to the suggestion that it was a family heirloom, a purse of coins clinked and clattered into his bounty. The way the signos bounced and knotted against the burlap, and the way they laughed to themselves in a way money knows best, the offering came as a summons.
Erasmus knew his words were a bold faced lie. So did the man who joined them across the table. So would the poor drunken sod beside him, if he was well enough. The other man at the table didn't seem like he could be bothered either way. And he wouldn't be so foolish as to think that Aghavni, in all her charm and sharpness even with the dulling of the drink, had been otherwise fooled by the jest. Of all the royalties that Erasmus could have come from in the scrape of The Wilds, none owned something quite so precious as the sigil that shone brightly against the mound of signos. If they had come across it, the primal bastards might have pawned it in an act of worship, not knowing that the mountain clans were the ones double fisting their offerings instead of the gods. Which led him to wonder, though to avoid self-incrimination it couldn't be wondered aloud – where had the bounty hunter found it? The hunter was undoubtedly from the rolling, roving nothingness of The Wilds and couldn't have come across it himself except if by chance or force. Why was it so important that it stirred some disquiet from his companion, and prompted a roughhewn collector to the table?
He looked to the wealth that weighed the table. The man who had joined had almost doubled the former offerings in order to make a late arrival into the game, and Erasmus counted his dues. He never placed an offer for any gamble unless he knew the value was appropriate and this – the sack was plenty, in his opinion more valuable, and for what? What good was a simple medallion that sparkled like a hundred suns? A conversation piece? A shining pendant for vanity's sake?
Another grounding of shuffling cards slicked its way into his focus, and there was a clap to each face as they clicked against the table before each of them.
I think it would be wise to remember that mentioned instance of gratification he endured in his odd sort of luck – a luck of a devil, of a laughing heathen, so uncontested by destiny. It was more than a faith or coincidence. It simply was, as every single fiber of his being was. And as he looked at his cards, their bold faces marked singularly with a scarab that seemed too small, too less, he realized that he again did not have the winning hand. He looked over to the woman's at his side, his eyes briefly glancing over those scarabs as well. Something about them seemed right, more right than his own, but still not quite right enough. He turned back to his glass and found it full again, and must have missed the passing waiter who had murmured something to the effect of an almost empty bottle just a minute before. With a trace of condemnation, he downed the glass again and pushed a card (without turning it over to see what it was) out of his deck. The way it shined seemed right, but he couldn't quite explain how it was right. He looked over at her deck again, the last card clicking into place. “wait." He whispered against her ear, and slipped a card from her deck that didn't seem to quite fit. “Sir, you can't –” “i didn't look." erasmus's harsh voice silenced the dealer, who looked complainantly to Aghavni. "The man's drunk." the new player scoffed, but scowled again when erasmus shrugged meekly and continued trading his card for hers. “just trust me, a minute. simple trade." He looked to her eyes once more, and though they were filled with the constant looming of dread and mischief, in them glistened something like a conniving honesty and a small glimmer of drunken pride concerning his instincts. Once he slipped his card in her deck, he observed it quickly once more and was satisfied in the way the beetle backs gleamed in the chandelier light. With a small half wink, he returned to his own cards and waited for the call to reveal their decks.
One day, his luck would run out.
@Aghavni
