#~closed

He could see a youthful face, but one old, too. These pure-as-snow features and hair of gold were not easily forgotten through the ware of time. More-so, though; the pain...the agony and the darkness laden fine between those clear pores and light skin. Not one person could disguise their own truth, or even the reality of their past. More-so when Niflheim had partaken in such horror. 

Niflheim had stolen the memories, innocence and goodness of many children and thus they had become daemons. If not daemons, then the dead. Despite grizzly features and the festering miasma of a plague; Ardyn had never forgotten a face of old. He’d not forgotten her face. 

His eyes needn’t scan in the hopes of recognition, for he already knew of the lady before him. He whispers softly to the breeze, his words floating on the wind like the secret message of a ghost. 

The emerald of Midgar was hardly the luscious green that he had been expecting. The sectors of old, the slums as it were, had been bathed in a messy olive hue. Of course, nature had certainly been birthed from the ruins of Midgar; but it’d hardly thrived. Vines weaved their way through the abandoned piping system of the city, metallic rust and creeping plant alike whipped through one another and around the buildings of old. 

The sight was hardly a marvel; before him stood a discussion point. A world at war with itself; the age old battle between technology and nature. The poison of industrial modernism verses the toxin of the cosmos. AVALANCHE’s old plight and one he had heard much about. The bane of any and all Shinra executive’s life. Where the accursed had come to envision the sights, he had instead found himself an eyesore. 

Only when his ears are pricked by the rev of a motorbike’s engine does he snap from his displeasure and pull his eyes off of the fray. He turns his attention to the assaulting noise, eyes eager to get away from Midgars unfortunate battle. 

The colour of Eos exuded shades by the day, the world had expanded and illuminated in it’s escape from darkness. The population had grown bigger, cities had prevailed and nations propelled through the strength and diversity of their people. But with that ensemble, came evil. 

A blackness most foul in the form of an empire. Niflheim. Away from the forefront, but firm at the side of the emperor’s throne had been Ardyn. A crooked smile and dark eyes always visible beneath his dusty old hat and the loose wine-coloured strands of his shaggy hair. One of his favourite past-times; scaling up a target. 

The chancellor had a penchant for laying in watch. Spying an individual, or even an entire nation as the next to be a victim of the great nation of Niflheim. 

His eyes, or rather the niggling urge of darkness to fester within him, had drew his sights to a particular stranger. A curious young thing ; standing a small ways from him in the popular Lestallum market place. 

The boy had been almost compliant. As compliant as a boy ripped from the arms of his father possibly could be. So they’d kicked and screamed. Ravus and Luna desperately fighting for some kind of ungodly justice ; praying that with every bark of a scream or thrust of a kick, that the flame to have engulfed their mother would somehow take the Niflheim guards for seconds. 

Their struggle was futile ; something Ardyn had noticed the young prince to have become aware of much sooner than his royal friends. Perhaps panic would enforce the boy whence he’d been taken to a room alone and without the dear faces of the Tenebrae royalty. Perhaps when the chancellor had informed him of his new fate as prince...

A life entirely different to that of a future king. A life only Niflheim could offer him. 

It’d become terribly cold. Bitterly icy even atop the skin of a man so distant to the common endurance of a human. His body was unfeeling, yet the bitter cold pierced even he. The freeze was like none-other. It lacked the royal blue of a Caelum’s magic and it’s prickles had been too sharp to have been born from the wrath of Shiva. 

The awash of cold to have sent shivers through the blackness of his blood was one unknown to him. This rare mystery was a splice of something new ; an enigma wrapping cold hands around his throat and choking him with all of it’s strangeness. 

He calls out, voice cracking beneath the icy hardness of the air. 

The liquid to trickle down the jagged stone of the ravine was as clear as morning and as pristine as any other water of the world. It’s wonder led to an encouraged imagination and it’s beauty was hypnotising. Entrancing enough to capture his gaze and hold it hostage. He refuses to look toward his path, or even toward anything else. Only the waterfall holds his eyes now; the water...and the bouncing portrayal of himself atop it’s shower. 

The image was strange, moving lonely. The figure looked the same as he - even bore the same rugged features and yet...it didn’t feel like him. His reflection doesn’t deceive him; no. By all means, he saw it move on it’s own. The man bore witness to the twirling of his fingers and roll of his shoulder without the means of doing it himself. His mirror image was almost certainly twitching and moving, acting individually. Against his will, even. 

The darkness could not have bought forth these side-effects. Two-thousand-years had taught him to see through the walls of an illusion. Beguilement was for the weak and Ardyn we not a weak man. This sorcery was something else...something mystique. 

He stands motionless, eyes analysing the being before him. Was it him? Perhaps a few moment before he had thought as much. Watching it’s being shimmer through the waves of the waterfall was enough to have convinced him it was a mere reflection but now...could it be a doppelganger? Or perhaps, more magically so - it was him. The him of another world. Of another dimension. His thoughts run away with the wizardry of a haphazard mind. He only breaks his foolishness when he beckons a whisper atop the lake. 

MORE FIRST MEETING STARTERS

💀 - One Muse is dead and the other is a reaper of some sort come to take their soul.

“Wh-who are you” weak words break through the crack in his lips “I d-demand to know.” The king is sick, broken. 

Ardyn's lips are cracked and blistered, blood fills the gaps with an ungodly freedom. His skin is black with the charcoal of a dead-flame and his eyes are drained of colour ; the hazel they once were has been stripped from his eyeballs and is now replaced with a ghostly white. 

He can feel their presence; even see them as a blur, but he's no clue as to who stands before him. 

From the heat of the sun's rays, his body fails to drag him closer toward the stranger. Ardyn’s muscles are scorched and just visible beneath the breaking ash of his flesh. The healer no longer looks as he is or as he was ; his body is broken enough to warrant death and yet he fails to die. One can no longer make out the plum-hue of his hair or the wicked fabrics with which he once wore so proudly. No, he's but a charred corpse of a man. Smoke emitting from his body, up through the air and past the cross he was once hoisted upon. Alarming the sky with it's fumes, the gods even. A cruel joke.  

A cracking noise can be heard from the knuckles of his fingers, bones breaking beneath the agony of strain.