The #Broken_Dagger Forum

She waited. As she had for so many years now.

She waited, patiently.

There had been the annoying battle of minds with that Lamai creature, which had suddenly stopped.

There had been ...well...there had been amusing distractions from time to time, and still she waited.

Now...things were beginning to move once more. Fingertips would reach out in the darkness, reaching out even as her mind did the same.

It was not her old friend she reached toward this time. Baie had requested silence, and it was that he would have, for now.

No...this time, it was one who was once a friend. Once a lover. Once her murderer.

"Sin...can you hear me, dark heart? I need to speak with you. If you can not come to me, perhaps we can meet within, as we have so many times before. I know you are...occupied, and this is what intrigues me. Speak to me of your new endeavors, so that I might be amused."

With that, she would recline once more against the crimson and black pillows that served as her bed. Awaiting an answer, be it friend, or foe. With Sin...one could never really know.

In dreams of ancient days, before there were days, and of spaces between stars, the gentle thoughts probe his mind and tickle his thoughts with silk. Her messages had always been delicate things, deceitfully delicate things; a de-fanged serpent who had learned to constrict its prey instead.

His mind brimming with the low hum of perpetual adoration from the Violet Dawn who had taken to heart the teachings that they should pray unceasingly to their divine avatar, the Ascendant One, their combined will made manifest, he waited before responding. This one he knew well, or thought he had known well just as she likely thought the exact same of him. She caught up in dreamscapes and seductions and he caught up in self-adoration and seductions.

They had always been quite the pair.

Slowly, he raised dark eyes from the tepid pool ensconced safely by a waist-high wall of green-flecked stone within the bowels of his ancient and forgotten temple. It was here that he had waged war against earth to spite Heaven all the long years ago, here he had brought the Ashfiend to his knees, and here he had been betrayed. Her features took shape, large and delicate, from memory he shaped the contours of her silken countenance and the ebony waterfall of her hair.

"Galacia," he murmured delicately as he leaned forward, leather-clad hands firmly clasping the cold stone basin's edge. "My latest endeavors?"

He chuckled and slowly shook his head, their minds meeting and exchanging yet each, undoubtedly, locked against the probing of the other.

"What makes you think I am up to anything at all?"

As was her gift, her talent, his features manifested in her mind. He was, as all were in the dreaming, what the dreamer perceived them to be. She was not dreaming, this one, but this was her dreamscape, her territory, his visage was as she last remembered it. Thin features, almost so angular as to be sharp. Dark eyes, so dark one could scarcely find their way free of them. Silken hair that women were often tempted to reach out and touch, but dared not. And that brand upon his ivory brow.

"When are you not, sweet?"

Came the purred reply.

"I can feel you, Sin. Just as you can feel me. As you know I have not been as dormant as they think, nor have you. It seems you are drawing a lot of attention with your charities. I wish to know more. Will you tell me?"

The final words drawn out, savored, he would almost feel one of those long obsidian talons drawing gently down his cheek. Would almost see those ebon eyes batting innocently as she looked up at him.

And once more, she waited.

Her talon's touch was a ghostly caress, whispering along the line of his angled jaw. She followed the map of his features so well, each having memorized the other countless times before. A knowing smile, teased by her feather touch, tickled a small and cruel mouth as her features grew increasingly clear within the pool before him. A soft, pale green light shone upon her features, illuminating them with a ghastly hue.

"What good does it if someone gains the world and yet loses his own soul?" He asked, each syllable a resonant, firm purr that danced along the length of his tongue accompanied by the shifting of a black, silk cloak tossed over one shoulder. "Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?"

He asked while pacing around the basin, gloved fingertips dragging along the coarse stone and soft boots moving with slow, careful steps as he circled her. The effect, for her eyes, might prove dizzying though such depended upon just how she had focused upon him, whether merely his countenance or the entirety of his body clad in white and black.

"The answer is almost anything, so long as he thinks he needs it, or desperately wants it." He paused then, leaning away and peering down the length of a blade-like nose into her conjured countenance.

"But I might ask you the same," he offered, sitting carefully upon the basin's edge, leather-clad fingers entwining upon his lap. "Ask you what has been occupying you, away from this land, away from me and all others? And even if you did answer that, I am not sure why I should tell you anything, given your penchant for stalking dreams, even mine," the last left with an embittered sigh as a fingertip traced the surface of the water along the curve of her lips, without breaking the surface.

"How do I know you won't slip this little exchange into some fool's thoughts that he might cry it out onto the street corners as divine revelation?"

The imagery and emotion of the dreaming is strong for her. Fuel for a cold black fire.

"A man will give whatever he feels he must to save his soul. Protect his love. Nurture his family. This is the folly of human kind. One of many."

The voice which reaches out to him has grown cold, the mistrust noted, digested and then reflected.

"So much has passed to have us still without trust for one another, Sin Vraal. Perhaps, if you would like, we could meet. It might be nice to see your face again."

The is a shiver, not seen, but felt, as he traces the water so carefully.

"You do not know that I would not. But when have you known me to share your secrets? Certainly, I have betrayed you in the past. I even helped kill you...a favor returned. I have never shared your secrets. Not even with Arcana."

"What say you? Shall we speak here? Shall we stop speaking? Or shall I make you breakfast?"

A soft laughter, somehow tainted, like glass being trodden beneath a boot heel, greets him. Somehow, he always amused her.

A soft chuckle dances over his lips, rippling over the pool before him, momentarily obscuring the cold, deadly beauty of the Dream Witch. Arms wove about each other, crossing against his chest while he leaned back, again, impulses flooding through his thoughts.

"I have food to eat which you know nothing about," he began in warmth, smile broad but edged, every expression sincere and sincerely cruel. "But it is a meal that I am willing to share. Perhaps, in breaking bread with me, you will find food for your soul as well, that nourishment that only the cattle might provide."

The iron serpents that often clung to his elbows as merely jewelry stirred in the familiar presence, however distant, of a recognized face. Slowly the pair undulated up along the mild swell of his upper arms to creep across his collarbone and test the air with dark, forked tongues.

"Come, then. You still know the way to where I am. My temple will welcome you once more and we shall talk, and delight, in how things are and how they are yet to be."

The temple. A place which holds bittersweet memories for the Dream Witch. A sigh, before ebon eyes close and she is taken there, for the first time...in many years.

Slowly her form fades into shape beside the scrying pool.

"Then speak to me, dark heart, of the cattle."

Obsidian talons brushed back masses of raven curls. Fully black eyes set upon him with both admiration and distrust. There had been so much come and go between them.

"Tell me of this food...and of my soul."

Laughter bubbles from from her lips. The sound bruised and malignant. A soft shake of her head.

"My soul. You can be so amusing, Sin."

Galacia's coming was silent and yet explosive, the visible sealing of the past and the great weight of the future that the Violet Dawn propelled him toward. Her countenance, sculpted and pale, yet looms within the scrying pool while his own dark gaze flits from impressed image to the fleshy elegance that Galacia offers in word and breath.

His eyes alighted upon her with a gentle, knowing and pleasured sigh as he remembered sweet and toxic things.

The temple itself, all around them, stood empty and hollow save for the dark, beating heart that was its master. Along the walls, towering up into darkness, stood ancient statues of beast-headed men, their figures covered in countless symbols that whispered blasphemies only to those who knew how to listen. Behind him, atop a broad, short dais rested a throne fused of countless polished, ivory bones and the opposite end bore a simple pair of heavy, stone double doors.

"The only food they have to offer those like us, Galacia. Adoration. Worship. As they scramble about their short, meaningless lives seeking to be restored to the graces of Heaven or whatever they cling to for their preservation and enlightenment." The syllables, clipped with distaste, twisted his cruel lips into the barest of frowns.

"Every mortal needs such, and yet every mortal wants autonomy. And there is the quandry," he whispered, slender lips flowing into a broad and ready smile as he raised a gloved finger to punctuate his point. "How does one worship another while loving one's self too much? "