Wings and a prayer

[Thadius Dhrin]

Deep in the silent night of Myrkenwood a figure moves through the nearly deserted inn. A cloak of soft black fur, lined with silk of gentle mint green, shifts softly over the worn floorboards of the common room. Boots of highly polished black leather step with purpose toward the staircase, eyes within the shadowed hood never looking left or right.

A hand, missing one finger, a horrible scar where it had once been, grips the railing as the approach is made toward the door of the last room he remembered her occupying.

From within the cloak comes a folded piece of parchment. A shape she had long since learned to loath, he knew. The swan gently placed upon the floor, a fingertip pushing it beneath, into the room beyond. Around it's delicate neck a single crimson hair tied in a perfect bow.

She would read the note, he knew this, she would not be able to resist it.

Nightengale,

I know what you have done.

How could you do this to me? To us? My son will not be forgotten. Not by me, and most assuredly by you.

You take from me, I take from you.

Not dead. No. Never that. I promised.

Death is easy. Survival is much more challenging.

Until we meet again, dear one...

Always,

Thad


The words were scrawled with the abandon of one who had surrendered to madness. The neat script of so many notes before was peppered with pauses and drops of ink that one could almost read as laughter.

The ink was dark and rusty, it glittered strangely in places where the quill had run deep with it. A necromancer would be able to hear the screams of the one who had provided it. A scholar could see the script and know the fury and glee mixed within the carefully chosen words.

Ari...Ari would need help to read this note, he knew. Quincy most likely...since her darling Altias would not be available for the task. Together the two of them would know why the governor had been so long missing. And perhaps together their screams would pierce the night.

In the same silence which brought him, the stranger disappeared again into the night. For things here were far too silent, and he longed to here the frightened screams of his newest toy.

[Carnath-Emory]

Thadius Dhrin -- monster, saint, heretic -- had inspired the woman to a long seclusion. This was not a fact of which he had any particular right to feel proud; such periods of isolation were quite normal for her. The years of her stay in Myrken had been marked by several of them.

Usually, though, she didn't spend them trying to poison herself.

In the chill northern reaches of New Dauntless, the deeply-green liquor was known as Polynnaja; the outlander Haar insisted it was rightly named Absinthe. Whatever the case, it had been her drink of choice over these last weeks, laced sparingly with essence of polyn' gor'kaja ("wormwood", they had insisted at the Rememdium, when finally she'd made herself understood). Quite sparingly, her mission being one not of suicide, but murder.

As Thadius Dhrin had evidently discovered.

It had done its work well, this sickly, sickening diet. There had been some complications, of course: a little aching in the joints, a little pallour to the skin; the tendency of her stomach to reject what food she dared offered it. By the third week, she'd begun to leak blood from the nose and eye-ducts, but that was just the pennyroyal from which she'd made her weak tea -- and it had already begun to work its mundane magic on her flesh. One morning soon after, she woke in a tangle of red-drenched bedsheets, and knew that her ordeal was over.

***

As it happened, Dhrin's was not the first letter that she'd received that week. There'd been the usual from Vornheim -- lurid tales of adventure and outrageous fortune, written using the smallest words possible. Another had followed swiftly after, of which she'd deciphered enough to know that it's sender was Coran, and very little else at all. In the long, quiet days which followed her pregnancy's end -- and in the absence of Quincy, Sawyer, Bromn -- it had proven an excellent diversion. She'd made it as far as the baffling 'foremost', when the delicate little thing by the door caught her attention.

For the next three hours, it sat unopened upon her distant clothes-chest. Thadius Dhrin knew no words that would please her. Thadius Dhrin could pluck the moon from the sky and the pearls from a crocodile's eyes, and still fail to bring a smile to her lips or mercy to her heart. There was no reason at all to read whatever new madness he had penned for her.

For three hours, her resolve lasted, before the little swan was unfolded, the strand of sunset hair caught in her palm. Three hours, before she snatched the letter up and read it.

As he'd known she would.

***

Had he expected screams? Had he lingered near the tavern's walls in hopes of hearing them? Ahh, then she would disappoint Dhrin one last time, for there was scarcely a whisper of sound to be heard from her room; nothing but the subtle thud of a thin body striking the floor. There she slept for several restless hours, in dust and her own cold sweat. And dreamed. Oh, dreamed...

of lruid adventure and outrageous fortune, imagined in the simplest terms possible. the sapphire-eyed man struck the bonds from his wrists and the head from his shoulders, again and again, and each time his laughter grew. sometimes there were sunsets in those eyes. sometimes his hair shone a brilliant crimson, but that was only the blood that stained it. his blood loved the tormentor's wicked nails, and welled forth eagerly to meet them; his screams followed with admirable haste.

"For you!" cried his tormentor, the maddened trismegistus. with loving devotion and bone-white teeth, she ate the heart from his chest and dubbed the meal Fate. with the golden blood of Lady Rot for her ink, she penned missive after missive. as the black dog howled its music, she folded the pages in her hands, and a brush of her lips sent them flocking into the air. one hundred paper nightingales flew into the violet sunset, and the dying, crimson sun burned every one of them to ash.