#otolin

Mister Pike.

The coy appellation had come out of that first meeting all that time ago. Sitting on the couches in Severine's apartment, while Otolin laid out his ideas. All three of them in a flux of some kind. Moving between one place and another. Crawling out of the dirt. Tearing aside rotten leaves so new ones could grow.

A man who'd been called Crag in a forgotten-past and a woman the urchins in Pearl Lane already called Saint Savage spitballing words for Breandan's favored weapon until he spat out the word they used to describe the units and kinds of polearms they fashioned in Otolin's ostensible homeland.

As if that was the sole reason. Here he was, just the Ala Mhigan's Pike.

It seemed to be one of the Ala Mhigan in questions' favorite party tricks. Savage. Crag. Pike.  As he made the brief introductions and pointed out each of them with a light gesture of his powerful hand.

And they settled in, and he hung and placed things in the office space he lived in as much as worked in that he liked looking at. That reminded him of places he'd been and people he'd been there with.

And on the wall behind his desk went a framed sketch of a lonely statue, half buried in the frost of the Western Highlands. A caped figure in a helmet bearing a lance. A monument people just called The Pike.

Children in Ishgard learned this story young: Haldrath the Dragons-Eye. Ishgard’s first Azure Dragoon. A king's son who tore a treasure from the skull of their great enemy. Who eschewed title and prestige in favor of vengeance, in going to the field and staying there to keep his people safe. 

How many times had he yammered about it to his sister on the estate when they were small? Regaled Silvestre over campfires in the snow while they rubbed their hands and watched the skies?

Noone seemed to tell it anymore.

(Mentions: @stone-xiv, @severine-savage, @loadedmemory, @witchespromise)

She’s been staring down the point of a shortsword for the past twenty-three seconds, and counting.

Not at - down.

The enemy is down.

Past the steel; past its weak and gliding through the fuller, over the strong and tripping through the crossguard, sloping along the arm and the shoulder, and down into a pair of some seriously pissed-off eyes.

They’re just full of it, so full of her, really.

Those pupils are so blown-out that they seem to have replaced their blue irises with a thin outline, and the surrounding pinkishness makes Xiaohu, herself, feel fucking wasted.

Anyone in her place, sitting on this barstool, a couple ilms from being run through, would feel it in their palms.

But she doesn’t feel it in her palms.

She feels it in the muscle collar of her throat.

And the corners of her jaws.

Cascading through the nerves of her teeth.

All around the edges and bloodworks of her eyes.

It’s a gunshot scraping and cutting through the metal of the chamber containing it; that single, violent, squeeze of her heart and through its subordinate legions.

She doesn’t have to have a mirror at hand to know how she looks like - that roil in her features bringing eyes once-saturated with laughter into something like a maddened tiger with glinting, bulging, almond eyes. Luring her shoulders towards that weapon’s tip until she can imagine its cold press.

“...what the fuck are you going to do, stab me?”

The tendon running through the underneath of the man’s wrist and palm quivers.

“That’s…”

Otolin’s flat voice stops as though it had almost walked into a chasm-gap.

Like he’s concerned, but not really sure on if he should be actually helping or not.

“...that’s exactly what he’s going to do, Xiaohu.”

Just a pair of dudes hanging out waiting on Heaven-on-High to open back up.

"I don't weigh anything to you, do I?"

"No. You are as light as a... a feather."