feet to the rising. [talon]

[Dhruv]

The line of Dhruv’s spine relaxed when Aoren laughed and shrewd eyes moved between the powerful men when they briefly switched to Kathenor. It was a language Dhruv recognized but did not know. When the red dragon stepped out from temple’s archway and was swallowed by shadow, his eyes widened.

“Does he travel that way often?” It was a question gently applied in response to the faint unease he sensed from Talon. For a long minute, he stood at the Lightbringer’s side, staring down the darkness.

At length, he nodded and made an eloquent gesture with for Talon to lead the way. An absent tug was given his shirtsleeves even as he fell into unthinking step to Talon’s left and a glance behind.

“I’ll have to borrow,” he confessed what he suspected Talon already knew to be true, a wry twist taking his mouth. “I haven’t got anything else.”

Maybe that touch of madness in Dhruv went deeper than was necessarily safe. He seemed perfectly comfortable with the fact that he was walking with Arcas himself through the divine’s own temple, unintimidated though not unimpressed by the sheer presence of his companions so far.

The reaving rune emblazoned on his back itched, almost eager, and Dhruv was more than ready to feel the wind in his teeth. A good fight might empty him and allow for a full and restful sleep as that he’d been denied since unceremoniously shoved into a sewer. It was how he thought of his arrival in this time, when he thought of it all. It was easier to focus on the present than it was to think too hard about the past. It was all still elusive, jumped and disordered, but also a gaping wound, too painful to touch. He knew he must hold it, hold all of it, so sharpened his focus and compartmentalized all of those jagged edges so he didn’t have to think his way through them.

[Talon]

T A L O N

“Recently, yes.” Talon, or more specifically Arcas, was still growing accustomed to the fact that the shadows were no longer quite so violently arrayed against him. In the darkness at the edges of the world he sometimes felt as though his elder brother were watching him.

“The grace my older brother affords me is not promised to any other, and his favor is hard-won.” He trusted in Aoren’s abilities. His husband was far from inexperienced or incapable of defending himself from threats that lurked in the dark. Still, he always felt a pang of anxiety whenever Aoren was not by his side. The lingering echoes of his trials in the Imperium, perhaps. He shook off the uneasiness and turned to Dhruv. At the motion to lead the way, Talon flicked his wrist at the double doors to the temple. They closed and then with a few confident strides, he moved forward and opened them again revealing the interior of what appeared to be an armaments room. He motioned for Dhruv to follow him.

“All places in Dawnhold are as near or as far as I wish them to be.” Once Dhruv was through the doors, they closed and then seemingly melted away into the wall becoming solid stone as though the doors had never been there to begin with. Talon held up a hand to a pair of very startled looking paladins who were on guard over the arms room. As soon as they saw him, they visibly relaxed bowing to him and speaking acknowledgements. He nodded to them before gesturing to the room around them. There were racks of armor, shirts, pants, even an assortment of boots, along with weaponry and even what appeared to be a few cases of magical paraphenalia.

“All forged by my hand or that of my associates. Much of the armor has been given rudimentary reinforcements with runeforging.” Talon gestured vaguely to the room around them. “Take your pick.”

As Dhruv went about making his selection for arms and armor, Talon reached into his featherlight bag and retrieved a piece of paper. He withdrew a well of spellwright’s ink and began the process of quietly inscribing a glyph of protection upon the surface of the paper. His composition of the sigil was artful, forming a sunburst pattern in the form of runic markings. Once the pattern was complete, Talon stirred his aether into motion. Into the glyph he imbued a protective shield that would ward against the corrosive and chaotic nature of the dread mists. He constructed the anchor to be attached to the scroll so that when it was activated, the person holding the scroll could still roll it up and tuck it away into a pocket or on their belt. He instilled his mastery of Negation into the spell scroll and once finished, he placed the locking seal upon the glyph then rolled up the scroll. Returning the spellwright’s ink to his bag, Talon looked to Dhruv and presented the scroll to him.

“The Dread Mists pose little threat to me. In the off-chance that we are separated, I want you to use this. It is a spell of protection that will shield you against their chaos. You will still be vulnerable to beasts and the indirect dangers posed by the mists but the mists themselves will not harm you so long as you carry this scroll once you invoke the spell.”

[Dhruv]

At Talon’s mention of an older brother, the time-tossed Hytori slowly squinted one eye. Shadows all but stumbled to spill out of him with the abrupt sidestep of his thoughts, but the tilt of his head was thoughtful and the horde of questions was caught by the backs of his teeth. Maybe he recalled the Aoren’s caution, or maybe the sudden near-scent of aether as he followed the avialae into the armaments room silenced him. The smooth swath of stone wall that formed behind them was eyed for moment and he waited for something a whole lot like nausea to stop trying to humiliate him.

“What a wish,” he murmured, the corners of his mouth flickering up before he turned to take in the room’s contents. “Really?” He hesitated, clearly astonished by the generous offer. It was one thing to offer a sword and shield and another thing entirely to give Time's own thief free rein over a weapons horde maintained by the legendary Order. “Thank you.” The paladins on guard were given a polite nod of acknowledgment before, following another long hesitation, Dhruv slipped between suits of armor to consider the options.

There were far more than he’d anticipated. Of course, he hadn’t actually considered that he would find himself in this position. Not, at least, at anyone’s invitation. A final glance was given Talon around the wicked curve of a mounted helm, watching as he set a glyph to paper. Gold-chased eyes wanted to trace it, learn it, but he dared not delay and so shook off the last of his uncertainty and curved about on a worn heel that left a scattering of sand along the floor.

With the same matter-of-fact absorption with which he had thoroughly scoured the libraries, Dhruv set to ransacking the arms room. Numerous weapons were examined and many lifted. A dagger deftly flipped before placed back on its hooks. A rifle raised with the hard clap of palm to ebon wood. An iron chest plate with an old runework drew a ghost’s chuckle out of him before set back down. He idled a while before several displays of swords, mouth hooked in a funny smile, but ultimately moved on with a regretful but determined nod. This provisioning was not intended for his benefit, but for the defense of the people of Light's Reach. He ended up crouched in a corner, huffing a tangle of hair out of his face while peering into a rough hewn wooden box at the dulled gleam of an arm cuff and eventually nodded to himself. It along with his other, carefully chosen items ended up in a pile on a bench closer to where they’d entered so Dhruv could re-sort himself while Talon completed the scroll.

Cloak and shirt were divested while Dhruv took the opportunity to perform a silent self-assessment. Long, lean muscle. Sun bronzed skin. More than his fair share of scars. Weaker than his bones wanted. Weary with centuries despite the long-legged youth gifted his people. Ill to his soul. Magic the sigh of a forgotten wind where once had howled a hurricane.A whole heap of thoroughly depressing adjectives that his broken memories refused to let lie. Nevertheless, with a discipline unsung, he mentally packed them into a lockless iron box and stored them deep within the carefully curated corridors of his waking mind. The ring he sought – and all his leftover hopes along with it – was not forgotten so much as was depriotitized. The choices he made were, at a glance, less than impressive. Perhaps he had not understood the assignment. Selected armor consisted of a pair of dark leather greaves that would buckle over the tops of battered boots and crawled up over the knees in protective black scales. They rested on the bench as he lifted a right-shoulder pauldron that could strap diagonally over his chest and to which clever, calloused fingers were busily attaching a healthy supply of caster shells. Once finished, the pauldron was dropped to join the greaves so he could catch first one vambrace then the other with a light flip and yank at the buckles until the straps were braided and could be positioned once on to his very specific tastes. They were all dark, black and duller shades of metal, so as to go unremarked in the night. None of it was heavy, and none of it was like to make so much as a squeak to draw attention. This was a man who favored speed and agility over the greater protection of more robust armor. He turned to scoop up on a simple black shirt and heavier vest and pull it over his head and in doing so revealed the beauty and ruin emblazoned on his back.

An ancient longsword stabbed down the length of his spine, molten gold dripping and crawling through the shattered face of a stylized clock. It sharpened to murderous edges that grew lost in in the very shreds of shadow it destroyed. The clockhands could have been been pistols, smoke rising from fires that were shed from the wings of a phoenix rising over the hilt, beak turned to the noon point of the rising sun that spread behind, beside, and above it all. It was a massive entanglement of cardinal runes, layered masterfully over and in and around each other, to form the only remaining story of a hot head son of Sol’Valen who’d once imagined he could withstand Fate itself. It was the sigil of a great sorceror on the body of wayfinding beggar. And it disappeared beneath the heavy warmth of his borrowed shirt as he tucked it in. He finished strapping a double gun rig low about narrow hips and was tucking a matched set of well made but plain sniping pistols into the holsters when he turned back.

With a quizzical raise of his eyebrows, Dhruv automatically accepted the scroll Talon held out. The edge of his thumb rasped against the papers end, thoughtful, and he tapped it once to his palm before tucking it safely into an interior pocket of a vambrace. He propped a boot on the bench to tie off the ends of the gun rig and strap on the greaves. His body knew the way around weapons and armor even if his mind wasn’t quite able to always think its way to them.

After a few moments, he caught Talon’s eye with a swift smirk. “Don’t lose me.”

Part command. Part bargain. Part prayer.

“Almost ready,” he added. The vambraces were fixed fast, in ways more familiar to him than his own hands, the longest yawning memory. It was the left vambrace half under which he fixed the banded bracelet he’d discovered in a quiet corner shelf, half hidden behind items of far more obvious worth. Glyphs chased across it like sparks to conflagration, hinting at the elemental magics forged to its curve.

[Talon]

T A L O N

Talon’s eyes followed the line of Dhruv’s back. He examined the masterful work of art that was arrayed across sun-tanned flesh. The clockwork sword dusted with the ashes of a faded phoenix that paid homage to a glory now long gone. As that faded glory revealed itself, Talon found the whisper of a memory dancing across his reverie. As his fingers brushed that of Dhruv’s in passing the scroll, he was struck with the barest hint of a vision. Golden eyes that laughed in sunlight as they sailed among the waves of a sparkling black sea. The ghost of a prayer, old but familiar came back to him.

Don’t lose me.

“Never.” The reply came out of him out of instinct and he had a sense of deja vu. Talon paused, words catching in his throat. He felt a near sense of familiarity to Dhruv and he could not quite place it. Again he saw that shift in the man’s aura, that vague edge just beyond his reach that remained continually out of focus. Before he could look further however, he received a flare of warning across the Bond. His head turned in the direction of where he sensed his husband. Through their link he received a flash of the danger that Aoren was in.

“I trust you will know how to use that.” He nodded to the bracelet. Not wasting any more time, Talon extended the equivalent of a mental hand to his husband. It was grasped and through that tether, Talon opened himself up to the spatial pathways across the Slipspace. The air in front of him twisted upon itself before splitting open to form a gateway between Dawnhold and where Aoren was located.

Talon glanced back at Dhruv with an almost excited smirk. If he was anything, Talon was a warrior. Raised a prince, ascended to godhood, but forever a fighter and now was the moment before the rush of a battle. He turned and in one smooth motion, his hands moved, summoning an impressive longsword. Stained glass decorated the flat of the blade, touching the hilt in a pattern that resembled a rising sun. The silver of his wings sharpened and resembled blades of steel as silver-white fire ignited in Talon’s eyes. Like a caster shell fired from a rifle, Talon launched himself through the portal, guided by the tether that existed between himself and Aoren. The pact-blade in his grasp stirred and Talon allowed himself to be moved by the sword, bringing it up just as the claws of an icy behemoth were aimed to descend upon one of his husband’s raven wings. The sound of glass shattering was accompanied by a bellowing howl of rage. Talon flourished his sword and faced the danger that stood before him.

“Always an entrance, beloved.” Aoren held a pair of blood-red swords, one of which was wreathed in shadows while the other shone with the brilliant silver-white of Dawnfire.

“One would not want to disappoint Lyra with a lack of style.” Talon grinned.

“I see you brought der Flammende.” Aoren stepped up beside him. Talon’s smile softened.

“Be nice, love.” The red dragon flourished his swords.

“When am I not?” With that, Aoren sprinted forward launching himself at the abomination in front of them. A swipe of frozen claws was met with a clash of burning swords in what became a dance of shadow-touched fire and corrupted ice.

There were two of them. Standing taller and broader than even Aoren’s nearly eight-foot frame. Bulky and blocky and made of jagged stone with shards of ice jutting out of their frames, the lumbering forms of corrupted ice elementals awaited them. Behind them was a waterfall that itself seemed an impossibility. Half-frozen with shards of ice falling from it midway down the mountainous cliff-face, the Icefalls was completely still in its upper half but falling water interspersed with chunks of ice that fell into a wide lake with interconnecting streams extending from it in various directions.

The corrupted elemental that was not being fought by Aoren was nursing a wounded extremity. It growled and grumbled, the sound of a gravelly avalanche, turning glowing orbs of blue light to stare at Talon. It raised the partially shattered extremity and with a tinkling of what sounded like ice freezing over, reformed its broken limb. His eyes settled upon its torso, at the center of which rest a pulsing crystal fully encased in the thick ice that formed its body.

“Aim for its core!” Talon jumped back, flapping his wings in order to take flight and dodge what would have been a pummeling from the corrupted elemental.

[Dhruv]

The smirk faded from Dhruv’s face, taken off guard by the vehemence with which Talon responded. His eyes narrowed not so much with suspicion as bewilderment, sensing the lumbering beasts of time and memory stirring even as his heart tightened. He might have grasped for it, or he might have recoiled depending on the courage of the hour. There were dangerous lures knotted to the endlessly reforged details of his destiny, ones that face down in a sewer seemed a mercy of forgetting, of undoing. An ending, even, rather than this endlessly ending symphony of skeletons his life had become. The vulnerability made him uncomfortable and opened his mouth to ask a question when the demigod turned to rip open a path to Aoren’s side.

So, instead, Dhruv released something between a nod and a shrug to Talon’s back in response to whether he knew how to handle the magic bracelet because the answer, of course, was that he didn't know yet if he did or did not. Nothing known to him was capable of being relied upon, he feared. Not yet, and the devils may care attitude he projected with it was at least half defense. Not that it was about to matter.

Instead he exhaled a thin breath through his nostrils to calm the nausea traversing continued to threaten him with, rearing like a phantom of unprocessed trauma, and unraveled to his toes while aether whispered itself awake around him. He bounced there while Talon shot like a comet through slipspace to Aoren’s defense, revving himself up even as the familiar song of battle came in a high pitched crash of ice. Unable to help it, Dhruv grinned in a flash of white teeth at the sight of the battle, and the idea of fighting with such great warriors.

He watched. He was not hesitating – no, never at this – but instead balancing on the threshold between while a longsword of such great age as to be primeval materialized in his right hand. His left hand rose, calloused fingers outstretched, to channel aether up through the unusually reversed curve of the sword’s quillions – their ends rounded up towards the blade rather than crossing, as this allowed for the swift rolls of his wrist that enabled the protective gyre of his particular swordfighing style. He squinted one eye at the ghastly ice beasts then refocused on his sword as Talon and Aoren came together.

“Géant bâtard rouge,” Dhruv swore on a sigh. The old rebel’s retort to Aoren’s remark – not that he had the faintest idea what he was being called, but that wasn’t at all the point – held all the companionable vehemence the moment called for. The beauty of ancient Vallenor almost made insulting the immensely dangerous dragon by naming him a giant red bastard seem less stupid – “I see you’re in need of reinforcements.” Well, almost.

Dhruv dropped his left hand with near visible relief. He’d not been certain how his magic might answer him. It had writhed and in turn caused him to writhe since his arrival in this strange time, unwilling or unable to ascend anywhere close to what it once was. Or, perhaps, he was simply delusional. He’d entertained that dark thought a few times too. Nonetheless, it answered him well enough tonight. He’d held his hope cautiously and sought only to use the power of morphosis in a clever manner. The wickedly sharp blade was now molded into a razor curve at the end, fashioned from longsword to hook sword with a hiss at it’s completion that left a glittering trail of sand on both snow and armament room floor. Dhruv crouched down, eyes up, to silently lay the pact weapon in the snow even as Talon was diving out of the way of the ice beast’s blow. One breath, two, and he bulleted out from the threshold for the creature in what should have been sheer suicide.

In the last moments he dropped, frost spraying from the downcut of his heels, to wheel a pistol out of its holster and fire up in an echoing clap of discharged caster shell for the beast’s core. Firelight caught on gold and shadow as Dhruv shoved the pistol into his belt, momentum still carrying him as he rolled out of the way of the stomp of huge frost foot and pushed back to his feet. One hand was thrown out and his pact weapon answered – later he would deny his sheer relief – by thrusting itself off the ground where he’d left it to whirl toward him. He caught the sword in his off-hand, swung it around so that the sword’s now-hooked end caught like a grappling on the beast’s knee, and doublehanded shoved himself backwards with all his strength.

He didn’t have wings, after all, so he meant to level the field.

[Talon]

T A L O N

Dhruv’s ploy was partially successful as the lumbering frost elemental stumbled. Its trunk-like leg was yanked forward causing it to tip forward just enough to find itself staring at the Hytori. A menacing icy face full of jagged teeth and crystalline features glared at Dhruv. Across its torso were various scorch marks and cracks from where the warrior’s caster shells had impacted. The ice however, seemed too thick to be fully penetrated by the shells released by the pistol. The crystal in its chest began to glow brighter as its opened its maw. Frosty mist gathered around its gaping mouth. With a rumbling growl akin to rocks grinding over each other, it released a ferocious howl laden with icy cold magic to freeze Dhruv in place.

---

Talon had to be impressed by Dhruv’s boldness. The Hytori leapt into the fray without hesitation, clearly making a rapid tactical assessment to bring the corrupted elemental down to his level. The move was a smart one. Absent the advantage of wings, the best strategy was to bring the elemental’s vulnerability closer to one’s level. He glanced over to see Aoren physically grappling with the elemental he was facing down, his form wreathed in his arche element of fire. The dragon and the elemental were neck and neck as they exchanged physical blows. It was in that brief moment where Talon was distracted by the spectacle of Kathar Avialae and elemental locked in martial combat that the elemental staring down Dhruv summoned its icy breath.

He saw the makings of the magical breath stirring just in time. Talon dove down, willing his aether into motion. He reached out with his kinetics, weaving together his own flux in order to enact Seeming. Bolting through the air, he reached for Dhruv, grabbing the man around the waist. As soon as he touched Dhruv, Talon teleported them both out of the path of the ice breath. The reprieve however, did not last long as the elemental moved its head and redirected its ice breath in their direction. Talon wrapped his wings around both himself and Dhruv, summoning an aura of intense fire in order to shield them both from the frigid breath. After a moment, Talon swept his wings outward, sending out a wave of fire that had the corrupted elemental ceasing its icy barrage and stepping back.

“I suppose that is one way to try and fell it.” He looked over Dhruv. “I will weaken its armor. You aim for the core.”

Talon’s form suddenly shimmered as two more of him stepped away from his main body. The mirror images of him took flight as Talon directed them to form a circle around the ice elemental. Weaving his aether through the simulacrum that he had conjured, Talon channeled his Rune of Elementalism. He raised his hands, the motion being copied by his simulacri. There was a rush of air as flames ignited in the space between Talon’s hands followed by the roar of an inferno being unleashed. Three beams of elemental fire slammed into the ice elemental from Talon and his two simulacri. The elemental roared, thrashing as it was blasted by the conjured fire. Its icy form began to melt, the thick ice encasing the crystal within its torso began dissolving.

Off Topic

Talon enacted the Kinetic technique of Seeming to close the distance between himself and Dhruv at a rapid pace. He then used Traversion to teleport them a short distance away. This was then followed by shielding them with Elementalism in an aura of fire to block the elemental’s ice-breath. He is now using Masquerade and channeling his aether across himself and his two conjured simulacri to hit the creature with concentrated beams of fire from three directions simultaneously.

[Dhruv]

When the frost beast gathered a deadly ice storm in its throat, moments away from erupting over Dhruv in what could only be certain death, the hytori tightened his grip on the sword hooked to the elemental’s ankle and swung up both feet to stomp his boots into the jagged knee joint. Ultimately, he shoved himself right into Talon as the availae came to his rescue and hastily released the hilt of his sword as magic once again folded space like an accordion and nothing less than a demigod hauled him right through it.

It was on the other side, there in the ring of fire summoned to thwart the blizzard winds, that Dhruv tightened his hand on Talon’s arm and clenched his teeth against the queasiness conjured by traversion. Someone unaccustomed to battle, to the swift shifts and rapid oscillations between push and shove, life and death, would not have been capable of acting so quickly; but Dhruv was. It took him only a few seconds to reorient himself in the protective blanket of Talon’s wings and by the time they swept out like expanding moons in a gust of billowing fire, Dhruv was flipping both pistols back into his hands. Gold eyes met grey with a cant of his chin to acquiesce and the pistols spun as he spun, a clockwise turn toward dark of noon while a triad of flames illuminated the night and the monstrous elemental at their convergence.

One eye squinted as Talon assaulted the creature’s armor and the ice surrounding the beast’s crystal began to melt beneath the heat. Dhruv silently marked the seconds and held steady, deadly in his patience. He failed to flinch at the scratching howls of the frost elemental, or at how the ground shuddered when it writhed. This man’s blood itself may as well have been ice for the manner in which he deliberately murdered a minute while steadily gathering aether and waiting for his chance.

As the last layer of ice began to slough off the elemental’s torso, Dhruv fired. First one pistol exploded, then the second, and in the echoing clap of discharge he brushed his aether across the magic armband fastened over the pulse of his left wrist and willed lightning itself to walk. Power activated by the borrowed bracelet shot out in the comet tail of the second caster shell with a banshee like whistle to hit the beast’s crystal heart in an explosion of light.