by Carnath-Emory » Fri Apr 27, 2007 12:01 pm
A distinctly odd turn. Ask Cinnabar about his sword, she'd once bade Starr -- who'd had such success in the matter of Renne and Prime, after all, so that she'd reckoned him most adept in these tricks. See what he does, she'd invited, because she'd done so herself already, and the results had been ... surprising. In the light of Renne's unusual situation, they had been almost alarming.
Several days from now, a large group of persons will storm the caverns which house the Order's gatherings. Cinnabar will be amongst their number, and Ariane as well, and she will witness the man act in a way which reminds her keenly of that alarm. But a great many hours stretch between Then and Now, and in this moment, the woman's concerns are very different. This conversation, for instance: the very fact that they converse at all, and in such directions, so that she is put in mind of Duquesne and Bromn both, and finds the comparison disconcerting. If there is trouble written across her features, that is surely its source, and what follows only heightens the fact -- for he has echoed another man entirely, somehow, and for a long moment her aspect hardens entirely.
For a time, she is as closed to him as if her skull were vacant of thought, of person.
"You are not," she begins eventually, "the first to suggest this thing." Flatly-spoken, perhaps. Carefully measured. A woman reaches for control, achieves it with particular effort. "I have come to see the truth in it: what it means merely to exist, what it means to live. Existence does not satisfy me as it once did; I find it ... insufficient. And I find this realisation uncomfortable.
There. Now you have more than you wished to know."
There is some measure of dignity here, beneath the bruises; there is a great expanse of pride, lurking beneath the sellsword's natural arrogance. It has lifted her scarred chin, has made a thin line of her lips -- but one which gradually relents, which discovers a very slightly self-deprecating tilt.
"So I have thought on this, mn? This .. direction, this choice. I tell you mine, for it is so simple: that there are some very few things that I cherish, that I find most fine, most worth preserving. These things which I love, I discover so often that peril threatens them, and me..."
Her smile is not quite kind.
"I excel at nothing but the banishment of peril.
"It seems so simple, yes? It ... should be so simple. It seldom is."