[P] an evening stroll (on a knife's edge)

[Anatoly]

Anatoly could not tell you what the stronghold had been like before Raum, before "Madame Fia", before so many others. He could not tell you that once the walls stood unblemished and gleaming, that once the halls were rich with adornments and its denizens dripping in finery. He could not tell you that once it was a place teeming with life, with laughter, with love. He could not tell you much about the Day Court’s heart at all.

Truthfully, the Mors had been his first and only home, and of Solterra he had only had cause to roam the wilds: the desert, the oasis, and on rare occasion the canyon. What use had a simple man such as he for capitols and crowds of stuck up pigeons? Well, times had changed.

Mama had taken him to courts more impressive than this one, taught him the dances, draped him in just enough gold and soft yarn tassels to gentle his edges until he belonged. This one, where the commoners scurry past, head down and cowed, where the soldiers march through, arrogant and smirking, where the King rules the roost and those who do not fear him flock to his calls like so many blood drenched sheep? This one is easy to fit in.

Proud enough to keep the commoners from making eye contact, charming enough that the soldiers take him to be an ally and allow him passage without looking too closely. The balance he must keep isn’t a delicate one at all, and so he weaves through the many halls, memorizing architecture and turnoffs and glancing just long enough at passing rooms through the corner of his eye to ascertain the ones of note. Nothing to see here, he knows where he is going, just stretching his legs after the evening meal.

Maybe, if he’s lucky, he’ll catch sight of the King himself, or else the man’s prized basilisk where it is less likely to consume passersby. It would be good to know the face of the King he has set himself against, the scale of the creature he may one day be unlucky enough to face. Descriptions just aren’t enough for this sort of thing. Imagine the tragedy if he were to accidentally strike down Raum’s double? The King would surely take the death of an otherwise innocent man as one warning too close to home.

No, that simply wouldn’t do. Best to keep these things discrete until the knife digs in.

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@Avdotya I'm so excited for this thread!

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[Avdotya]

Unlike Anatoly, Avdotya had walked these halls many a time before - and as much as she abhorred them and their suffocating, sandstone walls, she could not help but acknowledge that they were witness to nearly every high and low that befell her immortal life. They saw her arrive in chains as a battered and bloodied slave, then watched her rise from pit-fighter to kingslayer, then saw her vanish like a ghost. Given time, she returned to them with animosity burning hot in her chest and a hunger for vengeance that could not be sated by king’s blood alone. The Davke mare was welcomed so foolishly into Solterra’s capitol as its regent and like a wolf among sheep, she ate them whole. She set fire to those very halls and left them with nothing but ash and dust. After that, Avdotya knew the only time she would ever see those walls again was if she was being marched to her execution. Yet here she was, walking as a free woman and an advisor to the mad king who now occupied the throne. Ah, yes, how quickly circumstance could change the paths one took. And once again, circumstance seemed to have found her. As the viper slipped around the corner, she found her fire-hot eyes caught by a face that so suddenly tickled at her memory... it triggered something, but she came up with nothing. His name felt as though it were right there, within reach, but somehow it still felt far from her grasp. Her ears fell flat out of agitation, and then she stopped mid-stride. What Avdotya did know was that his was no face she had seen around the palace since her arrival, rather peculiar considering how often she haunted the corridors out of sheer boredom. These walls were never meant to contain her. ”A fine evening for a walk about the castle,” she called to him while she spun around, watching him saunter off in the other direction, ”wouldn’t you agree?” The harsh expression she wore seemed to say otherwise - and that was very much her intention. @anatoly bring them on!! image © pacificdash

[Anatoly]

mothers make the man

Perhaps a part of him had been hoping, however naively, to catch sight of his peers. Perhaps, though he had chased himself away from the Mors (from his home) for the risk of running into those who were to be his enemy, he had allowed nostalgia to drive him closer than he ought. Perhaps he had been looking for ghosts.

But Anatoly had not been looking for her.

Avdotya, adorned in a well-worn pelt (a trophy if he ever saw one), turns the corner ahead of him and he immediately controls the curl of his lip, the teeth that want to bear. Here is the woman who courted ruin for them all, with her weakness carefully fostered by too-eager soldiers, with her so-called potential, with her gods damned mother. She was looking insultingly well, and he wondered if she even cared for all their brethren who lay dead in her wake.

There is little he would like more than to see her dead in these very halls, than to watch her chest fail to rise and her blood pool on the floor as it should have many years before, but Anatoly is not a fool, however much he would like to be. Killing her now, in this place she knows so well, so surrounded by allies, would make little more than a martyr of her. He must take her apart first, piece by piece, until those who have flocked to her banner turn away in disgust. No, when Avdotya dies it will be public and brutal, and prove once and for all that she is unfit to be Davke.

So he nods his head in passing greeting, face neutral, and steps just enough to the side to allow her passage without weakening his own position. With any luck that will be the end of it. He has already found many interesting rooms, many nooks a clever enough assassin could disappear in, so he might as well find the exit. And that's when her steps stop, and she spins to address him.

Of course, what luck.

And so he turns to face her, no hesitation in a single step, and bows his head a little deeper in greeting. “Of course.” He says, perfectly agreeable. Looking at her for the briefest of seconds, at the harshness of her face and the shift of her body, he calls up how he felt the first few years in courtly halls, smothered and trapped and perfectly willing to murder his way out, and grins at her, all teeth and agitation. “Forgive me Khan, but these walls are stifling, I hardly thought either of us in the mood for conversation.” And still he keeps his body forcibly loose and prowling. “Did you have need of me?”

@Avdotya

anatoly

[Avdotya]

Ah, if only she could hear the thoughts that seeped through Anatoly’s mind. She might have gripped her spear a little tighter, ready to drive it through his heart as he so eagerly thirsted for her blood upon his tongue. And yet it would not have been his desire to kill her that would have stoked Avdotya’s unyielding fires, but rather the folly in his justification for her death that would have driven the mare mad with white-hot fury. The Davke were her purpose, forever and always; their revival now was her repentance for every single soul they lost to Zolin in their attempt to rescue her years ago. She knew the loss of their tribe came on the heels of her failure as a child - she knew it and she’d be damned if she ever forgot it. Indeed, even Avdotya the fierce, Avdotya the wicked, Avdotya the unfeeling bore the heavy weight of guilt upon her tired shoulders. But she was a monster, a girl painted as something little more than a savage beast in the eyes of the world around her - so in the end, that was what she became, and monsters did not feel. That was, at least, when there were others around to witness it. How fortunate, then, that Avdotya was no mind-reader. Instead, she stood before a man with false manners and a forgettable face, one that grated her mind for an answer she still could not find. Who was he. Educated enough to address her as Khan, it seemed. Her gaze narrowed... was it the Davke that made him so familiar? Whether or not that was it, she presumed the answer would eventually find its way to the surface. For now, she let her focus rest elsewhere.”I am never in the mood for conversation.” She stated flatly in return, her eyes watching his own without falter. Prim and proper as he was with his words, Avdotya felt no need to dance so sweetly with her own. ”Yours is a face I haven’t yet seen in the palace. What is your purpose? Your name?” Lie to me, the viper yearned silently. Her days were in need of some excitement. @anatoly image © pacificdash

[Anatoly]

mothers make the man

“I am never in the mood for conversation.” Anatoly could have laughed, could have sneered. There is no fault he can not find in her, in this woman he has set to be his enemy. Never in the mood for conversation and yet she calls, forcing it. Never in the mood to speak with one so lowly as he, soldier of her mother’s people. Perhaps his hatred blinds him to her, certainly it riles him, but that is something for him to pick apart later; when he does not stand inside enemy walls before the very object of his rage.

“I hardly expected you to remember me, having never properly met.” He grins, a little sharp, a little sheepish, affecting acceptance and just the slightest touch of resignation in the tone of his voice. For all appearances it is as though he had hoped she might have heard of his exploits, of his prowess, of the raids he had succeeded in and the glory he had returned to their people. As though he had hoped she might have known of him. “I am Anatoly, and as ever my purpose is the survival of the Davke.” That he does not count her as one of their number is hardly worth saying.

She had failed her trial after all.

“I heard rumours that we were gathering once more, and that you were treating with the King.” He says, as though he had not considered doing so himself and discarded the potential as foolhardy, as dangerous to their continued survival. “I wanted to see for myself.” Somehow, he encompasses the stronghold, the monarch, and this newest plot in the shrug of his shoulders and toss of his head. A dangling gem click click clicks against his horn before stilling, drawing attention to its subtle shine and his senseless adornment.

Soft. He knows how weak metals and useless jewels look on a man, one anyone, when they can be bartered for more useful things. Knows that he used to pick targets based on how the gleam of their accessories tried to hide away the inanity of their personal lives. An easy mark, a glittering show-pony, weak.

It’s at odds with the grin on his face, the prowl of his steps. He presents himself as a tamed tiger; reluctant, but whose claws were none the less filed. Perhaps he might be reintroduced to his natural habitat, perhaps the desert might swallow him whole if they tried. Not quite dangerous (not yet).

He’s always liked to play with truths.

@Avdotya

anatoly

[Avdotya]

Ah, so she had been right to pursue the niggling spark of familiarity his horned head produced. Avdotya studied his curves and edges through narrowed eyes, her ears ever-attentive to each word that fell from his tongue - and then he spoke of the Davke. His purpose? Her own head tilted just slightly with the black bloom of a grim curiosity, one that whirled into a web of questions she was forced to hold back as he went on.  ”Then I am surprised it was not you, Anatoly, who stopped me just now if it is confirmation you were looking for.” Rather suspicious that he come seeking an answer when he quite literally walked right past it; she made sure her skepticism made itself clear in the tone with which she used. Avdotya, though, was more than happy to indulge him. ”Those rumours carry truth to them- Raum and I have indeed come to an agreement that satisfies both party’s desires.” Her deal with the Solterran King was no secret, considering it was struck in the open air of the palace’s front steps. That was no longer Avdotya’s focus, however, and she now sought to dig a little deeper. In the midst of his pretty gem’s twinkling, the woman stepped closer to him, her gaze as critical as it had been throughout the entirety of their brief encounter. ”Forgive me for straying off topic, but I do not recall seeing you during the burning of the Capitol...” A few eyes from casual passersby strayed to the pair, clearly perturbed by her carelessness towards Day Court’s woe and the supposed horrors the Davke committed. ”Did you receive Velorca’s summons? Perhaps he had forgotten you.”  She wondered the latter part aloud - it was partly genuine, but more so a pluck at his purpose. Would he not want to be at his kins’ side on the day of their retribution? And so it began - unbeknownst to them - the virulent games of the tiger and the viper. @anatoly image © pacificdash