Only the crunch of snow and dead leaves below a mage’s departure from the camp. The heat from a campfire slid off his shoulders, a forgotten jacket, as he retreated into the outskirts. Behind him, the bustling of fighter’s battle plans and worries and nostalgia faded into a buzz to join the orchestra of crickets. With a sneer shot over his shoulder, his eyes dipped down into untouched snow still before him.
The man stuck both hands into his pockets, eyes lifting to the stars as he rummaged. A swear escaped his mouth coupled with warm mist but no smoke. One hand found an engraved silver lighter and retrieved it for him to examine. The other, to his disappointed, found nothing.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back again to keep warm, in the dark appearing to be more a wavering shadow than a grown, living man. He spoke another word of frustration into emptiness before searching his pockets again for a cigarette he did not have.
"Looking for something?"
Gillian had already forgone the camp and its barely-veiled anxieties for the sake of solace herself (as she was no leader her, nor amongst the familiar companionship of her own men), and had been leaning against a nearby tree when the mage had wandered by. Hands in the pockets on her long coat, her katana barely visible against the long shadows of evening, she looked more at ease in the current situation than some of the others. After all, what was a gamble with life and death to a samurai?
She had made her decision to come along, and now there was only the matter of seeing the mission complete. Certainty fit across her form like steel armor.
But she was not, however, blind to those around her. After a beat she pushed herself away from the tree, the tiny ember burning at the end of her own cigarette visible in the sombre darkness, and she moved the item away from her mouth to exhale. Her other hand turned up a metal cigarette case and she held it up as an offering.
"Hand-rolled, southern blend, hope you don't mind the difference," she said, the smoke rolling from her lips in ribbons.
“Hm,” was his answer, almost a grunt in this variation, as he out for the proffered tin with no thanks. From his fingertips burst a small flame that lit his cigarette as he dropped his lighter back into his pocket.
“Barnard, red mage.” His eyes flicked up to move from lighting his smoke to meet the gaze of the other volunteer. He bore the expression of a bored, but irritated man, one with little patience of the mission at hand and the cohorts he had left by tents. (Yet here he was.) “Yours?”
She offered a casual shrug. “Goodwin, samurai.” The man’s sour temperament seemed to slide right off her as Gillian replaced the case inside her pocket, looking unperturbed. She smoked her own cigarette in silence and looked the man over more carefully.
Mages Guild, was it? He looked around the similar age too, she noted, but whatever or whoever she had thought about asking on, the mercenary declined. Instead, she looked beyond Barnard to the light from the camp they had both left behind, like a pair of wolves straying from the pack. “Ready for tomorrow?”