after murmuring with his kill-brother, the kapitan, about the state of elysium's tenuous leadership, a curious warden ventured down from his alpine realm, and began to lurk over the peace-kingdom's doorstep. by design he went uninterrupted for several hours - careful to remain upwind, distant, and low - as he spied on the placid winterkeep; a willow garden that seemed undisturbed and repellent to the king-sinister that loomed as ominously as an oncoming storm.
it was moondark and dead-still when he descended the ridge and finally approached their borders. the eventide weather was cold enough that his breath billowed like factory steam as he churned down the stone-ribbed path, but the wind had died down almost to nothing, and the sky overhead looked frozen in grayscale. stigmata padded up to their scent-wall in a brazen, military sway, and he bowed his head to drink in the cologne of the supposed elysium superiors.
As waif-like as a haunting ghost, the woman wove between the massive trunks and silken tendrils of the willows — she did not haunt aimlessly. Instead, the sylph had become the invisible eidolon of the man who approached the entrance to Elysium late at night, and whom she had only stumbled across by chance. In the dead of night, Olive wondered what his intentions might be.
She had been spending more and more time around the borders, as small as the entrance to the willowed outcrop was — the high walls of the sanctuary kept its inhabitants warm and safe, but at times became stifling to the woman who had once been a scout. Time and wife/motherhood had changed her circumstances, but her inclination to wander hadn’t changed in the slightest. Olive allowed herself to wander to the limit of her territory and rarely ever farther; there was nothing that needed her out there, but everything that needed her within. Duty kept her tied to one place, but Olive indulged in any small way that she could.
One of those ways was star speaking, an activity which had begun to escape her after the frenetic energy of moving Elysium and then taking in an influx of wolves for the winter; but once she revisited the ceremony, Olive folded back into it easily. With a clear heart and a clear mind she spoke to her gods, and when she did not want to scale the cliffs to do so, she came to Elysium’s threshold. The trees here were thinner and more sparse, and afforded a better view of the mother moon when it rose highest in its sky. That was how she had found the strange man upon her doorstep.
The man might be surprised to know that the concept of superiors amongst Elysium was a silly one — that the sanctuary acted with an “all for one and one for all” mentality, and to intrinsically support such an idea, every value of theirs repelled any sense of competition whatsoever — so it was not as a council member that Olive approached, but as a simple wolf, wishing that the beauty of this place might persist for ever longer. If this thief in the night wished to do them harm, or to glean covert information, it had now become her duty to intercept him. “Do you come in peace?” she spoke assuredly, coming into view, a woman upon her own ground.
“It is too beautiful a night for strife.”
stigmata looked up at the crunch of snow and frozen earth; his posture seizing briefly with the instinctive dread of having been caught sneaking. but the stiffening of his hackles melted flat again just as quickly - like the last flutter of a bird's wing as it lands - and the iron wraith pricked his ears dourly towards her silk-washed voice, not bothering to come up with an excuse for himself.
"i come as i come," he told her with a tongue cold and glittering - watching the slim figure closely as she emerged from the willow-cast shadows. "though my idea of peace and yours seem to differ." he fell eerily still as the delicate she-wolf stepped into a moonbow - sent into a mental spiral as each of her features came together piece by painfully beautiful piece: smooth heather fur, sage-green eyes, and a porcelain figure.
mother?
he blinked. then rolled his shoulders back and stood up straighter, numbing his expression. "but fear not. i do not lurk to cause you ill. i just prefer to know my neighbors," the basilisk sighed; "before they know me."
Though the strange man had been surveying her lands for quite some time before now, Olive had been the first to see him, before even he saw her — and it afforded the shakti woman a moment, just a brief second or two, to survey the brute in his natural state, without frill or pomp or any layer of superficiality that he might use when in the presence of another. Olive saw him, a large brute with salt and pepper pelage, at the same time both moondrenched and eerily shadowed, but she could not read him.
He offered no apologies, and so far, no introduction — so little that was useful to her. The shrouded sylph did not let any distaste register upon her pointed visage; an endeavor which the darkness surely made easier. It immediately made her nervous to have a creature ambushing the sanctuary in the night, especially one as cocksure as he, even if he was only on some forlorn reconnaissance mission. What could he ever need to know that he couldn’t ask her, in the bright light of day?
With the moon hanging heavy in the sky, nearly full and late in the month, the druid felt emboldened.“If you’re sure that our ideas of peace differ, then you must already know something about us, no?” she questioned gently, placing her willowed forelegs together as would a soldier standing at guard, delicate paws slightly turned out at the ankle. Olive let a smile grace her features in place of something more distant, though her mind was filled with worries and something more distant might have been appropriate.
“However, I do not know you, so you have succeeded and I must congratulate you….” her eyes, heavy-lidded and forest green, fell to survey their surroundings. He appeared to be alone. “but I do still question the intentions of the man who stalks a land of women and children in the night.”
"i know a few things," he admitted nonchalantly - ambiguously - then let his continued silence punctuate the extent of his exposition. he was far too busy scrutinizing her with intently his dull, hawkish gaze, trying to find fault or ugliness, and failing woefully to disassociate the personal appearance of this stranger with the memories she elicited within him. it was her voice that would bring the iron liege from his moon-bound reverie each time, and as she confessed her suspicions to the malingering shade, he was able to maintain his typical aloofness when probed for a response.
he was quiet for a long moment, his gaze set to that eternal flicker of calculation he owned, and then he sighed. "is that all there is here?" the smokehound cocked his head slightly, and flashed her the devil's look - an expression impassive and yet prying. teasing the bird's pretty feathers, to see what she would do.
The moment of silence lingered, unassisted by Olive’s stowed tongue, and in the absence of information — or any sort of color or detail, he played his cards so close to his chest — her imagination began to fill in the blanks. At first she imagined him to be your average, goodnatured fellow; a dime a dozen, as they were. The sylph almost immediately knew this to not be true, for the picture in her mind did not match the picture in front of her, so she thought of him as the opposite. A war monger, bloodthirsty and seeking to ruin her sanctity here. She did not know which one frightened her more.
Olive bit her lip as the stranger began his subtle inquisition. She was not afraid to tell him the truth of things, for most others respected the sanctity of this place, and the shakti woman had to trust that the past’s patterns would also speak for the future. Olive also believed that Elysium’s values and motives stood up to even the harshest of criticisms, so without hesitance she gave comment. “No…” came her soft whisper.
Oh, but how to convey the godliness of the willows? The woman returned his discerning eye, and continued in a slow easy tone. “This is a place where the sick can convalesce, where children can grow safely, where the tired can regain strength and where the elderly can rest on their laurels.” The woman then turned her finespun muzzle to the canopy above them — only a few snowflakes made it through the thick layer of willow branches.They drifted down and danced with the weeping branches, more of a true delight than anything. “The winter does not touch us here.” she commented, almost to no one. “See?”
Brought back to reality, Olive raised a questioning eyebrow at the silvered warrior. “Unfortunately, we are not the fittest of fare to sate the hunger of you and your hounds.” A small smile hinted at the jocundity of it. “The rest of your group. Where… are they?”
no.
the breath tracked a shiver down the serpent's long spine, and a shudder of his fur sent a powder of snowdust falling from his murkwood pelage. stigmata glanced away, as if to peruse the truthfulness of her words that followed, but he used the aside just as much to steady his thoughts. it was haunting - to see his dead mother here - and feel that the place she now guarded was heaven. she could not have gone to hell, he thought, where all sandraudiga's surely belonged; she had not been one of them. only sucked into their lives and killed because of it. and though he could not speak of it, he would never forget the day.
his swordsilver eyes returned to her, noting how quickly she wanted to dismiss that diaspora could find anything filling within elysium's claim. at this, the gaze of the hound flashed, and a knowing expression - sly, clever, and cruel - disputed the claim without speaking a word. she asked where they were, but he did not answer. "this is a place for the children and the sickly, you say?" he drawled instead, snake-tongue flickering.
"and what protects such a realm of nurturing and healing, i wonder? i mean, given its choice location, i can imagine these willows have... suitors." she herself had boasted of the areas merits. what was to stop a wolf like him, and others like him, from simply taking it from them?
His eyes flashed and danced in a way that left the woman of the willows unsettled. It felt as if she had spoken so many words, and he so few, yet his position felt more compelling and almost made her question the placement of her values. It was true, Elysium hadn’t stood up to much contest since its inception, and it allowed Olive and her Seraphim to persist in a type of ignorant bliss. But, the willows had enough bounty within to sate many hungers; for almost anything that one could hunger for. What was preventing anyone to wrest it from her grasp, after so long?
The answer, as always, was obvious and danced on the tip of her tongue. “The Gods,” she purred, knowing the certainty of that. It was the only thing that made sense, otherwise, this veritable Eden would not be allowed to persist in the world that upwardly propelled evil as it did. Yet here Elysium was, thriving amongst a bleak season, not only fulfilling it’s purpose but throwing parties and working the create the next generation of healers. It was clearly protected by some otherworldly power, and the druid trusted that the man would be able to see it after she said it so.
Olive perked her tail slightly to show this man that there were certain unalienable rights a woman had upon her land, and one of those was not to be questioned by ghouls in the night. “The Gods will always watch over those who choose to spread light, rather than darkness.” Could he take the willows for himself, if that is what he truly sought? Probably, but he wouldn’t — therein lied the unexplainable divinity of it all — so the man best watch his tongue and his thinly-veiled suggestions.
at the mention of gods - of powers beyond himself - stigmata's smokeburned hackles gave a small, defiant ripple and his tail lashed to suppress the contempt he felt for the concept of worshiping an unseen entity. was he not a god? did he not lord over the deer and the rabbits and all the other things deathly shy of his teeth? was he not a nail-driving hammer to building new life? could he not bring grave ruin to her physically - tangibly - in this very instant? but to her, he was just mortal; flesh, and blood, and as fallible as the rest of wolfkind. not capable of thing the things nature and weather would have her behold.
another she-wolf he did not think could ever understand him, and though the general could not fault her for this, he felt a stirring in his chest to defy the decision his war-wheel of thoughts had made. idly he couldn't help but wonder if it were a kind of whispering godspeak, crippling his own imperialism while faced with the druid's contention. his gaze softened, if it could.
"they must pity you," he expressed quietly, in a tone that did not seem to make fun of her, but could be mistaken as such; "for tirelessly trying to escape the darkness into which you were born, and will inevitably return to. such dedication indeed warrants reward, but darkness is all we have in the end, my lady. it is best we prepare to embrace it." and since he was of the mind that darkness had been there long before the light, he also thought that it would be here long after, no matter how brightly the things that brought light could have once shined to stave it.
the wolf's face turned suddenly cheeky. "but i am biased - just a devil in the night. i want for nothing more than to lead you astray and call you one of my own." he shifted on his feet, giving his long body a slow cobra-sway before reclining neatly on his haunches - compelled mysteriously into an unrecognizable pose of vulnerability for the tactician. "one of diaspora."
There was much going on behind the man’s hard exterior, that was certain. Olive felt the storm of emotions that brewed within the man, a clashing inside him; the empath felt it from him as authentically as she felt her own emotions [though because of practice and prayer, she could now easily separate the two]. She found his stoic exterior in spite of his unease to be unsettling, and because of it, her heart beat a little faster and blood slipped through her body a little bit looser.
The shrouded druid did not particularly like his suggestions about the dark nature of absolutely everything, and she knew him to be inherently wrong, so Olive let his comments drip off of her as if they were fat dew drops, falling from leaves. It was clear that he was trying to rile and bother her, and if Olive had been younger, she might have let him ruffle her feathers — but the Olive of today valued grace above all else, and sought to see it through here.
She regarded him hotly, her demeanor changed somewhat. She no longer thought of him as a threat to the sanctuary; more like unexpected entertainment, or a midnight’s reverie. Due to the hour, Olive did not worry about being found by anyone from Elysium either. Knowing all of this, the sylph felt considerably looser in this interaction. “Then you are a devil indeed,” was the only acknowledgement she gave his ideas on darkness.
and when he questioned her loyalty in a way that made her cheeks flushed, Olive pulled back as if controlled by reins and a little rider on her back. Wholeheartedly, she sought to teach him a thing or two about her place amongst the willows; heaven; elysium, of stark contrast to Diaspora. “I am not so easily led astray, you serpent — you…” but, under his microscope, she suddenly found it hard to put into words.
stigmata could see indigence rising around her like smoke, and though her poise remained intact, the tactician was able to tell he had provoked her. it was almost delightful to see her light pinch sharply, as if to fashion a weapon from it. her words intrigued him, letting him know he could get under her skin; willing him to find out just how deep he could burrow.
it was only then did he find himself fulfilled by this encounter - suddenly replete with a sadistic kind of joy - and it would be this same elation, this magnetism of opposites that would urge him unconsciously to seek her again.
"alas, i only wish to lure you away, my lady. i have no reasonable confidence i could do so. not to you," he mused cryptically.
"but i see we have already resorted to name calling," the wolf smirked.
"meaning either there is room to corrupt you yet... or you just detest me that much." he looked her up and down, as if trying to gauge the more likely reason, but then stigmata simply shrugged and rose almost elegantly to his feet.
"one day, i shall determine which it is," he announced with an unceremonious bow and a subsequently swift, stern-legged exit.
this post be poo and i am REGRET lol Dx
Still as he spoke, Olive did not much know the right way to react to this man and his many words. They way he probed into her life was completely unbidden — now he did so quite blatantly, not even bothering to hide it. She no longer feared for Elysium, but a small part of her feared for herself, and the misted druid almost wished he might leave so that she can drift back into her willows and disperse amongst the branches.
She got her wish, and the man left as quickly as he came, still nameless except for that of the wolves he led. Diaspora. For several lengthy moments, Olive remained in her place upon the edge of the woods and let her gaze linger upon the place the man once stood, vivified by the frenetic energy left in his wake. Then the woman returned to the side of her wife, and never spoke of this meeting to another soul.