#gormlessthing

Certainly, there's been a lover or two in his time, especially in his younger days, but it must have been years or more since he so much as touched another person beast without the intention to kill them. But here is the other hunter, her bared back pressed hard against his scarred chest, and there are his hands, grasping and exploring and teasing out sighs and murmurs of pleasure. He can smell blood in her blond hair, and the way it fans down her back is, strangely, even more intimate than her nudity in his lap.

One of those searching hands splays his fingers across her stomach, then down, lower, to that damp heat between her thighs. He has to remind himself of how to please a woman; his teeth catch along the shell of her ear, just before the warm breath of a growled promise for more.

Let me hear you, comes the gravel prayer. Let me hear how good this feels.

The hesitance begins to ebb, subsumed instead by the zealotry inherent in mutual pleasure. His mouth travels past her ear, down along her jaw, toward her shoulder. There is so precious little between pleasing and consuming, mutters his addled brain, as he marks the space between her neck and her collarbone with a deep, suckling kiss.

His hand between her legs works faster, thumb teasing at the bud of her, seeking out more, more, more. It's coming back to him, now; the other hand roams upward again, clasping tight against the swell of her breast, thumb and forefinger seeking out the stiffened peak of her nipple.

This is what this feels like: needing someone, the way he used to need prayers.

Sing for me, Maria, he breathes, against the column of her throat.

--gormlessthing

Maria had thought herself long past the reach of such prayers.

She had bled herself dry in penance, in discipline, in the terrible charity of the Hunt, in its endless red tide. Her body had been an instrument precise, obedient, honed to a narrow and merciless grace. It had known only purpose – the thrust and recoil of the blade, the measured breath before the shot, the hot arterial wash across her hands.

To feel it now as something wanting, something warmed and opened rather than wielded, pleased her in a way she did not care to name.

Sing for me, Maria.

The words did not command. They yearned. They trembled in the space between them like a struck bell, shivering.

Gorm was not a man of velvet courts or perfumed parlours. He was stone and iron and decades-old oaths worn blunt with use. A cleric who carried faith the way other men carried lanterns – low and practical, meant to light the ground immediately before him. She had seen him stand against horrors that unstitched reason, had watched him shoulder through with that grim, almost exasperated patience, as though the world were an ill-made thing he must constantly set right.

Gods saved souls, he had once said. He saved people. Now, he clung to her as though she were both.

Maria felt the roughness of him. Scarred skin, breath edged with gravel and the copper reek of the night’s work. Not the rarefied, brittle sanctity of the Healing Church. Not the parchment rot of Byrgenwerth. Something earthbound. Something alive. Stubbornly so.

Her blind hands found the breadth of his flanks and settled there with intent, fingers pressing into the hard knots of muscle, anchoring herself to the weight and presence of him. The simple, human solidity.

“You are a foolish man,” she murmured, her voice low and intimate, threaded through with that old aristocratic lilt she could never entirely shed. There was no cruelty in the words. “To ask such music of me.”

Still, she gave it, speaking his name as though weighing it, as if it were something newly learned, something earned.

Still, rough fingertips circled and teased and coaxed between her thighs, the sound of their ministrations slick and lewd and shameless. Still, his other hand grasped her breast, his broad thumb tracing slow, sweeping arcs as though committing the shape of her to memory. She arched, unladylike, into the contact.

With him, she felt no desire to be venerated. No pull towards martyrdom or sainthood. He sucked at her neck as though she were simply a woman. Simply Maria.

She tilted her head back to rest against him, a gesture so small it might have gone unnoticed by any other. For her, it was an unarmouring, a momentary loosening of the immaculate poise she wore like a second skin.

Outside, the night stank of blood and perforated viscera, of smoke and brine and the long rot beneath the city stones. The Hunt was at its close but it would begin again. As it always did. Blood would soak the cobblestones. Beasts would shriek beneath the moon’s pallid gaze. She would take up Rakuyo and Evelyn once more and do what she must.

For now, blood dried stiff in the loose fall of her ghostly hair, her skin still tacky where the Hunt had stained her. Eyes, grey and pale as oyster flesh, turned to watch him over the white peak of her bared shoulder.

Not lost in the moment, but holding it.

Her hand closed around his, where it rested against her breast, and she pressed it more firmly against the quickened beat beneath.

She let him hear it.

(--from Gorm!!)

Anri moved like a phantom among the twisted trunks, her boots pressing shallow pits into damp leaf litter. The hour had grown pale and silvered, not quite dusk but discoloured by a veil of frost that glimmered over the brambles like a mourning shroud. All around her, the woods seemed bewitched into stillness, as though it no longer remembered the shape of its own malediction.

She found the tree just as the old woman in the fen had whispered, though she had not asked. The woman had seized her wrist with fingers like withes and breathed the words into her palm, words that tasted of marrow and moss. Now here it stood before her, in a clearing where even birds did not dare cry – a vast, black-limbed yew, gnarled into the semblance of an open jaw.

Its limbs bore bones like blossoms. Ribcages and femurs, vertebrae strung like prayer beads, delicate skulls of woodland creatures bleached to porcelain. Some hung with twine, others impaled upon thorns that erupted from the bark itself – as if the tree had not merely accepted these offerings, but grown them from within. There were foxes and hares, crow skulls, a stag’s crown heavy with moss. The scent was neither decay nor rot but something far older, the quiet petrichor of death long since settled into the soil.

“You gather the dead as though they were petals,” she whispered, her breath a pale bloom in the air. “Is it mercy or hunger?”

Creaking above her, the tree answered nothing. She felt the urge to kneel but remained standing, spine rigid with a pilgrim’s discipline. Her hand hovered near her belt, where the hilt of her sword still bore the oils of prayer, yet she made no move to draw.

The memory of blood stirred faintly in her mouth – sweet, like copper and cherries. How many of the creatures whose remains adorned the boughs had she once knelt beside, to press a palm against their trembling flanks and murmur comfort while life leaked from them?

A shiver curled down her spine and she felt the gaze of every skull upon her, accusing and eternal. Was she so unlike the tree? Had she not gathered her own litany of deaths? Each one a name she wore like a rosary, knotted into her thoughts, whispered over in the cold hours.

Quite suddenly, she was no longer alone.

A broad shadow swept the bent grass. A figure of enormous strength approached, watching her with a brilliant, singular eye.

For a moment, fear tightened her belly, and she said nothing by way of greeting. The bones clattered gently in the breathless wind, like macabre chimes. A feather, black and iridescent, drifted from above and instinctively Anri caught it in her open palm. It quivered with the memory of wings, of something that had once sung.

Shaped by sorrow and silence, Faramir listened to the warrior’s words with the attentiveness one gives an old book – tattered, well-kept, and all the more valuable for the scuffs along its spine. Gorm, as he gave his name, wiped his blade in a kind of brutal liturgy. It was no noble heirloom, that weapon, only service made steel. Like the man, it had likely never been retired, never been honoured.

Faramir found himself smiling, faintly, when Gorm called him a poet. His gaze strayed to the darkening treetops, as if searching for a suitable place to tuck away the compliment.

“A poet,” he echoed softly, the word leaving his lips in surprise and rare pleasure. His eyes – deep and grey as storm-fed rivers – met Gorm’s single, steady one. There was no shyness in his manner, only solemn gratitude.

“Faramir,” he offered, and took the outstretched hand. “Son of Denethor. Captain of the Rangers of Ithilien.”

Their clasp was brief, but firm. Faramir felt the tremor there – the faint, lingering echo of spent fury. It reminded him of the warhorses after battle, froth-flanked, steaming and shaking, eyes wide and rolling with the knowledge of what they had survived. He did not judge it. The best men always trembled afterwards.

“And you do yourself no disservice, Gorm of the iron cloth. Witchfinder, sword-priest, keeper of whatever brittle peace remains to men like us.”

His hand fell back to his side and he turned toward the remnants of the orc patrol. Corpses lay strewn and still, their black blood already clotting in the leaf litter, but he was not looking at them. He was seeing beyond them, into the uncertain dusk and the shape of things yet to come.

Anri had not known what she expected of him. That he might remain as immutable as the tree itself, perhaps, or fade back into the thickets without word or trace.

When he spoke, the sound startled her, for it did not belong to the uncanny realm of omen and bone, but to a man of flesh and blood – weathered, measured, grounded in the mortal world. His voice was as rough as the stones beneath a pilgrim’s knees, honest in its coarseness, untouched by guile.

Her gloved hand lingered against the hilt at her side, not to draw, but to remember its weight. Her blade had slain beasts and hollowed men, but never yet a stranger who bore her no malice. She drew a slow breath, tasting the iron-tinged air of the grove, her gaze lowering from his solitary blue eye back to the blackened trunk.

“Ill…” she repeated softly, the word clinging to her tongue like frost.

There was sickness here, a gathering of sorrow knotted into wood and marrow. Still, whoever had woven these bones into the branches had done so with patient hands, with ritual. This was no chaos of carrion.

“The woman,” she murmured, her eyes narrowing as she traced the lines of the skulls overhead. “She marked my palm with words and I obeyed before I could question why.”

Her voice faltered, and she felt the cold fingers of memory stir within her chest. The cathedral, the cages, the snapping of dogs at her heels – all places where bones, too, had been trophies.

“I do not think I offended her,” she added, almost to herself, her breath clouding the air between them. She looked at him then, meeting that steady, searching eye with her own – hers clear as dawn skies, though heavy with fatigue.

send my character a ★ and i’ll bold everything they feel toward your character.

The gentle care in the old man's voice ill-suits him. The lines of his face, usually curled into an irritated frown, are instead furrowed with concern as inspects the livid wound along the younger's side.

It's right close to opening the poor boy up - had the blade bit any deeper, or any closer to his core...

The old man shakes his head. Best not to think of it now. People die in war, Gorm. Even younger men. Even kinder men, like this one, laid out as he is on a bedroll, barely conscious after losing so much of himself through that brutal gash.

Not today, though. Not now. Gorm will be quick, and careful, and war will go unpaid today.

"Talk to me while I work, poet," he murmurs, fetching some stitching and bandages from his pack. "Best to distract yourself - and stay awake."

( -from @gormlessthing)

Faramir lay still beneath a sky heavy with the hush of stormless clouds – slate-coloured and low, oppressive as the stone vaults of a tomb. The pain in his side pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, a dull drum calling him further into shadow.

“Talk to me while I work, poet…”

That voice – gruff, incongruous, human – cleaved through the haze to tether him.

With difficulty, Faramir opened his pale eyes. Even twilight stung. He beheld Gorm’s creased face not only as one sees a companion in arms, but as one glimpses a sentinel at the door of Mandos. Weather-beaten, grave, yet not untouched by mercy.

A crooked breath broke from Faramir’s lips. He tried to smile, but it faltered beneath the weight of agony. Still, he obeyed.

“I dream sometimes,” he murmured, voice low and splintered. “Of a city wrought in alabaster and gold. The fountains speak in forgotten tongues…”

Gorm’s hands moved with the competence of long habit, firm and unhurried. The sting of the needle drew gasps from Faramir’s lungs. His vision danced at the edges – black petals unfurling, blooming into nothingness. Blood pooled beneath him, gluing him to the bedroll, warm as spilled spice-wine.

“It was no place of this world. Not now, at least. There stood a statue in the square… a woman crowned with doves. Ever do my dreams show me places I have not known… and things I ought not to know.”

Somewhere beyond, a bird cried, thin and sudden as a brittle bone-snap. Faramir turned his head toward it, curious even now.

“I do not fear death… yet I cannot bear the thought of my bones resting among the stones, nearer to the sky than to the soil.”

He paused, swallowing blood and prophecy.

The bandages were tight now. The bleeding had slowed. Yet still he felt the pull – fatigue like the slow drag of burial earth, patient and deep. His eyelashes trembled, heavy with the promise of unspeakable slumber.

There are other signs, of course: the thick beard and long hair has long gone white, and a combination of time and trial has carved lines into his cheeks, driven deep furrows into his forehead. But it remains the eye - alert in the way that only the echoes of desperate terror - that betrays him most.

"Right, then," he says. "They call me Gorm - Witchfinder, by trade. Told me one of Gherman's best would be suited for, well, finding a witch."

He pushes a thin and fraying bit of parchment across the table. The document outlines reports from other Church hunters, a few statements from widowed loved ones, evidence of heresy out in the woods.

"Charnel Lane," Gorm mutters. "Supposedly the elderfolk out that way have decided to begin kidnapping some of our own. One turned up along the path missing both eyes, so maddened and suffering that our man saw fit to put him down as a mercy."

He nods his head at the sword behind him.

"So they've enlisted my expertise to handle the issue," he says. "Besides, I've only got the one eye left, so theory holds that the elderfolk might not be interested in little old me."

A grin - as old and angry as anything else about the man.

"Still - best to have someone watching my back, and I'm told you're the best the Workshop has to offer," he says. "I'll be blunt - you're not being conscripted. That's not how I operate. Given your prior work with the Workshop, I think anything involving this sort of...pursuit might be of interest to you, but I'll not hold you at swordpoint to do aught.

I am asking the good lady to walk with me in the woods, and see to it that nobody else gets hurt. What do you say to that?"

--from @gormlessthing

Lady Maria sat still as death, slender fingers folded one over the other, the creak of old leather and the soft sough of the rain outside the chapel the only sounds brave enough to linger in the silence that followed his question.

She watched him.

That eye.

It bored into her with a clarity that no mirror had ever offered. Blue, but not the blue of summer skies or cathedral glass. No, it was the colour of frost-bitten veins, of the last flare of lucidity in the half-drowned, of the clarity that sometimes strikes before the brain expires entirely. The eye of a man who had seen something peer through the world’s veil and had not looked away.

And yet.

He grinned, all crag and cliff-face and contempt for comfort. Something in her – the dead thing in her chest that beat like a blood-starved bird – shuddered against its cage.

Her gaze dropped to the parchment. Yellowed like old bone. She did not touch it. The words were already inked across her mind by their echo in his gravel-thick voice. Missing both eyes. Mercy killings. Elderfolk. A name she had heard whispered in the alleys behind Byrgenwerth’s empty dormitories, in the litanies of madmen who forgot to die.

Charnel Lane.

Maria breathed.

Not for effect, not for drama, but because something in her had almost forgotten how.

She was beautiful, still, though she wore it like penance. The fine lines of her face were half-shadowed beneath the wide brim of her hat and her mouth, pale as a newly-blooming bruise, twitched faintly in thought. Her cloak hung damp around her, its blackness soaking up the dim firelight. Behind her, her Rakuyo leaned against the stone wall.

“I was told once,” she said, voice low. “That the woods remember all who trespass. That the trees whisper names not spoken in years. That if you listen too long, too closely, you begin to hear your own.”

Her gaze lifted to him again. Her eyes – those terrible, searching, colourless eyes – held a weariness too vast to be measured in years alone. Within them, a cold fire to match his own.

Outside, the rain grew bolder, lashing the rippled glass like a warning.

“You ask me to walk with you into the woods,” she said, rising. She moved like a dream half-remembered – graceful, but not gentle. “To that I say: Let us walk, Witchfinder.”

She turned her back to him, fastened her cloak, slung her weapon across her spine. A movement she had done so many times it no longer belonged to conscious thought. Her voice was very soft.

↣ DRUNK QUESTIONS, DRUNKER ANSWERS

BY THE TIME HE'S sat next to her, she's entirely lost count of how many cups she's drank. Where has he been, anyway? No wonder she's tipsy, putting out bottle after bottle on her own. She empties the last of the wine into the cup and grabs his hand, sticking the drink in his palm. "Where were you? Got catchin' up... to do." A little spills over. "Ah, shit." Alizebeth squints, tries to focus.

"What was- oh, yeah. Best shot with Svetlana. Havn't I told you...? Feels like I've told you." She did, actually. But they were drunk as skunks at the back of some shite tavern, and not off the best wine in the damn world but on piss-warm ale. Both of them, that time. Slept on a pile of hay in the stable. She doesn't remember this. If he's asking, it's probably because he doesn't either.

"Long story short - old man comes up to me, offers me a job. Starts talking mad things, something 'bout a demon. Told him to fuck off. 'Bah, probably just a harpy,' he said. 'Probably just a'... what was it he said? 'Unfortunately-sized lycanthrope'. Five hundred for it, he had on the table. "

"I'm not stupid. I took the job. All he wanted was for me to down the damn thing so he could swing his..." she hesitates to call it a sword. "bladed... weapon at it. Seemed easy. Money was too good, though. Should've known."

Her head's canted aside as she looks back at Sam. "C'mon. Drink some. Don't leave me hangin'."

"Anyway, the old fuck lied to me. Wasn't no harpy. No lycanthrope. Not even a vulture-gnoll or a siren. No, it was a fucking Fury. Yeah, y'know, an entire fucking Fury. Just... faffing about. I mean, it did kill a few people. No, no, it was a... a real problem. Know me by now. It's my job to fix that shit, pay or no pay. What great pay it was, though."

She takes the cup out of Sam's hand and has a solid swig, wiping at her mouth with her gloved hand. The hunter moves to put it down on the bartop, before she takes a second, more conservative sip, and shoves it back in her companion's grasp.

"Ever showed you the special bolts I made for flying monsters? With the hooks. Tied some rope to one real quick, while the old man covered me. Didn't make it easy, though. Furies don't fly. More like cut through the air. Sun in my eyes, blood from her lashing, too. Had the mask, though, luckily. Got her as she swooped. Both wings. Tore right through."

"Oh, she fucked us right up after that," Alizebeth laughs quietly, rolling up a sleeve to show a nasty burn around her arm. "That one, I think. Still... Proud of that. Good memory. Wonder how the old boy's doing."