hiraeth

He sighs dramatically, as if that will endear him to the unfriendly stranger, and pushes his hair back. "I was born with hollow bones and a weak constitution," he lies. "It's difficult for me to do even basic things without the assistance of a stronger individual. It's why something like this is neigh impossible for a woman like me to do on my own."

But believing is a separate question from indulging. Thwack. Though he makes no move to answer him, the swing of his mallet slows with the burden of thought. If he ignores him, he'll probably just keep trying to persuade him, won't he?

-- "And I really wish to try this delicious treat that everyone speaks so highly of..."

-- yes, probably. Would it take more time to dissuade him than to simply finish making the mochi? Almost definitely. Thwack. Time for a change of tactic then; swinging the mallet over his shoulder, Wolf levels the raven with a long, reluctant stare.

Lord Hardin. This must be his lord. Her thumb idly smooths the petal out as she listens. At the end of each stroke, it furls inward once more, closed off to her, but each repeat motion soothes its creases.

(His fingers wrap loosely around his throat, a wheezing cough rattling coneflowers from his lungs. Would it?)

Matters of the heart -- that thing that keeps beating, keeps bleeding in his chest? The core of the life he was given, and the weapon he turned against the man who gave it to him? Fingers turn to claws, scoring into his skin.

And how can he expect her to understand? To not look at Coyote with unrighteous condemnation as so many others had?! If he speaks of what became of Nyna, then what of what became of Coyote? She should not blame him -- he should not have blamed her -- --but, Naga, he had been able to breathe just a bit longer when he did.

Different tribes... had Aurelis had such a history before the Archaneans came and claimed it as their own? Before their pride had been stripped away and the scent of such things as boiled mutton had slowly been forgotten? And in that he thinks (distantly, vaguely) that he might understand the shift in Sin's tone, the lowness he'd yet to hear from him before. Or maybe he's just being presumptuous.

Still he cannot control the way he shifts at the snare in the other's voice, the implicit wound tangled in the words 'my lord'. Did they all give such agonizing orders, then? --a hand rakes across his chest, fingers hooking on his shoulder, nails pressing against cloth and the skin beneath. How could he think that, even if only for a moment? Coyote had always been the most righteous among them! He had wanted more than anyone for the future to be peaceful and just! He had wanted...

"...Hah." A corner of his mouth curls bitterly. Of course even the plains of a distant land were set upon by invaders -- of course man would always be so greedy. For a moment he considers what would have happened if Aurelis had shared this fate. What if castles had never been built on soil meant for golden wheat? What if it was not only pride that had been taken from them, but everything?

...he does not know.

"No," he says easily, "That's what I asked." It may not be the comfort that another would want, but it is an unremarkable acceptance and a matter of course. In the end, it seems it is only natural that the history of the plains would include its destruction.

"...The wind over your plains," Wolf replies, voice rasping just slightly against the burnt hollow in his chest, "Does it still smell like green grass and wildflowers?"

Eager to reciprocate, cerise eyes exacted sharp scrutiny of his partner's command, laving over root and hollow to find it plausible. There was both rhyme and reason to targeting the areas that commanded little attention, an educated guess to that lack of attention being precisely intentional. In other words, chinks as good as any.

Well, then—

"Hrrah!!" A formidable dragon, he had named of himself - would show of himself. It was not gaps he aimed for but gaps he made. The blade of Rafal's axe careened into thickest root, shirking all those weak and thin. This choice proud, the result brilliant, the thunderous clap of splitting bark overturned all meager sounds of the whispering wood. What melody! And what strange, inanimate death soon to answer.

As if in response, the tree ceased its motion in an instant, its wilting like to any flower, its slumped branches resembling the internal failure of a fleshier body. Could it be? It could. The reaction Rafal wielded upon his discovery was not perfectly objective, but it addressed the same logic all the same: to sever whatever lied between and behind the panoply of bark was akin to piercing a heart clean. Their way to victory, clear.

Of course, there is power in an axe as well. Where Wolf seeks that single point, Rafal and his bladed weapon carve out many. Bark shatters and falls apart, turning whispers to wails, susurrs to shrieks, and a predator's hunt into prey's dying throes. Mark and observe, Rafal calls, and in dragon's triumph do his fingers search among haphazard clothing for a hidden weapon.

The world around them is already falling still as his hand wraps around the knife, stalking forward low to the ground to examine the wound left behind. Like as not, Rafal's finishing blow will have been more than enough, but--

--but the restlessness does not leave his hand until he drives the small blade deep into the hollow and twists it, feels the earth shudder beneath his feet and sees the black blood on his hand beneath the dim light.

"...There. No more surprises, either," Wolf mutters, wiping off his blade. Indeed the difference is tangible, if not explicable: the energy he had attributed to some sort of mysticism or magic no longer hangs in the air, and nothing is left to dare pretend to be the sounds of night. A glance at the spring they had previously relaxed in wrenches his brow in great displeasure, for its waters have turned dark and rather ominously opaque. "...ugh."

So instead, he turns to the one worthy thing that remains here.

"Good work," he acknowledges Rafal with a nod, an undecorated acknowledgement many times less grand than the dragon's earlier exultation. Yet it is in this he is the most sincere, sees the other most clearly, and recognizes him in that.

While he is unmoved by the plight that saw him hired, this is still far from the worst job he's taken during his time here. Though he had left his own steed in Aurelis, in the care of those who would remain, he lingers now at the head of the herd at what he can only describe as a leisurely speed. The wind combs through his hair and over the back of his neck, the tail of his borrowed mare ribboning behind him. ( "Wow," the stablehand had muttered, a hand laid to the back of his head, "She never likes anyone..." )

Yet something breaks within that peace, a subtle thing and yet glaringly obvious once his ears had caught upon it. Behind him, the breathing of some horses becomes more labored, the tempo of their hoofbeats just slightly wrong. His mare notices as well, ears flicking increasingly more often.

"Stop!" Throwing out an arm, he brings them to a slow, and then a stop, the actual leader of their mission looking fairly disgruntled.

"Right. You -- what's the meaning of this?" The man's eyes narrow, so fixated on the challenge to authority that he misses the slight but constant tossing of his steed's head. Not even a soothing palm is laid against the horse's neck, and not even while the sounds of discontent grow more obvious against the untrodden path.

"We need to check the horses," Wolf answers, to the man's evident displeasure. Yet to his credit as well, he finally checks. "They're agitated. Something's--"

"Oh-- oh no!" A cry rings out from elsewhere behind them, turning the two men's heads at once. A meeker rider rakes his fingers into his hair, one hand coming away from his pack covered in some thick, dark substance. "My-- my pack! The lumenthus flowers...! W-we have to check--!"

Was this a sign of the peace he had hoped for? Could he really breathe so easily and take things at a lax pace like that? Had he found the sanctuary he had hoped for? He wonders.

But it is in thinking it through, thinking his mentor's words over now, that he's forced to slow down and with it, his pulse slows, calmer in a way even if still a bit anxious. The anxiety transforms however, blooming from sheer nervousness to something a bit more eager to prove himself and put this advice to use.

“Understood. I'll stick to the situation and try to keep in contact with you the whole time,”  he pledges to Wolf.  “And if I make a mistake, I'll try to learn from it as you say. Thank you for being so patient with me, Wolf.

“Ah, looks like that's the canyon the townsfolk were telling us about,”  he points out off in the distance, identifying it by the precarious looking bridge spanning it. It's a practical wasteland on either side, and the wind is a gentle breeze. As they make their steps closer to it, however, the wind begins to pick up astonishingly quickly.  “Whoa.”  

...That, and the fact that he of all people has rarely been ascribed with the word 'patience'. Truly, there is no other word for it besides odd.

"...Of course," he answers instead, and presses forward.

The closer they get, the more insistent the wind is as it brushes against his face; Wolf idles in both the gentleness and the ferocity. It is a drier thing than the breeze over Aurelis, to no surprise, and it carries their quarry on unnatural wings.

"What beast is this," he mutters under his breath, sharp eyes narrowed to knives as he crouches at the edge of the undergrowth. It cries like a bird but beats wings like a wyvern's, if somehow more unsettling still. Worst of all is that decrepit thing it bears like a face.

"Joachim." He calls the boy's attention quietly. "There are things you'll have to pay attention to in order to understand them better. I can tell you, but you'll learn it through experience." The bowman moves subtly, disrupting their cover as little as possible. With gloved hand held low, he points his finger at their unsightly prey, then traces a line sideways against the wind.

"Distance. Movement. The wind will push your arrow and gravity will pull it down. You have to counter that when you aim. Like this." Still silent, he slinks backward and draws his bow, arrow pointed firstly at the beast, and secondly adjusted. "The same goes for a moving target and its trajectory.

The voice wasn't one that Sigurd knew, either from a distant past, or from the present, no professor or knight at the monastery that he was familiar with, but when he saw the expression on the man's face, gentle and kind, his own face split into a beam. 

"I suppose I do seem rather turned around. It was the strangest thing, there seemed a manner of shop here – items that had seemed mundane upon first touch, but the keep told me this riddle about love and bade me put a veil over my head, and - " 

A shrug of his shoulders, somehow lighter than he remembered them, but a glance at himself showed nothing amiss but a delicate shimmer at the edges of him, silvery and ethereal as the reflection of a lake in the sun. 

"I suppose if I must put a word to it, I do feel rather strange- not merely for the absence of the shopkeep, but unsettled - it's no matter to me if I need to make the trek back to the monastery - " 

Actually. He glanced around, and a frown dipped his expression. "No...I'm not in the same place that I was mere moments ago. Perhaps that's where the man went. I'm afraid I have no use for this - " 

He ducked a wrist under the veil and lifted it, as though in demonstration, but a delicate tug found it firmly rooted in place. 

Still, for someone seemingly stuck squarely in a conundrum, she seemed rather cheerful. The more she talked however, the greater the difference between Wolf's brows, one of them arching in evident puzzlement.

"So it seemed ordinary, but the shopkeep implied it wasn't..." The lingering tug at his conscience softened his words just slightly, but it was still strange to him overall. And he spouted a riddle on top of all that? "...so you put it on your head," he inferred a bit dryly. That sounded a lot like how people wind up walking into curses and... possession of generally nefarious items. The line of his lips firmed a bit at that, a hand lightly touching his temple. Right. "What did he say, exactly?"

But it was true that when she attempted to lift the veil, the simple brush that should have easily displaced the garment hardly moved it out of place. The other brow lifted.

a nomad of sacae was born to wander; to take his horse and pack from place to place, to move his feet in no direction, to heed only the wind which guides his tribe and the sun which warms them. and even here there is wandering, across such halls lacking wind and sun, horse and pack.

alone and on foot, the quiet steps of rath are muffled further by the distant din of dance and song. beyond the excitement of the ethereal ball, he seeks for quiet - a moment he might call his own. amidst his duty as a guard, there is no rarer resource to be had. he drifts through the alleys of the ballroom, enclosed by four walls of civilization, directionless and not merely for a lack of knowledge toward his premises. what comfort can be attained without open view of the sky? what stability without the solidity of earth beneath him? it is these he seeks for as a needle pointing north; these he yearns to grasp as a man dreaming of home.

so he wanders - wanders - wanders - and, then,

—stops.

another stands ahead; stolid, pink, draped over one half of his face by his own hair. by now he can be recognized at a glance, and at his behest is change. rath who has wandered, now he roots, stepping into companionable place beside his fellow guard as if this has always been his stop. "...wolf," he announces himself, for something that might have been courtesy. an idea that lingers in the curt bob of his head.

perhaps it is for strangeness that rath wastes no time in speaking, the once more fateful coincidence of their now three-time crossing; or, perhaps it is for the distant look in wolf's single eye.

"what are you thinking about?"

He had expected to hold the ball in mild disdain, spurred to no greater feeling, no nearer feeling than that. In some ways it was more familiar than the plains he longed for, the home that had belonged to them and the pride they had been divested of. The gaudiness and opulence, the self-indulgent performance... and yes, the innocence that he could bitterly admit might exist beneath it, like flowers peeking through brick -- these were the things that had been laid over so many miles of golden grass, of wildflowers and wind's songs. And they would never be to him as they were supposed to be.

That was what he had expected; instead he finds himself strangely unsteady, like a post finely bisected, only waiting to fall. Family and neighbors. He grimaces to himself, callused fingers raking through hair evidently unsuited to blending into the crowd. The sound of his name gently piercing the silence, then, is nearly laughable.

"...Rath." An equivalent greeting, if not in tone then in manner; his hand disentangles from his hair, laid upon the crook of his arm instead as the wind brushes around his new company. To this, Wolf does not object, though his gaze falls elsewhere -- upon the slivers of light cast from that which they had departed, or perhaps somewhere more golden still.

What is he thinking about?

That uneasy feeling cuts through him once again, a wound known and felt, but yet to bleed. A breath taken sharply through his nose presses all of his discomfort against his ribs.

"...why did you come to Fódlan?" Because I came here to die. Nails turn in toward his skin, scraping just enough to be felt. Because it feels sometimes that he is only alive for the heart beating in his chest and the pain of that failure; because even as he casts his own bones into the fire, he cannot bear to bring his brothers to ruin. And he would have, if he had stayed.