Skandra Tyullis (roll_the_bones) wrote in adusta, @ 2009-03-07 23:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | aeotha easaahae, merc, skandra tyullis |
over it (aeotha)
From here you felt as though you could see the very edge of everything, eternity's source, even though such a thing was impossible. Here the river was neither raging nor quiet, the middle section. Quiet days before its worst offenses to come. Mountains were good for that sort of thing. Mountains were good for a lot of things if you could stomach the emerald hue of the world. Plants here forgot that there were other colors in the world. So did princes and peoples who lived without a blemish on their souls. Perfect in every way. Such was the perfection that resided in the outpost across this quiet bubbling river. No one had come out to greet them yet, but that was only because they had not yet violated the treeline, had not exposed themselves. It would be a long walk for someone who approached in bulk with their forces evident. A long walk filled with arrows.
For Aeotha there was no safer walk in creation.
"I guess this is it."
From head to toe there was a wretched hurt that would not go away. No horses now. Foot one after the first until you arrived at your destination. Battered and bruised. Stitches where seamless flesh used to be. Skandra could feel his face cracking from the moisture in the air, not the dryness, as though all of it had decided it would ruin what was left of his face for future generations to enjoy. That was the rub in a nutshell. Now she didn't need him any longer. There was no one left to kill. And despite himself he couldn't really blame her for it. Skandra wouldn't spend as much time with himself as he did if there were another option. You didn't get the way he got because you loved life and everything in it. You got this way because something wasn't right. Or at least, most of the world believed that something wasn't right. Now he was struggling for words but he wanted to tell her that he wasn't afraid.
He just didn't believe in it.
"Not that I didn't enjoy our time together, but too many large women have been touching me lately," he shot her a wink. "Gotta keep that number low, y'know?"
It was like the river that stood before them. He could fill it up with bodies, good men that lived too short a season, and nobody would give a damn. And then at the end of the day the gods themselves wouldn't weep. It was part, they would say, of their plan. A plan like that was a horrifying thing to consider. Yet it seemed to trouble no one. Death could be accepted because it was part of the natural order of things, because that was how it was supposed to go, but his stomach wouldn't settle for such nonsense. They had to be more than pieces in a game or absolutely nothing that any of them had ever done was relevant or important. If that was the case, why do it at all? He could accept that he was making moves pre-determined for a god who derived pleasure from his suffering, along with the idea that these moves were made for no good purpose and changed nothing. Or he could believe that the gods were irrelevant.
He knew which one he had to pick.
"I don't think I'll be spending much time with Ithacles, either, so's you ask."
She hadn't asked.
"Never know which fork to use. Or which knife is for rolls and which one is for stabbing."
The coin was flipping from his thumb endlessly. Restlessly. He kept letting it land on his palm in the hopes that it would show heads. Always came up tails. Like so many things in life it was totally arbitrary, but he'd arbitrarily assigned even the possibility of paying a visit to Ithacles to heads. It never appeared. Not once. He saw it like a blur, blending into tails until it was an ugly nuisance of a thing, but that was all he saw of it. His impressions of it were based on a memory that probably was distorted. He remembered only what he wanted to remember about the horrible nature of Ithacles dark wood and hard marble kingdom. There were thrones there, and servants, and kings like the wretched kings of old. Too much of it for a man like him. A nice patch of desert with nothing but his wits seemed the most attractive option. If only because the coin kept on telling him the truth.
"Don't make this awkward."
He grinned at the coin, and flipped it again.