The Tangle from the heart of the universe

for @Astraeus

the tangle leaves something of a bitter taste in his mouth as he traverses carefully thru the thick thorn barbed vines; epitome of the territory’s namesake. an unfriendly and merciless labyrinth where each twist was a thorn at one’s throat. what happened to the unfortunate and unlucky bastards caught in the bowels of the naturemade maze are better left to the more superstitious. though he’s settled on stavanger bay — and it’s neighboring sentinels for hunting grounds being a territorial ass as he was — wintersbane knows that recruitment involved travel.

this wasn’t his first rodeo, nor attempt.

now, however, he is more ironclad in his determination; holding his goals close to his scarred chest so he was always reminded of why he sought to stake a claim upon these wilds.

the dawn light spreads a golden hue upon the deadly labyrinth; a witchtrick. in this favorable light the tangle doesn’t look half as menacing and he trudges forward, shrugging through spindly underbrush with the intention of clearing it. after all, he doubts he’ll find recruitment potential lurking within the maze.

sry i think my prose died, honored to be part of ironclan formation thread tho! <3<3

The starling departs from his roost by self-summons;
he was between a boy and man and a hard place. His activity was reduced to grunts, wry quips and rabbitshy glances. He had intended with the possibility of fulfillment that a short jaunt among the polylith  would serve to ease the bile nestled in the path of this throat. No healing salve or languorous waltz would heal the scorched engravements over his heart, however! 

The sight of Wintersbane gave face to the bygone, better days he'd thought were lost when he'd awoke anew. He waited for the gelid behemoth to speak first.

footfalls, lighter than his but still notable upon the coldearth, drawing wintersbane’s attention and with it splicing polar gaze thru thorny vines; seeking, guiding as a lighthouses’ fire dancing upon raging sea.

the face, scarflesh over verdant eye; no longer of the mewling cub abandoned to the cold and harshstone of birthden within the sawtooth. a young man and yet… and yet it is still the same. guilt, it seizes within the tundrian’s chest, constricting as tight as if the boy were of his own loins.

as if he were his blood just as much as quellcrist — for he felt the same nagging guilt when he first came upon his daughter, spritely and young and lost —

astraeus?

He felt useless, elfin;
like a child all over again. Then maybe...he'd appreciate an undoing. He was lunging on that animal-skin couch where the material turns different shades depending which way you swept your frictioned hand, watching his modern morning cartoons before Wintersbane had come along switches to the old 1980s feature of things he doesn't want to acknowledge. 

He whispers the name of Astraeus, but from the physical and mental undoings he'd underwent that gloaming he might as well been mistaken.
(i don't know you, i don't! i don't!)
And so strides step afore of the gelid 'goyle, poised and seething and frothing with unbidden melancholy, “Who gave you my name?”

though reaction from the boy — seething — strikes hard at the chest of the would-be ironking, wintersbane is quick to remind himself it's not entirely unwarranted. the boy had been young(er) last wintersbane had spent any sort of time with him, let alone actually been apart of sagtannet. without any way to feed the boy while he was still suckling had left wintersbane at wylla's mercy and in the end, wintersbane assume(d) that a family unit was better than a single-father.

especially given wintersbane's penchant for trouble.

it could be argued he did a well enough job with quellcrist he couldn't really take full credit for her, could he?

i found you after your mother abandoned you upon her birthing den in sawtooth. it's wintersbane. he does not mean to speak the terms of abandonment with such callousness or lightness but it is what it is and largely in the past now. for wintersbane, there was no sense in dancing 'round it.

The resonance of the unseelie's voice makes him tremble at the words;
and back there he was, standing fidget-fingered at the threshold of remembrance. Ghost-white knuckles aquiver as they frightfully clasped onto the doorknob and a sign that read: unwanted and uncalled for: keep out (or come in if you are). A crack in the door, a crack in the stoneheart'd façade, his mother who could be described as a medley of balsamroot, moonshine and the occasional chant Rhaesuialian limericks & lullabies — abandoned you.

( and if he knew, he wished she could sung those songs to him! )

If Astraeus knew about tall tales of mandrake roots and changelings, he would have assumed the maiden figured he was a doppelgänger of the image of the real child she'd wanted, labored, bled and wept for. She'd probably wept harder when she was faced with the gangly chaos-attracting fetus that was Astraeus. 

A a visible and mental flinch from his words, “I don't want to talk about that, then!,” the boy exclaims overlapping Winterbane's own, now stepping back from the once-montane farer. Often locked lips forcing more speech then 'get out' and 'go away' and 'i hate you' force the enquiry: “why are you hardly on the mountain?”

clearly, the abandonment of his mother is a sore spot for the boy; understandable ...if it doesn't also raise the question in a small part of the tundrian's mind of why. surely, the adolescent had been too young — little more than a mewling newborn still not even weaned — to have even remembered her. nevertheless; wintersbane concedes to the boy's wishes. okay, okay. wintersbane says; whiskey-steeped baritone lowered. meant to assure, to calm.

things happened. i was injured severely and i had to spend time out of these wilds to recover from. the bear attack. the plummet into the ocean. the being spit out on some foreign lands. the truth but something that wintersbane does not hold onto. he will not endlessly explain himself. was he not a champion of 'the past was the past and that is where it should stay'?

when i tried to return to sagtannet, wylla turned me away. for good reason, even if it left a creator's sting that would not entirely fade. he could've tried again when he took thade back to them but ...he hadn't escorted thade back to sagtannet to make himself a hero or try to win favor. he'd done it for the boy; nothing else.

so now, wintersbane draws. i'm starting anew.

The salt king's shushing makes him want to twitch his eyebrows in a scowl but says nothing of it. He wants to self-efface then and there, but he listens to the unseelie's later days of yore, suppsedly nodding in understanding. If Wintersbane had told him about his findings concerning Thade and shepherding the boy home, he would have assumed anything but the man not doing it out of sycophantic intent. How cynical he was made to be!  

“...Start anew? How can you? People don't change, they can't,” it may roll off as in insult or the misunderstandings of puberty-less boy, and maybe its both. He does not understand how finding asylum with slums by the sea could be his own opus magnum. 

“Let's just go home now.”

wc: 127
edit: retiring this thread since he's inactive <3 lmk if pp isnt alright

Wintersbane tells him he doesn't understand, and tells him of his designs for the bay. Astraeus takes interests in the man's descriptions of the terrain, but decides against going with him. HE turns tail back to the sawtooth-specimen.