#ashborndevil

Valen pursed his lips. “I don’t know…” he drawled while demonstratively looking him over, from head to toe. Once his gaze had returned to Vilayn’s face he quirked a single eyebrow and smirked. “I could stand to look at you some more,” he concluded smugly.

Never one to mind being admired, Vilayn waited for Valen to finish his appraisal patiently, although at its conclusion he sniffed and wiped some of the blood from his nose to the back of his hand.

Jo’Raya spared Valen a withering glance, the sort only feline eyes could give, before she resumed scrabbling at the dirt with her claws.

Perhaps Tosti had been watching the mer too closely, although he was sure his hood was pulled down far enough to hide the direction of his eyes. He threw it back anyway and smiled.

Rosie let her sword fall a few inches, striking an impressive balanced between sheepish and affronted with a pout and a glare which didn’t quite meet Valen’s eyes.

‘Uh huh?’

Luca’s hand had been sidling towards Valen’s coinpurse. Now it snaked back into the seemingly endless pockets of her over-large clothes, safely out of sight.

‘Good, I’m glad you appreciate my efforts. Unlike anybody else.’

Vilayn said this without looking up from the manuscript his quill was dashing across. Anyone might have assumed he was not giving his full attention to Valen, were it not for the sliver of a grin as he mumbled, in time with his hand shaping the words on the page,

‘An’ ya found it in ole Braskan, did ya?’

Braskan stood like an apparition in the middle of a swamp, covered in mud from head to foot, dripping muck from his matted ponytail, and glaring with a ferocity that would have had him instantly venerated as a spirit of war by any innocent locals who stumbled across him.