Forested Expanse

    It was silence he ached for, driven into the dark bowels of the forested expanse by a relentless dystopian pang; it was the solace of oblivion, and not nature's flawed beauty, that he sought... Black boots, small for a man's, worn by ages, climates, and temperaments few things could have ever hoped to weather, beat a slow and entirely relentless tattoo against the inky sea of mossy grasses. It wasn't that his pace was swift, but it possessed a certain air of... inhuman efficiency. A ground eating, mind numbing, mechanical consistency that would've worn down any less man in minutes; there was a precision to it that bespoke something almost unwholesomely logical about Warden's new visitor.
    Stygian cloth hissed, stretching out behind him like a great banner, the conched plates of his mantle relieving the single-minded darkness of his form-fitting cloth attire, gleaming like polished chrome each time they caught even a stray shaft of moonlight and rattled almost whimsically on their numerous artificed joints. How long he'd been walking was a question not even he could answer - it had been a long time since he'd actually traveled with the intent of arriving. Walking, as had life itself, had become a matter of doing only for doing's sake.

    There was an incredulous movement, the lofting of one finely arced black brow, invisible within the overriding shadows of his raised hood, and that strangely mechanical gait abruptly died... a termination brought about by the sight of another person some distance ahead... Warden, without knowing it, had just committed the gravest of crimes; imposing his presence, disturbing the perfect, haunting loneliness of the skeletal silhouettes of trees under a darkening evening sky.

    A second crime, perhaps even greater than the first--light. The sudden, burgeoning orange glow drew his eyes; they flashed in its warmth despite the shadowy cowl of his hood, two pinpricks of frigid mercury, devoid of even the vindictiveness festering behind their icy mask. A cold breeze rustled past, giving life to the voluminous cape swaddling his slight frame... it whispered an urgent warning to Warden, begged him to turn his way, or better yet, to rise and blindly run... But there was no running any more. He breathed out--perhaps the first time in days--and the world seemed to stutter, an unsettling feel of dread accompanying a sudden gust that'd tear the life from Warden's fledgling fire, scattering orange embers across the grass at his feet. Zephidel's deep and stately voice, quiet from disuse, carried on a breeze like a whisper, addressing the wanderer who tried to carve out his survival in this wilderness.

    "Have you ever dreamed without a dream, to touch the blackness just beyond the thin film of the human mind...? Its so cold; so sweet; so empty. Do you think that's what death is like?"

    He continued with that same distant softness, his train of speech completely undisturbed by the man's rejoining words. His steps returned to him, but slowly now, so that he seemed to drift towards Warden with a horrendous, thoughtful certainty.
    "Ah... one of the mortals that ignorance protects... what foolishness has drawn you so far from your den?"
    The cloaked figure, hardly larger than his own came ever nearer, step by step, foot by foot, second by second, with a slowness that wholly belied the aching, overriding urgency to kill. Already it was screaming at him, the black-sheathed blade that rode his left hip - the seething agony of its need permeated even his cold mind with a fearsome, primal insistence that forced a ghostly whisper from pale, wind-bitten lips, only half seen.
    "One with the voices, better left unheard... One with the heart beat, the force that turns the earth - that's who I am."

    "So... human."
    His voice was as dull and harsh as the crash of a lead weight, and then crashed like a wave into velvetine iciness. All the while, gunmetal eyes, now purely visible with their new closeness, remained unblinkingly affixed to Warden's face. They were like hollow shells of cold steel molded around something vast and unknowable just beneath; closed windows to the damned.
    "To look without seeing is your greatest flaw; you yearn to see blue skies only... Look up - we live beneath a sullen, blackened sky..."

    A gulf of six feet still yawned between them. His strides had broken there, but only just, leaving the sensation that he might still be slithering nearer in the now staling air. His broken, battered lips warped with a mirthless smile.
    "Death is a part of life..." He trailed on. "...You are but a corpse waiting to happen... A grave waiting to fill..."
    His spidery hands both hovered at his waist, black gloves obscuring even the tiniest hints of pale flesh beneath - the blade was just at hand, twisting a knot somewhere deep inside him... But he was strong, maybe even stronger than it.

    The thoughtless ease with which he did all things was, in and of itself, cruel; their was a wickedness to it, to its calculating inhumanity, devoid of those tiny flecks of sentimental foolishness that so readily defined a person; there was no flowery jerking, no elaborate motions. He simply stepped in as the man moved and his arms began to lift - stepped in as though he'd meant to all along.
    Was Warden's blade descending? Its movement would be rendered meaningless by the twining synergy of their strides... they were so close--too close--and his hands and the very base of the blade's hilt would crash into the convex plates of his left mantle, jarring the collar beneath, and surely his grip with it. Strangely, his wan features, fine boned, gaunt, and would-be-boyish were they not kissed by so many scars, remained wholly unchanged throughout. Unchanged, even though his own merciless response had begun before Warden's blow probably landed so poorly. His right fist hooked upwards with frightening force, the bony bludgeons of his jutting knuckles aimed to slam deep into the man's left armpit while the limb was tensed and utterly immobile from the recoiling force of his failed swipe. There was no pity in the punch, no reserve, no secret inhibitions.

"Hnh."

    Did his fist find its target? He wasn't sure; it didn't matter - all that mattered was continuity. He always had continuity; he'd stepped into him again without pausing as he spun, without thinking, as the motion of the driving leg exaggerated, becoming a pitiless thrust of the knee slated to catch Warden in the side of his lower back midway through the desperate twist with enough force to send him sprawling across the ground with a thoroughly bruised kidney. It wasn't that his strength was super human - he just knew nothing of restraint, and felt not the tiniest inkling of pity. He held nothing back, because all that existed inside that wiry frame, behind those boreal quicksilver eyes, was the need to strike... To break. To end. His heart beat out the rhythm of a war drum inside his leanly muscled chest, as his trailing voice echoed a distant note of an eerie moan, as if he himself were in awe, terrified and saddened by Warden's impending end.

    "You shouldn't have come to me... You shouldn't have been here..."

    Those black boots appeared next to his head with startling suddenty, as though he'd just sprouted right up out of ground beside him. That long black cloak of his rustled, whispered, and then snapped as the breeze became wind, became gale, and then became an icy blade that tore at Warden's skin like a razor forged in the icy heart of the wastes of Drumbar. Slowly, almost lazily, his shadow shifted as he squatted effortlessly down, staring at his fallen figure with a strange and wholly tranquil curiosity - whatever rage had so momentarily driven him all but gone.


    "It seems... that time does wait for you, after all. Do you want to live?"

    "Why not?"
    Should Warden not move to stop him, a shadow would dance forwards as swift as a flitting shrike; his gloved hand falling over the back of his head - he'd lightly grip, fingers clinching, and steadily draw it back by the wrist so that his pinching fingers came together at the very back of his head before they too lifted away... pulling with them a twisting, fluxing thread of purest midnight hue from somewhere inside his mind. The sensation of having his head lifted by a string, like a mannequin's might, would overwhelm the man for a split second... and then the pain, anxiety, and fear that filled his skull would just as suddenly fade away, leaving him in a temporary state of delirious euphoria which, within minutes, would subside into a state of deep, easy sleep. He flicked his wrist aside almost casually, flinging Warden's personified negativity aside with all the offhandedness of a seamstress discarding a broken piece of string - it twisted in the air, and then into the air, dissolving into evanescent mist.
    "Dream..."

    That voice as soft and solemn as it had ever been.

    "Yes... dream," his voice a silky ribbon that wound itself like a snake through his ears, settling like liquid into each and every crease of his dizzy brain.
"And seek me out... in the place where there is no darkness."

    The face of a boy just become a man stared back--a face that, save for a growing collection of scars, that had not changed in generations--a crooked little smile on its thin lips. His eyes, animated now, smoldered with a vigor anathematic to the desolation of just moments past, slitted beneath alabaster lids before he turned away in a swirl of long, glossy raven strands that blossomed out of his smalling hood. He began to stroll off as quickly and smoothly as he'd come, his thoughts only of walking again.