That was the difference between himself and Leironuoth, in the shortest possible terms, Skandra realized. Leironuoth would never kill someone in anger. He would certainly be angry on many occasions, and even let that anger show, but when he struck it was for the right reasons. To defend someone who was less than a lion. To obtain justice for a wrong. Skandra had killed a man who'd suggested that the Immortal cheated at cards. There were many fine reasons to die, and to take a life, but those were not his domain. Now Skandra had a different sort of challenge before him. If he was going to live up to the standard that he'd tried his entire life to achieve, he had to do more than kill. He had to settle this. In stark terms, it felt as though he finally understood what Shantar had been trying to tell him for all of those years.
"I don't know if you should ask," Skandra stared at the table, limbs at his side. "If it helps you decide, I won't lie."
She didn't want to know the truth. She wouldn't ask.
The table was a shopworn thing, faded and gray. They'd passed through doorways without actual doors, just frames of aged wood and rusted iron. This was truly a forgotten place in a forgotten building. Guyther, Ramga, Fenrir, Elemmire. The drow. All those names that inspired fear and awe and perhaps envy in the common man, but what were they really? Tools. They were all being used to one end or another. The fact that they'd consented to their usage did not make it any less pitiable. Skandra wondered if he was a tool, in their same vein, but less pitiable for his ability to forget? He still felt like himself. The strangeness in his mind was come with the dreams, and the darkness that followed. None of them were the real threat. But if someone was playing and covering that many angles to try and take Astarii out of the picture entirely, they wouldn't reveal themselves until all the tools were out of the equation.
Skandra had to make that his mission, first, and then wait.
With a "cat's head" pommel and its angular steel bars wrapped into a basket hilt, the schiavona on the table seemed at first glance to have much in common with Leironuoth's current sword. Two slabs of wood had been joined together into a scabbard with heavy black leather and brass fittings at either end. This scabbard Skandra seized, and he lifted the blade until the hilt was before his eyes. When he finally drew the blade from its scabbard, it was not as expected. It was not glittering steel that revealed itself, but a blade that shone as glazed pottery might. Pale-white in color but in every other way precisely as a sword blade should be. Skandra thought it looked like a child's toy.
He knew better.
"This will cut through anything," Skandra pointed the blade toward the sky, and let it slide in his grip, so that he clutched the guard delicately - the hilt he offered to Leironuoth. "It started taking lives on the day it was born. It's not meant to be anything but a killer. Don't pull it unless you really mean it."
He paused, and then grinned. Smoke came in through his teeth, and it leaked out through his nostrils, after paying a visit to his lungs. Felt good.