Alcuin shifted uneasily against the stone pillar of the archway when the ancient pressed him for clarification. How was one meant to explain something to someone who hadn't experienced it themselves? All his life he'd been surrounded by people who shared his heritage and culture, people who knew precisely what his particular lineage and upbringing entailed. Hermes had encouraged him on more than one occasion to be more open about it, to share that part of himself with his master at the very least, yet the very idea frightened him. What if his master thought him simple-minded? Worse yet, what if he took him for a hatter? In the very worst of his nightmares, he imagines his master taking him for a whore, and pitying him for it. But the ancient...
“No.” Grateful though he was for an inquiry that was comparatively easier for him to answer there was nonetheless something briefly vitriolic in the dark depths of his gaze, something that invited uncharacteristic sharpness to his tone. “Not formally, anyway. Master Delaunay did not think it in keeping with his designs.” Alcuin punctuated the sentence with a joyless, thin-lipped smile. He could still remember the sound his palm made against his beloved's face; loud, louder than a gunshot in the dead of night, louder than anything he'd ever heard, and sickeningly wet with his own blood. He'd expected sadness, heartbreak, but only guilt stared back. “What I learned, I learned from a Cassiline.”
A shame that he'd never learned the terminus.
“'I know naught of my grandfather but the footsteps of his son, my father, who leads me to places I do not wish to go.' Do you remember, my lord?” Alcuin returned to his submissive posture against the archway, his gaze harmlessly tracing the pattern of stone he leaned against, and his voice gentling to a hush. “I am a scion of Camael; he who founded the armies of the nephilim. His blood, however thin, runs through my veins. And it is not me, I fear, who takes interest in your spear.”