“Don’t hide.”
He hears the words snaking through the darkness, a whisper and a shout all at the same time- or perhaps that is just his muffled hearing. The snap of a twig beneath his wooden hoof breaks through the bubble surrounding his mind. He limps from the shadows, not entirely sure why he was hiding amongst them in the first place. The pounding in his head rises from tolerable to a mild nuisance with the heavy fall of his wooden leg- was it the hangover from this morning or the noise from the tavern tonight? He couldn’t tell, not with the way the darkness wavered at the edges as though he couldn’t quite focus. Internally he huffed impatiently, the part of him still yet to hit rock bottom howling at how far he had sunk. A few specks of dried blood and the evident bruising around his left are the only evidence of how far he had fallen- drunk off his ass and picking fights in taverns when he still hadn’t got the hang of using his wooden prosthetic.
Oh the god of war; reduced to drunken bar brawls. His brethren would kill to know he’d fallen further than them all. The irony.
Thaeron’s pace is evidently hindered by the soft, uneven thud, thud, thud of the wooden appendage- unwieldy and uncomfortable even these few months after the fight with the dragon. At least the pain was gone, well most of it anyway. There was still that dull ache deep in his radius, rising up his sternum. It beat in tandem with the heavy ache in his heart.
There was a light in his life, a flickering flame that burnt brighter than the infinitesimal grey his soul now oozed. For a few moments she chased away his shadows, setting fire to his lamentation with little more than a look and a few sharp words. Israfel. But she was as fleeting as any fire and he had not seen her for days.
Perhaps that was why he’d been skulking in the shadows, his whiskey-addled mind searching for that flame, only to be presented with a shadow. Well, in fact, she was darker than the shadows, as though someone, somewhere, had carved her from the blackest realms of the deepest night where even the shadows ran from fear.
“My apologies,” he offers, his voice hoarse (from shouting or from the burn of liquor, Thaeron does not know). The normally silver-tongued man is struck dumb for a moment before drawing the cool night air into his lungs and forcing himself to concentrate. Perhaps there was an upside to spending centuries drowning your sorrows in alcohol- you learn how to function even as your senses are dampened. “I’m Thaeron,” he drawls, a smirk tugging at his dark lips, “at your service.”
With a jangle of metal his dips his horned head, his hair cascading in messy braids and curls as they slide over Bloodbane, clasped to his side and gleaming faintly in the darkness.@Nameless <3
