Arma. [Seven]

[Abalia]

His cheeky response caught her off guard, and Abalia's resolve not to glance back at him faded in the face of it. Her head swiveled around so that she could stare at him, trying to discern his meaning from his expression. The click of his feet upon the flagstone resounded half a dozen times in this silence, before at last it was shattered by her laughter. "Nice," she conceded faintly. It was a good thing, she thought, to be able to laugh at oneself. Faults were the greatest weakness a being had, in her estimation, and if you fretted over them or tried to hide them then they ultimately became weapons in the hands of your enemies. If you were so in tune with your own wretched existence that you laughed at your own imperfections, then what could another use against you? "I think it's cute," she went on to surmise, perhaps more tragic for Seven than hurling insults might have been. Because she clearly meant it. "Symenestra are beautiful. I think so. But, I guess not everyone does. You kind of... make it prettier. More palatable, maybe. For ordinary people." Abalia wasn't ordinary people. She loved the dark claws that curled the ends of Laszlo's fingers, the pallor of his skin, those intimidating fangs that hovered behind his smile. She'd invested a great deal of thought into which was more beautiful; his night time form, with arresting eyes and that dark hair, or in the day, when he was a surreal and beautiful child of Syna. The fact that there was even a moment of competition there might have suggested something about Abalia. "Do you still have venom? Do you eat like them?" If it was a sensitive topic for Seven, Abalia missed all social cues and was steamrolling through a conversation that was as much to sate her curiosity as anything else. And, blessedly, they weren't talking about her or Roxanne anymore.

[Seven Xu]

“Prettier. Palatable.” Seven mulled over the words, over Abalia. Had she called him cute? Gods, even her laughter was grating. His nostrils flared, and he relieved an itch on the end of his nose with a pocket-warmed fingertip.

Of course, that was not the last question the girl intended to ask him. Seven felt as if his game had been flipped on its side, its pieces scattered and reformed to favor of a charismatic brunette and her dog. “I … do,” hesitation lingered between his lips; a finger hovered over his face, drifted to his upper lip, and fingered the caustic tip of one juvenile fang. “It’s more palatable, too.”

He immediately grimaced at his choice of words. His hand dropped.

“I can’t eat meat,” A pause, “Or too much of anything, really. Call it a weak stomach, or weak venom, or both.”

Seven dodged another puddle. “It was raining here,” he noted, grasping for a route away from fangs and venom, away from blood mixed and spat out and mixed again. However, curiosity was an enticing slattern, and she towed him back in. Seven sucked in his bottom lip and stole a sidelong glance at Abalia, after having caught up to her with a few long and awkward strides. He was graceful, until he began to calculate his movements, and threw the passive elegance he seemed so unaware of to the wind.

“Are you into Symenestra, or something? They’ll only end up killing you, you know.” Again, some offer, some motive seemed to linger beyond the reaches of his intentions; Seven sighed, and waved his hand dismissively. “Laszlo’s probably fine. He’s as much a Widow as any troupe performer dressed in motley with a white-painted face.” He shrugged curiosity’s embrace, his hand fell limp at his side. “I’ve had run-ins with his kind, though. Two-faced things, Ethaefal.”

[Abalia]

"Not on purpose," Abalia quipped quickly, the image of Laszlo's two faces stuck in her mind's eye. The witty choice of words made her smile a little, even as the dog wound between her legs and tripped up her steps. He clearly wanted her to take a left at the fork they approached, and Issima obliged without a thought. The easiest way to spot a newcomer to Alvadas was as simple as observing them as they moved around the city. Every street, every intersection presented a terrible new choice and possibility, and they often stood for extended periods of time considering. Abalia didn't seem to care where her feet fell, though she was far too much a native of Alvadas for that to be true. She knew the full scope of Ionu's tricks. "I knew one, once. He was..." There was a pregnant pause, the scuttle of a pebble along the path before them. "Mmm, I cared about him. A lot. And Symenestra are so graceful and tragic and... beautiful? I'm repeating myself. Anyway. He wanted me to go away with him. And I might have, except for Roxxie. We'd been together forever, you know? Roxxie and me. And in Alvadas you can't trust your own shadow, sometimes. Having someone close like that, someone you can count on, that isn't something you can just throw away. I couldn't leave her here, all alone. So I didn't go. And he left." Abalia blinked at the dog, who turned big eyes upwards to her. She peered up at Seven as if he had somehow coerced her into revealing so much personal information. There was a naivety about her confession, though, a certain sense of incompletion to the story. As if Abalia was completely unaware of the fate that awaited her, had she gone. Whether Seven picked up on it or not, the human barreled on. "Anyway. I think it's coincidental that Laz spends half his time looking like one, and that I think he's alright." And kind of gorgeous, night or day. Funny, in his own way. Clever, too. Stubborn, in a way that Abalia liked because it challenged her and kept things from ever being boring. And when he smiled...? Nevermind his willingness to comfort her over Roxanne, now that she was all alone in the world. Yes, Abalia certainly thought Laszlo was alright. "How do you know him, anyway?" She'd heard a vague sentence or two about it from Laszlo, but a point of focus would be good right about now, before she sank into a realm of feminine ridiculousness. Thank god Seven couldn't read her mind.

[Seven Xu]

“Chance,” Seven shrugged, as if the word was sufficient as any explanation for how he knew the Synaborn. “We ran into each other, at an inn, or, on a street; I can’t remember, to be honest. It doesn’t matter.”

Curious reds swept Abalia’s face again. “So, Rox—” Seven caught himself, refusing to voice the endearing nickname of a dead girl, “Roxxane saved your life,” he muttered, “He probably wasn’t as fond of your face, as he was of your womb.”

Seven broke their mutual stare, trying to find interest in the carved embellishments of a three-story building’s eaves. “False or not, there’s always a chance Laszlo’s seed could leave you a bloody husk, but I doubt he would ever intend to, like this other,” he shrugged, trying his best to pretend the possibility did not bother him. “I assume you don’t know how important you were to him, or you wouldn’t speak so kindly of a Harvester, or be so eager to bed another spider.”

The halfblood found himself stretching to step over a river of dirty water that occupied a dip in the cobblestone street. He landed on the ball of his glass-wrecked foot, grunted, and turned his offended stare on the torrent of water.

“I’m sorry.” He sucked in his bottom lip, let two sharp points glide along fleshy pink, and released it, glistening with spittle and venom. There was a pause, and he sought to fill it with a short, bitter laugh. “Far be it from me to lecture you on dangerous lovers.”

[Abalia]

Abalia's brow furrowed in consternation as she listened, stepping along the pocked ground beneath them with a thoughtless dexterity. She had no idea what Seven was blathering on about, really, though it sounded rather important. She was loathe to display her ignorance so bald faced, though, and so she inclined her head and shrugged one smooth shoulder when he had finished, his mirthless laugh filling the distance between them. With her delicate chin tipped upwards, the win played havoc in her dark hair and whipped the silken strands about the girlish features that made her seem so young, sometimes. "Roxxie saved me, yes," she smiled, the fondness that played upon those lips tempered with a sadness she wouldn't speak aloud. "From myself, maybe. It's strange to exist without a purpose, you know? As soon as I was old enough to be on my own, I was," she continued, with no intent to expound upon her parentage or the details of her upbringing. Whatever it was, it mustn't have been pleasant, for the clouds that temporarily darkened her bright eyes. "And there were others. More kids than you'd imagine, surviving in Ionu's playground. I took care of some of the younger ones, made sure our bellies weren't always s'empty, that they weren't sleeping in the rain. But that's..." Abalia twisted her lips up in a thoughtful purse, trying to think of how to express what she meant. "Not the same. Not the same as someone who depends on you because they love you, and is there for you too. Life kind of becomes more than surviving then, y'know?" Abalia stooped low to pick up a miza that lay in their path. She turned it over several times in her palm, then tossed it over her shoulder as if it were worthless, despite the heavy clang it made as it fell to the ground. As they walked, more and more of them appeared beneath their feet, but Abalia ignored them. What this had to do with Laszlo as a harvester went unsaid. Abalia merely picked along with that damn dog at her heels, drifting into her own thoughts. Seven was awkward and strange to the Alvad but, then, that was precisely the sort of company she was accustomed to in such a city. She was somehow at ease with him because of it.

[Seven Xu]

“Charming,” Seven murmured. His eyes settled on his palms when they grew weary of serpentine streets and faceless buildings. It was getting hard to remain detached from a girl so intent on telling her life’s story; tuning out voices on the other hand had never been hard, for Seven. The cobblestones beneath his feet became a nonsensical grey blur, and his fingertips itched. No gridelin shimmer would grace them, without purpose and a clear head, so his hands closed and dropped to his sides in unspoken defeat.

He rejoined the conversation as Abalia began to speak of love—love, or survival, he couldn’t be sure. “Dependence more often begets love,” he shrugged, kicking at the growing tide of gold-and-silver rims beneath his boots. “At least, from what I can tell.”

Seven sniffed, brushed the tip of his nose with the back of his thumb, and turned his attention back to the stretch of unfamiliar brick and mortar. He hoped a strip of black would appear, and his aching feet could rest beneath a tiled ceiling. The coins between his ankles were beginning to wear on him, as the bone-grinding cold was wearing on him.

“I’m really sorry you lost her,” his voice nearly cracked. He cleared his throat. “I’ve never lost something I loved, as much as you seem to love that Kelvic.” Would he dwell as long if Palla disappeared, had her throat cut open and her blood smeared on white sheets? He exhaled, drove his fingers into the collection of pitch-colored tresses behind one ear, and probed his mind for some middle ground, rather than a vantage to judge from. “I’ve had a loved one hurt. This woman, a reimancer—I offended her, and she thought it necessary to slice his hands open. He’s still got the scars from it.”

That hand fell, and offered its upturned palm to Abalia, where a dark line traced the longest crease in his palm. A breath of a laugh escaped him. “For what it’s worth, I made her marks mean nothing to her, and everything to us.”

[Abalia]

Abalia seemed to accept his condolences with a silent sort of gratitude. She didn't mean to keep harping on it, but grief changes a person, and she found that sometimes she couldn't help it. When he related as best he could, and showed her his palm, she reached out to trace that line. Connecting with his pain, too. Her fingertip was warm, feather-light. She smiled up at him, then dropped her hand. "Magic," she murmured, with an exaggerated shudder. "I think I'm far too plain to appreciate it. I mean, I love Alvadas. It just seems unnerving when a person can hold such power in their hands. People misuse it so often." Abalia didn't define misuse. After all, if she possessed a magic that made her a better thief, she'd certainly employ it. Morals weren't exactly involved here, unless it was a scale of morality that she had invented entirely on her own and wasn't altogether conscious of. And, perhaps that was her own human ignorance deployed, too. Either way, Abalia had an unassuming way of saying things that left little room for egotism or anything of the sort to inflate her words to something she did not mean. She was quite simply, for whatever reason, musing over different facets of life with the strange mixed blood at her side. "Do you have magic?"

[Seven Xu]

Abalia’s touch lingered on his palm. Four fingers raced to rub it away, and he thought, for a second, he glimpsed the ambling shadow of familiar night vermin out of the corner of his eye. But, when he turned to chase it down, it had gone. “Of course they do,” he muttered, lifting his chin to once again scan for a familiar bar’s face. “Even the Gods misuse magic.”

With Abalia’s question, the streets drained of coin, as if some force below them was gathering them up beneath the very stones they walked on; for a moment, the halfblood seemed unsure of what to do with his own feet, skirting coins that were singing a chorus of resounding tinkles every time one slipped through the cracks. When he found his stride again, he could not look the girl in the eyes.

“Me? No.” Though he had meant to say yes, to tell the truth of his ghost-given talents, his tongue had stopped him. Seven made a face, and continued, “I wouldn’t know where to start.” At least that wasn’t a total fallacy; it took the dearly departed to take control of his body and force the djed from him, before he’d wrapped his mind around the concept. “When I came to this place, I half-expected everyone to be some sort of entertainer, or magician,” Seven shrugged, “I haven’t met a single juggler or fire-eater yet. It’s disappointing, really; can you eat fire?”

His sideward gaze was punctuated by a crooked smile.

[Mirage]

The Truth Within the Reality Abalina : XP Awarded Investigation: 3 Philosophy: 1 Lores Awarded Seven: Can't Eat Meat Seven : XP Awarded Investigation: 2 Philosophy: 1 Rhetoric: 2 Lores Awarded N/A The Truth Hidden by a Mirage : Loved the thread, and it flowed so well! I have to say I loved Seven's remark about Laszlo's two faces haha. It was beautifully done, and as always I am impressed with your writing