2017-07-09: A Blade Dance Between the Fallen
- Log: A Blade Dance Between the Fallen
- Cast: Cassidy Cain, Isiris Shango'Ra
- Where: Hilton, Kingdom of Lacour
- Date: July 9, 2017
- Summary: Amidst the revels generated by the much-celebrated Tournament of Arms in the Kingdom of Lacour, Cassidy Cain follows a curious young woman that dovetails directly into a deadly encounter with a current or former Solarian special operative, and right into the arms of a destiny that Isiris is determined to make her realize.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
In many ways, Lacour is aptly named.
At least for her - ten years on the surface, a decade perfecting her current craft while determined to kick the ashes of her old life into the winds, have seen her visit many places and immerse herself in various cultures, but for all of her travels, the kingdom remains the only true home that she has ever known. While she could say that she hardly remembers the last time she has stepped foot within its borders, it would yet be another fabrication, as she is a creature blessed and cursed with a propensity for long and detailed recollection. Situated now in the midst of the capital's current spate of revels, it is just as colorful as she remembers.
The night market is teeming with activity; businesses are open longer in an effort to cater to the needs of participants, merchants and exiles alike, the air thick with smoke and the scent of sweat, cigarettes and cooking meat, rising as if to reach the white-blue streamers of light emanating from Filgaia's two moons. The representatives of the local royalty have been quick to express their solidarity with their recently beleaguered southron brethren, but even the blind can sense just how much the economy was booming, putting truth to the old addage that one man's misfortune is another man's treasure. The demands of Commerce, ranging from the truly legitimate to the downright criminal enterprises, in the last several days, have been constant and sleepless.
This means that in spite of the late hour, foot traffic is just as persistent as during the daytime hours, though while those with more mundane and civilian lives have returned home to spend the last minutes of the day with their families, those without them fill the streets. The Midnight Window, she had been told before, was the time for rogues and ne'erdowells, and while she knows that they operate all hours, the evening has always been their domain.
Ghosts of a different nature fill every shadowed alley; in corners and shopfronts, faded spectres of memory that slip and out of brick walls and cobblestoned walks. As the tall slender blonde meanders directionless through familiar avenues, they linger just at her periphery - remembered wounds and old regrets pulse dully somewhere within her ribcage but despite all these attempts to keep her personal mausoleum sealed tightly shut, the slight smile on the corners of her mouth remains. There is always a specific sort of heartbreak associated with every delayed homecoming, but there is pleasure too, and she has learned that she is absolutely incapable of enjoying it without some degree of unadulterated suffering. It had to be that way for years, living here - Hilton, to be precise. It would forever be a city of lost and broken things.
Cassidy Cain, Lacour's prodigal daughter, stops in front of the Hammer and Anvil, falling within the shadows of its worn wooden awning, slipping a cigarette between her lips and lighting it up with her silver lighter; a well loved thing, inlaid with its share of scratches, hints of her tumultuous life embedded in its plating, all around the delicate and detailed engraving of a snake eating its own tail, its eyes set with two tiny sapphires. Embers glow at her deep inhale, cheeks hollowing out around the taste of pleasant toxicity and illuminating her pale features momentarily in sharp relief, cut and defined further by the darker fringes of the evening. The live flame sets the gold flecks within her emerald irises alight, glinting from underneath lowered lashes.
A pair stumbles out from somewhere behind her, the tavern's doors swinging shut with a bang. A young man and woman, both who look familiar to her, cheeks flushed with the early onsent of inebriation and smiles plastered on their faces. They share a fumbling kiss, and one that draws some amusement from the woman's own expression, before the boy pulls away and notices her standing there.
"M-miss Cassidy!" he blurts out; he has the good grace to look embarrassed. "I didn't think I'd see you so soon!"
"Benjamin," Cassidy greets around her cigarette, lips curling upwards in a smile. "Leese." To the redhaired woman in her arms. "I take it your new careers as professional gamblers are going well."
"Well, we're not there yet," Leese pipes up with a laugh. "But give us time and we might just become good enough to leave honest living behind! Thank you so much for all your help the other day."
"Though..." Benjamin scrunches his brows. "If you know this much about the bookie rings here....why don't you play?"
The pale-tressed woman inclines her head at that; her visible amusement grows. "Ach, luvs," she says with a laugh and a loose gesture with a pale hand. "Who says I'm nae?"
She winks at the pair, before pivoting to step back into the market. "Have a good one, lad, lass. Dinnae see much of a reason not tae enjoy your youth, ay?"
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
They say that they will crown the World's Strongest Warrior here.
With the sudden influx of customs to the kingdom, given the tournament and the recent destruction in neighboring Adlehyde, it is not particularly difficult for a man to find his way inside the nation's borders without attention being drawn. The idea of it... 'World's Greatest Warrior..' that such a title could be endowed was mystifying to him. "The theatre of men's things themselves," a voice chatters beside him.
"Aa," 'Ra replies.
"Glory is just, one of those things, isn't it? Men die for it every day. But it doesn't make them ... real, does it? It doesn't make them.. coalescent. Right?" The harsh voice flickers, taking on a hollow octave in his ear. He does not blink. "Aa," he repeats, in distracted agreement.
"You're so objectionable when you're like this," the voice complains.
A hood is pulled over his head, stuffing his hair into the black, and leaving only shining, piercing blue eyes to stare out from the dark. The young man stands atop the gable of a weapons shop, whose proprietor recently had the good fortune of being sold some relatively well to-do ARMS. Of course, it's not being advertised, these things being of lower popularity in Lacour compared to the exquisite smithing work the kingdom puts out. Rarity and secrecy equal value, and the proprietor was rather shrewd in letting word of mouth do the trick for him. Consequently, several men of some note had frequented the shop today. "It's a shame that none of them were strong enough," the voice comments. "They didn't have the heart. Did they?"
"Aa."
The crow stretches its leg on the former militant's shoulder, wings draining off the spare smoke as it flexes each in turn, each appendage ruffling indistinct, rippling feathers. The man in the grey coat watches the people mill about below, the crow's capricious blue eyes flashing in the light as it turns to look at him again, head temporarily splitting off into a second head as it does so.
"You need to find one soon, don't you? Coalescence is hard to come by," the crow comments.
"Hey. Is that why you're using...her?"
It's the only statement the man elects not to respond to.
Just as Cassidy turns, she will find herself almost slamming into a young lady as she passes through the night market, hurried steps taking her at something a little faster than a stroll, a little slower than a jog. "Oof," the whip-thin girl comments. "S..sorry," she apologizes, before quickly moving to break back into the crowd and disappear with them. That would have been the end of it, a chance meeting, with not so much as a name to put to it, before it passes. There's no interest in it, no point in thinking overmuch to it.
Except for this feeling.
In a heartbeat's span, there is a pervading sensation of 'familiarity' in the air, a scent that isn't, mixing with the stale smoke and the aroma of distant meats on the spit. The young girl was tall for her age, though far too young to be running around in the middle of the night. She wore all black, with sleeves that dip all the way to her knuckles, her long hair tied up in a bun. There is a painfully indistinct feeling about her, a feeling of incompleteness, as if something were missing from the girl as she passed. The intense familiarity entwines with the sensation. When they collide, they flavor the winds with the feeling of her leaving with more than she had arrived. The bereft contact is brief.
It's easy to believe that she was never there at all.
Except for the black feather from her silver hairpin, smoky and indistinct things, laying on the ground at Cassidy's feet.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Quick reflexes are just but a part of her overall arsenal, necessary in extending the lifespan of one such as herself - prone to impulse and recklessness as she is, anything and everything to fill her every day with the same riotous color as Lacour exhibits around her. What could have been a decidedly significant impact is reduced to a jostle by a pivot and solid footwork, honey brows lifting over glade-green irises as the young woman clad in black brushes past her, an apology quick to fall on her lips. But there is a moment there, where the seconds trickle like spilled molasses, slowing to a viscous crawl - a window in where she notices every detail, from the way the breeze ripples strangely through ebon tresses that have managed to escape the tight and functional bun, and the echoes left from her footfalls, strangely amplified and heard amidst the surrounding din.
The feel of the air changes, the kind that makes the hackles of any seasoned operator's rise. As emerald eyes fall on the ground and the single crow's feather resting there, Cassidy's expression flattens.
There are images from her past often associated with like instances such as these; wizened faces cut deep with leathery wrinkles burned by the unforgiving desert sun, bits and pieces of the gutteral Baskar tongue threading through the holes punched into her consciousness while she floated in between the world of the living and the dead. It hadn't started then, really, but before, though that incident was the reason why she had become aware of it to begin with - this strange way Luck twists around her and how coincidences may not be coincidences at all. She does not believe in such things, but then again, she has seen many a peculiar thing in her travels - at the very least, it has given her an open mind.
This does, however, cause her to roll her head back to divert her stare to the expanse of stars above her, the glittering spray swirling over those two far away moons, framed by rising smoke. She sighs, but the amused bent in her mouth tics higher up the pliant corners.
"Alright, you finicky bastard," she murmurs, to no one in particular, save whatever Guardian has managed to twist his fingers around the threads that make up the tapestry of her life - Chappapanga himself could be standing directly before her, and she would be just as irreverent. "I'll play."
Reaching down, dexterous, pale fingers take the feather, if she can. With that, she pivots, to follow the wake of the raven-haired child. She leaves behind her own trail, the strains of tobacco lost within the miasma generated by still-lit forges, of lamb and beef and fowl dripping fat on live coals, punctuated by the hiss of heated and tempered steel doused in troughs of cool water.
Where this path leads, she doesn't know.
But she's curious and brazen enough to find out.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The crow straightens, looking over a shoulder in a snap of feather-rilling motion. Though the crow's faintly iridescent plumage doesn't seem truly distinct in ways, truly real, the man pays no attention to the distinction. The direction of the crow's sapphire attention is all that cuts to the quick of it; the young Ra is motionless, but the weight of his mind shifts after the crow, a slow, meandering thing chasing the faster of the two.
"You can feel it too, can't you," the crow eggs, excitable.
"...."
In a step, the agent turns, the crow flapping in deep vexation as he does so. In a second step, the grey of his old military winter coat billows. He drops into the dark, the spaces that even the night markets forgot.
She knows the feeling. It's a familiar sensation -- the nagging sense that one ought to recognize someone who isn't. But then, it is a familiarity of a different sort that the straw-haired woman pursues tonight, isn't it? The world shifts on each click of her boots, each step taken a step further from the norm. Being led is not an alien sensation to Cassidy, but she has to work very, very hard to catch up with the girl, who moves as if a dream. It is easy to think that she may be nothing at all, a vagary of the senses, to explain away some imagined slight taken by a breeze or a brute, either becoming a moment's too personal. But every so often in the crowd, the colorful hat of a merchant or the tight hood of some traveller moves to one side or the other, and Cassidy can see the messy bun in the distance, the scrawny young girl moving quickly through the crowd.
They say that pixies find their marks this way.
In the end, the moment breaks, and the girl disappears into an abandoned shopfront, quickly moving into the darkness.
A crow scrawks loudly at Cassidy when she approaches, perched on a sign that has long since faded, the chains suspending the saucer-like logo creaking with the bird's alarm. As it laughs at her, the feather held between her fingers tingles. Though it had felt real enough when the focus was on anything else, cursory inspection will bring a doubt to it. If it is real, it is barely so, and holding it is like trying to hold onto sand. Possible, but only with the gentlest mind and the tightest grip. As the feathers of the ornament trace through the air, it leaves a small impression of black smoke, as if parts of it flake off readily, belying the iridescence of the feather.
The door ahead of her is ajar, but only just so.
Nothing can be seen on the other side.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
It's familiar but not and those with well-honed survival instincts wouldn't follow at all. But following her every whim is Cassidy's primary drive and so she follows.
It is only because she is exceedingly familiar with these streets that enables her to keep sight of the child with the bun. Even these more forgotten corners of the city are well-known to her; nights spent perched on rooftops in dark clothing, when she was much younger and when her physicality was at its prime, soaring, tumbling and leaping across jagged gaps between buildings in the relentless search for the next big score. Her thievery then had been more an art founded on dexterity and agility than anything else, unlike the last few years in which she has let the workings of her mind and argent tongue to procure for her the kind of yield she could have only dreamed of in her youth. Not to say that she's all too old now, seven-and-twenty years with a disposition that could pass her off as someone younger. But that part of her history feels like an eternity ago; to her, who lives unrepetantly in the present, it might as well be another lifetime.
And so she navigates these remembered waters like a seasoned sailor, pace just quick enough to be able to keep a visual bead on her quarry and nothing faster than that, an assured vessel cutting effortlessly through waves of humanity as the child leads her into the older parts of the town, where several buildings stand derelict, shades long forgotten in Lacour's own long and sordid history. Places were never just as such to her; they had their own lives, organic in a more figurative sense - they change along with its people. But with Life comes Death and it is inevitable that pieces of them would find their ends, sacrificed for the sake of constant evolution. It is in one of these corners in which she finds herself, slowing to a stroll once emerald eyes find the building with its creaky sign, weighed down by the corvid that perches there.
The slender blonde inclines her head at it, stare lidding just slightly. For some reason, and she doesn't quite know why, birds have been a running theme in her life lately.
"I think you dropped this," she tells it, her tone almost carelessly easy, lifting the feather that isn't between her thumb and forefinger. Theoretically, the feather belongs to the child she has been chasing, but the woman has eyes - the strip of black she holds matches the bird's, right down to the hints of iridescence she glimpses on the tip. Pursing her lips, she blows on it, letting her breath carry it up towards the sign, and the evening breeze to bring it the rest of the way forward and up.
Pivoting, she directs her gaze to the door left ajar, and the yawning blackness beckoning her within. She doesn't even hesitate when she strides towards it, hands slid in her pockets as her toe lifts from the ground, boot nudging the wooden appendage swinging inward with a loud declaratory creak.
"Singing telegram!" she calls into the dark, taking one step inside. "Dinnae know precisely what you did tae get an admirer's attention, but it must've been a hell of a sommat, so here I am, prepared tae deliver."
She clears her throat:
~Oh when, when will I see you?
Oh when, when will I see you?
On a highway in a car?
On a river in a boat?
In a town where everyone is sleeping,
It doesn't matter where you go
Oh when?~
For a self-declared 'accountant', her contralto is well practiced, hinting, once upon a time, at a life on stage and under bright lights.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The bird stares at the drifter evenly as she offers the feather, the forest green of her ironic stare meeting sharp eyes of the purest, deepest, clearest blue.
They are so clear, so bright, so crystalline sapphire, that they are painful to look at.
For the most part, there is no actual threat posed to Cassidy, at least not by the crow. He (she?) will make no move to reclaim the feather, turning that painfully blue eyed glare on it. Spreading its wings, it scrawks loudly, as if to end the conversation. Somewhat mercifully, the harshly colored look takes on a fine patina of quizzical when it isn't focused directly on a person. The bird will in all contentment watch Cassidy gingerly toe open the door, but make no overt move to stop her, or even steal her valuables as a crow might.
For all intents, it appears to only be a witness.
There is nothing but pure black inside, the light streaming in from the doorway behind her. Beyond the brack taste of dust on the air to be illuminated by the lights of the distant market, that light is swallowed up entirely by the encroach of night. But the cramped space of the room inside, the rote confinement of the thing is easily a thing imagined not to exist. A dark this pure could honestly go on forever.
Cassidy's song, hale and crystal if not for want in its provincial nature, never quite reaches the point where it echoes. It may as well carry on forever into the still wind. Her practiced notes seem to travel with the dark, causing a ripple of imaginary light to extend across the floor. That ripple, no matter how much a figment, extends far and afield from its songbird originator. The wave seems to travel far beyond the confines of the original building itself, extending to the far horizon -- and disappearing entirely. Save over one point.
The feather, if it still is in her hands, will feel cold.
Somewhere in the middle distance, the ripple churns around the tied shoes of that girl. She is facing away from Cassidy, her head bowed and her hands clasped together furtively in front of her. Her shoulders hunch at the silken touch of the drifter's song. The idea alone of the imagined admirer causes her to shed a single tear, a tear that seems to fall into the dark. If Cassidy does not turn away, if she does not leave now, the next words will take the door away from her.
"I'm...I'm sorry."
Hands appear from the dark, and settle over the scrawny young girl's shoulders, soothingly.
The man appears to be in his late twenties, judging by what little can be seen of his complexion. His body, though of no great and imposing build, is made even less distinct by the voluminous grey military coat that positively swallows him up, to the point where his sleeves drift back on his wrists to admit his fingertips. The young girl stifles a sob as he lays hands on her. Her body becomes very much a negotiable thing, taking on a certain transparency when he stands before her. He looks down at her. He whispers comfort to her, a murmur chilling to even the dark. It is the only comfort he will provide. This endless shrine extends forever in every direction. But only when he stands in it does it take on the pallor of a mausoleum. His comforts are few and far between, but he rubs the insolvent young girl's shoulder with his hand, and gives solace with his words, even as the heat drains from every corner of the summer with each one.
And then he turns eyes of the most piercing, choking, abhorrent blue on Cassidy.
"...I'm glad you came."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The lack of light doesn't seem to bother her - she has been in a room much like this one before.
Moonlight renders her nothing but a shadow when she steps inside the abandoned construct, unhesitating and decisive in her steps. Curious, gold-flecked eyes sweep over the dark shapes within, hinting only at what she would expect to find in such a place - broken furniture and wooden boards peppered with holes, from a gunfight or a termite infestation or all of the above. She takes a whiff of the musty air, detects nothing but age in those scant precious moments when the song leaves her lips and fades off into silence. She no longer has the feather, having blown it towards the crow before she had stepped inside, but her fingertips tingle, still, at that remembered touch of a thing that isn't.
She sees the girl, her back turned to her, head bowed - alone in the dark. While her expression remains easy, something within her tightens seeing it - an emotion easily squashed, easily dismissed, so practiced that if any well-intentioned person knew, he would think twice before associating with the likes of her. After all, she has made a career out of silencing her conscience. These days, she barely speaks to it.
So when her lips part, her first words are dry and somewhat acerbic: "I've read books like this once," she tells the child. "Penny Dreadfuls, they call it. Macabre stories that keep young ones late at night. Cheap entertainment, ay, tae me they tend tae be scarier when there's a ghost child involved, luring the unsuspecting into..."
And the door vanishes.
"...supernatural traps like this one," the blonde finishes with a sigh, rolling her head back and lifting a hand to rub absently on the back of her neck.
I'm...I'm sorry.
"Ach, well, you oughtae be, lass. Pulling me away from a city-wide party for whatever this is s'posed tae be."
As casual as her demeanor is, no matter how strange the situation, she is not unobservant; she senses movement in the dark before she actually glimpses those hands, paler against the shadows, wrists covered by gray sleeves. As a second figure makes himself known, she inhales, the cherry-red ember on the end of her cigarette the only other light source in the room, silhouetting her features and causing those eyes to gleam like a cat's in this strange, quiet place. She doesn't blow the smoke, leaving it to escape instead in white-gray wisps from a softly-parted mouth. She says nothing when the stranger imparts his words to the child - comfort in a way she can't describe, in a way she can't relate. Anyone in her position would speculate about the relationship between the man and the child. On her part, she doesn't.
Instead, she takes in the look of the person who has just made himself known. Somewhere around her age, most of his features obscured by the shades cast by his hood. But his eyes are a distinct, almost otherworldly blue - beautiful, memorable, the kind of shade that would linger in those long memories. But somewhat inhuman.
She lives her life in a way that exhilaration is interchangeable with fear. Pupils dilate, blood rushes through her veins, the roar of it deafening despite the complete, still silence within this small pocket of black strangeness enveloping her. Adrenaline courses through every nerve, sets dormant synapses on fire and lights up every single cell within her like a Christmas tree. The dump of volatile biochemicals triggers her basest instincts keyed toward fight or flight, and all those other filthy human behaviors that start with an F.
It isn't because of the way he looks, but rather the colors he wears. Her recognition of the cut of the coat draped on his person, those worn by those who belong, or used to belong, to the Solarian special operations division, nearly forces her heart to make a devastating jailbreak through the cage of her ribs. Icewater rills down her spine, and lightning churns within ther bowels. It had nothing to do with the sudden drop in temperature in the room.
And when the stranger finally addresses her...
...I'm glad you came.
She flashes him a smile. Her smile, unique to Cassidy Cain, that brilliant, searing expression that cuts like the sharpest blade, and promises no small measure of trouble. "Dinnae think you want tae say that so soon upon seeing my face, luv," she murmurs, her posture undertaking a sideways lean on astride feet, fingers bracketing over the flare of one hip. "The night's still young."
She inclines her head at him. "So what now, then? Do I get tae hear your life's story?"
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"You walk like a woman who has done nothing wrong, with nothing to fear, and nothing held back," he observes.
He speaks with the violating familiarity that the child had only a moment ago, the sort of meandering word reserved for old friends. The child shifts, as if stifling another sob. With the delicacy not quite reaching that of a father, he runs a hand over her shoulder with the warmth of something real, smoky lines of impermanence crawling between his fingers. As he favors the child with his care, she becomes something stronger, the translucency of her whip-thin body chased away by his fingertips.
"That's a shame."
To look at the man, only a scant hand's span older than most of the new drifters of the age is to invite a migraine. He has the unwavering and piercing gaze of the military but not the angry, disciplined edge of most of the graduates. Though there is nothing but an uncomfortable peace in the transfixion, to meet his obscenely blue eyes is to invite a tension, and to hear a ringing that is not there. The longer one matches eyes with the boy, the more cramped the sky becomes and the harder it is to fix the young man's place in three dimensional space.
The abandoned feathers are now at her feet, inches from Cassidy's toes.
A single heartbeat of blood filled with ice, and he is no longer standing where he was, the distance between them cut by half, the world surrounded by aging and slashed old wood, blood painting every surface--
Another heartbeat, and he is again at the more than generous distance prior.
A crow's laughter, harsh bark though it is, will serve to break the idea of worse things. A bird is watching Cassidy from behind, that same terrible eyed look fixing her, though on a bird it is far more benign. "The weight of history is something that fills a person," the ink-haired young man explains, gently favoring the teenage girl by brushing strands of wavy hair back towards the messy bun behind her ears. Never quite taking his hand from her arm, he kneels, picking up the abandoned feathers from the crow. Absently, he works the feathers and wire back into the young girl's hairpins, her head bowing so that he can work. He does so carefully, but expertly, as if he has worked the clasping fixture thousands of times prior.
"It fills her and fills her, until she cannot walk with the weight of it," he continues, his darkened voice warm, impersonal and weighty, the calm of the rain in a thunderstorm over the desert. "She can choose to lay down," he notes, "and let the thing take her. Or she can breathe in deep, and keep walking." He inspects his work, tilting the young lady's head this way and that. It is the only break the roguess will get from the painful blue of his eyes. "Sometimes it is better just to lay down. For some. But certain people are special. And if someone suffers enough, they can become the thing that will save the world," he reasons.
"As the horror fills her, so too does her everything fill Her."
Logic laid out with such intent and so clearly, it makes a perfect, crystalline sort of sense. Does she get to hear his life's history? "Old pain doesn't interest me as much," the agent concludes. Slowly, he lifts his girl's chin in his hand, his fingertips curled lightly. Satisfied, his train of thought shifts over to the yellowbird of a thousand songs.
"...But I feel as if I need to be fascinated by you. Maybe you are the one I am looking for."
He meets her searing expression, that whiplash white firebrand of a smile with placid, obscene calm. The fires of the sun reflected as warmth by the cool moons. His eye contact never breaking by actions of his own, his hand slowly lowers, his touch gracing fingertips and their wandering down the favored young girl's jawline, down across and on her throat. The movement is so delicate, the gesture so elaborate, that it feels like it is meant for Cassidy herself. His touch can almost be felt. No matter how gentle his words, he never truly smiles.
The night's still young, after all.
"Aa," he agrees. "And so much can be done in it."
There is nothing kind in his words.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
You walk like a woman who has done nothing wrong, with nothing to fear, and nothing held back.
That cutting smile only sharpens, white teeth gleaming as if with their own light in the shadows of this warped, shrouded place. "Do I?" she wonders, her tone so facetiously innocent that judges would convict her on the spot if they heard. "For all you know, luv, maybe I'm just that confident. Nae exactly a green stripling from an isolated village, y'ken. I've got some miles in me, as sure as could be the same for you, I imagine." She gestures loosely with her fingers. If she finds offense in his casual, almost intimate address, she takes it in stride; she was not one for formalities, herself, and any attempt to force her into some degree of etiquette or deference has only yielded frustration in the souls who have thought to try.
The color of her eyes is reminiscent of a sunlit glade, shattered fragments of gold filtering through evergreen leaves. Her stare is direct and for all of the disconcerting, striking blue in his, she meets them head on with the same bold recklessness she has shown in everything she does, and most especially when she's about to accept the Reaper's invitation to dance, palm forward and ready to whirl in his skeletal embrace. Anyone would find it intimidating, but where he invites tension, all she harbors is that same, almost carelessly affable demeanor, no matter how quickly blood floods the open channels of her veins, so quickly she is almost lightheaded at the sheer high and fright of it.
She blinks once and he's suddenly there. Another blink and he's back to where he stands. Many things about this encounter reminds her of hazy images that visit her the one time she found herself in the In-Between, delirious fever-dreams in which one often finds herself, especially when she leads such a dangerous, but colorful life, in times in which her survival had been the most uncertain. Or, alternatively, within the loving grip of a toxic mix of alcohol and narcotics, glassy-eyed and smiling blissfully while chasing green faeries, golden dragons, and whatever fanciful hallucinations a brain soaked in recreational chemicals could spin out.
The sense of being watched from somewhere behind would get anyone's hackles up, but she has been in this position more times than she could care to count. The way those eyes slide to the corners is the only acknowledgment the crow would have of its presence, before her stare fixes on the black-haired Gebler operative in front of her. She takes in the way he touches the mirage in front of her, of a child that she isn't sure exists. He talks of history, and she can't help but groan inwardly, for she has had conversations like this before - most recently, in fact, from an artifact hunter who has tried to tell her that history never dies, that the past 'are stories.' There's some truth to that, she knows. She's certain, if nothing else, that there is a story here.
For all that she remembers her own history sharply...
"Sounds like a literal and figurative drag, that," Cassidy replies, taking an emphatic draw of her cigarette as if to illustrate the point. "Might be a better alternative tae just cast it aside altogether and put on some new shoes, so tae speak. You've only got one life, after all."
He seems to agree with that, at least partially, when he tells her that old pain doesn't interest him as much. She laughs, lips parting at the seam, head tilted slightly. "Ay? Well good, because it dinnae interest me either. So I s'pose all that's left is what's in front of us, then. That, I can abide. So what'll it be, luv?" She speaks to him as if she isn't swallowed by oppressive darkness, or that the man before her is touching a child in a manner that suggests that these gestures are meant for her. Save for a prompting lift of her eyebrows and a quirk of her lips, the ghost-girl might as well not exist.
...But I feel as if I need to be fascinated by you. Maybe you are the one I am looking for.
"Well, be still, my heart," she tells him drolly. "There's sommat tae be said about a man who knows what he wants. But this much pressure so early, within five minutes of meeting me?" The sharp curve of her smile tempers into an easier expression, lashes lowering. Irises glitter from underneath. "Were I a more suspicious person, I'd think you were setting me up tae be a disappointment right away. Not verra sporting of you, methinks."
That same, free hand lifts, to drift through the rivers of pale-gold by her left temple. "But since you caught me in a verra good mood, why dinnae you tell me what it is you are actually looking for, and maybe I'll have sommat worthwhile tae tell you. It would count as my charitable deed for the day, and believe me, it's nae in my nature tae just outright assist someone without obtaining sommat in return. I operate mostly in a quid-pro-quo basis, y'ken, but considering how interesting you're presently making my life, maybe I'll make an exception for you."
With that, she steps forward.
She closes the distance in her own accord, stopping just a few inches from the child in front of him. She leans in, a slight hunch from the waist, arm curling around behind her to hook into the waistband of her leather breeches - almost a stageworthy bow that suggests more inquiry than gratitutde, head tilted and angled up to meet his stare and catch its striking-disconcerting from a vantage point slightly lower than eye-level. Her shadow eclipses his face.
And so much can be done with it.
That smile returns, curling up slowly from the pliant corners of her pale-pink mouth. "Indeed," she agrees. "But as always, the question is what." Amusement dances over that halflid stare. "Or are you going tae make me guess? Are you a gambling man, Mr. Crow?"
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The world and the sky above seem endless.
There is nothing for the feet to visibly gain purchase on in this 'space,' though the ground below is as solid as any castle's. The feel of the grounds beneath is that of a smooth, featureless thing, as if Cassidy were standing for all the world on a sheet of glass that goes on forever.
He settles, his loose touch resting on the young girl's throat just over the windpipe. Thumb running down the jugular vein, the young woman obediently stays, wisps of escaping spun flax falling at her shoulder as she cranes her head to one side at his bidding. Even as he favors the young girl, he watches Cassidy as she approaches. There is no wariness in his eyes, the sharp glare of the agent coming more into focus as she approaches. There is no tension in his body, no warrior's repose to give voice, reflection or definition to the unnamed thing writhing in the seamless abyss between them. That thing is not seen and not spoken of, but the pain of it is felt, something that thrashes just beyond the reach of perception. A scream that cannot be heard.
Yet he is completely at ease.
"The seeds cannot be sown until the brush is burned," he agrees, readily and simply.
"The things that attach you to the world are just poisons. Things that distract us," he says, ambiently caressing his child's cheek with his free hand, "from the sensations that a new sunrise brings. Tethered to the old world, the light is excoriating, agonizing. Free of it..."
He looks up, breaking their locked eyes for nothing in particular.
"It's beautiful."
This close, everything feels real. The agent in front of her, the honey-haired child in his grasp. The closer she gets to him, the closer she can feel him. Reality that far out was a tenuous thing, but now, here, there is something tangible to hold onto. Something real. But something is wrong. Some sensation of things that cannot be. The man returns his free hand to the slender child's shoulder, the weight of his grip very much a real thing. It is heavier than before. And it is hard to tell how that could even be known at all.
"Despite the years, you are a pretty thing," he finally remarks, as if noticing Cassidy for the first time. Reality seeps into every crevice, every crack of his words. Cold, hard, and most important of all -- coalescent. "I disagree."
"Tonight, you are the thing that I need most of all in this world."
She offers him her mind, her knowledge. For all of the jarring disconnects in meaning that the man in the Solarian coat seems to string together, this close, it appears that his focus finally lay on the real meaning of things. "Offer me more," he responds, a dark authority coloring his voice, anathema bleeding openly into the air for the wildfire-minded. But no matter how 'real' it becomes, there is the sensation that something is wrong with the man from Solaris and the slender young woman on her knees in front of him. "Offer me loyalty," he suggests. "Offer me your need," he continues, and the woman shifts uncomfortably beneath him.
With a flourish to chastise queens, she bows in interest, her hand moving behind her.
A thousand battles and a hundred atrocities raises his pale lip in recognition.
The woman at his feet begins to writhe, her boots kicking at once, as his grip intensifies. The nightmare agent calmly continues, the gentle hand on her shoulder becoming a band of iron to hold her down and in place, muting her struggles placidly. "Offer me your agony. Offer me... despair. Offer me everything you have. I wish to drink in this thing that you are, and sample your worthiness."
Blood begins to drip from his right hand, as he pierces flesh with his fingers alone. There is a horrific and muted gurgle, and beautiful hair of honey gold spills out, the pin holding her hair in the bun never hitting the ground. He kills her, right in front of her. He kills her, and forces her to watch. His hand reaches in deeper. "And in the end, if you were to ask me what I want," the nightmare agent begins, thoughtfully.
Her hair was not gold before.
The wrongness of the thing sets in slowly. The man in the grey winter coat is not killing the child from before. He is killing the woman in front of him. If Cassidy can even bear to look down, the horror of it will be complete, as he mangles a twin with her leather breeches, with her honey-gold hair, and her glade-green eyes, struggling and kicking at his feet. If she looks -- if she registers at any moment the horror of what he does to her -- it will become her. Every feeling of what he does is spelled out bloodlessly in every nerve in her body, as he reaches inside of the woman at his feet, seizing something hard in the back of her throat.
If his instinct is right, by the time she can whip her gun loose from her back, he has already ripped the full length saber from her soul and stomach itself to block the barrel.
"I want you to sing for me. So that I can take your song from you," he finishes, eyes of cornflower shining in the dark.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
It doesn't escape her notice that the figure in front of the Gebler agent has changed, but there is no outward sign, not even a chuff of breath to acknowledge it. Cassidy's full attention is on the man with those otherworldly blue irises and the way he speaks. Amusement remains, something more felt in the cold air than actually seen on her features; however often she smiles, they are never empty. There is always something alluded by the pliant line of her mouth and it is rare that she actually elucidates the viewer as to what lies behind it.
Despite the years. The thing he needs the most in the world. Lips split at the seam to bare her teeth once more; her laughter is visible now, though it remains silent. "While I'm verra flattered that you think I'm pretty, I wonder if you always talk tae women that way?" she wonders. "You come on rather strong, luv, you'll have tae be careful - when someone worthwhile truly comes along, dinnae do you much good tae scare them away. Nae tae say that intensity isnae good. It is, under the right circumstances. Cannae help but wonder, though, if you always talk this way. Deep, ominous and foreboding-like. You're nae a vampire, are you? Is that why you're huddled here in the dark?"
That mouth twists into a wry expression. "Is that why you're here instead of exerting the will of your masters? Was told that Solarians dinnae take too kindly tae people who march on their own beat. Pity, that. I tend tae gravitate towards the ones who are unique. There's nae fun tae be had if everyone thinks the same, acts the same, hold the same opinions. What say you, luv? Do you agree?"
She straightens, her hand still behind her back, arm crooked by the elbow; anyone suspicious would be fearing a gun, but there are two in plain sight, on either of her hips. There is a blade too, with a hilt meant for a sword, but no longer than a knife - a curious armament to be sure and hanging just slightly lower from her left pistol. She has not reached for either, not even when his list of demands scrolls through every item and her expression shifts subtly from amused to very much the same, but now with a hint of exasperation.
"Just like a man," she says with a long-suffering sigh. "I miss the days when all your brethren wanted from me was just my company. Would nae like tae believe your memory's that short, luv, but as I inferred before, I dinnae make it a habit tae be generous. Even if I did decide tae give you all of that, none of those would be for free. So, tae make this even more interesting..." She lifts a finger from her free hand. "Hypothetically, I humor you. Right here, right now. What do I get in turn?"
There's a tilt of her head, a pale-gold tress curling on her cheek. "I'm as far from a saint as they come, you seem tae be stuck with a verra selfish creature."
She says all of this as the facsimile of her twists and gasps, gurgling with her death throes as the man's grip tightens. Her eyes gravitate in that direction, watching herself die before her eyes, but that is the strange and difficult thing with the likes of her - born and broken to achieve some monstrous purpose, only to be put back together hastily into something else entirely. Something unreadable slips past those expressive eyes, curiosity mingled with virid wildfire. Her jugular kisses the underside of her jaw at every staccato beat, for she never feels more alive than when she is about to die.
I want you to sing for me. So I can take your song from you.
Her attention returns to him then. There is still no pistol. Not even if he decides to grasp the hilt of a blade from her dying clone and pries it free. Not even when he points the edge of it towards her emphatically. Her slight smile widens once more into a grin, punctuated with a lift of her eyebrows. Her hand moves from her back, wiggling her fingers at him, as vacant as the time it had slipped around her from when she leaned over.
And if the point of the blade is close enough, she will turn her head, to clip her teeth against the edge, eyes locked on his. Barely-repressed mirth sparks from the depths of her eyes. The contact is brief, leaving the faint imprint of her lips on cold steel.
"Usually, I would be happy tae oblige someone with a request," she tells him. "I ken many songs, after all, and I'm verra good at singing them. But you see, I'm not verra much for people who try tae take what's mine, especially when I make it my business tae take from others. You would nae be the first tae want tae, though. You would nae be the first tae try. Now, I'm wondering if you intend fully tae see if you'll succeed. And if you do..."
Her smile turns almost helpless. Slender shoulders lift in a shrug.
"The name's Cassidy Cain," she tells him. "Try tae take my song, then." Lashes lower. There is a glint in her eyes.
"Better do it now, luv, before I take sommat of yours."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Enchanting.
"There have been many."
His blade is electric underneath her lips. It is not the same as other blades, hearted works churned out in Lacour smithies or old blades dug from the dirt from civilizations long ago. The blade churns with the dark, repressing the tempering cold of ongoing discomfort. She is the most romantic thing about that, the breaking current of the weapon a cacophony of small electric sensations, chaotic and ongoing, small miseries passing under her ivory teeth and causing lips to tingle.
It is a channeling weapon, something manufactured straight from the city in the sky.
He is almost disappointed that she does not draw a weapon against him, his blade hovering so close to her. Cutting edge down, the curved saber is close enough for strands of her hair to play across the razored edge, if she isn't careful. But then, care is so rare in this one. Who may? The man blinks slowly, that harshly beatific gaze never quite straying into surprise, his expression never quite relishing the act. He has the tenor of a person trained in horror. Cruelty comes to him so easily. It is a form of unique.
"There are some who came from the sky," he finally answers.
"And then there are those who fell."
"On the earth, they found all of the things that crawl and walk, all of the things who do not know the sky." Cassidy's faux body still lay at his feet, limbs splayed about her like a broken rag-doll. Eyes of pale green grow paler as the light dances from them, an empty gaze looking up pointlessly at her, as if to punctuate his words. "They found those who beg, who borrow, and who steal. Those who believe in gods, and those who believe in things that can be known only in the deepest corners of the night. How do you imagine they would speak, if they could speak to you," he asks calmly.
"Would you," he emphasizes, "be afraid?"
She suggests there is a price to her, an idea that the obscenely-eyed agent reflects with another slow blink. Slowly, the point of his blade lowers, the tip of the thing wandering across the collection of baubles at her neck, and travelling the stitchwork of her jacketry. The meandering of it is something that breaches in favor of words, if only for one lightning-strung moment. Where his blade travels, the energy follows. "Do you imagine that I cannot bring you recompense for everything that you give," he wonders aloud. "That I could not complete you in the angles of every way," he considers, "until you lose yourself entirely within my halls?"
"You are a brave thing," he decides.
The blade, if she does not retreat, will press into her middle, the point of the thing worrying the cheap leatherwork of her jackets and beyond. He will step closer to her than she could to him, something he has to stride between the corpse's legs to do. The point of his blade will begin cutting, piercing, sinking into her silhouette until it rests on flesh. "Do you think that I will leave you barren? With such demands, you gain the stretch of my attention."
If no impediment is brought to him, he will slowly begin cutting into her with his blade, slowly moving steel through her middle with the utmost of attention. He is slow about it, delicate and calm. If she doesn't fight him, if she doesn't retreat, he will quietly begin to impale her while she watches. He won't stop, even if she writhes, even if she screams. Until she stops him, he will pierce her slow, until that tingling, horrific sensation lives in every nerve of her. "I am the one who fell."
"And in return... let me give you horror borne only from the sky."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Would you be afraid?
Her smile lingers, eyebrows once again rising upwards as if to emphasize it, the lines of her face wreathed with the gently caressing smoke of the cigarette clasped between her lips. "Dinnae know, luv," she murmurs. "Until it actually happens. I'm an open-minded lass, y'ken, it's nae exactly in my nature tae rule anything out."
That isn't to say that the man does not dispense part of his history into the present proceedings, for all that he says that speaking of his own past does not interest him; he communicates these small glimpses as fables, something akin to myth. Oh, she can guess where he is from, but their dying world is filled with possibilities and she can't quite discount the idea that whoever this is could have come across a Gebler agent, killed him, and took his possessions. But the way her lips thrum with that strange energy from where she had bit into the edge of his blade speaks volumes and lends to some truth to the colors he wears. For all of her lackadaisical attitude towards the man intent on menacing her, she is intimately familiar with Solaris and most of its foibles.
To explain would be to dive into her own past, and for many reasons, she is exceedingly reluctant to make that journey.
The point of his blade follows from the base of her neck; her pupils shrink slightly when it touches on the array of necklaces and the string of pearls adorning her collar, a reaction so brief he could have imagined it. But it is gone again when it finds buttons, over the frills of her collar and lower, still, until it finds the grasping cinch of the corset that has found its reincarnation as a functional vest, steel and energy finding the contours of its ribbing through hard, solid leather.
You are a brave thing.
"So are you," she says, her reply in part jest, lips easing into a wider grin. "Implying that anyone or anything in this world can actually complete me. Cannae blame you for assuming, considering we've only just met. But you'll find out, perhaps sooner rather than later, that I am perpetually hungry."
And so, for at least a brief moment, Cassidy lets him do what he wills. She feels the point of the blade depress into her middle, the center of her vest. She feels it cut through treated rawhide, the saber as sharp as her smile. She does, not once, remove her gaze from his, even as he imparts to her that he is the one who fell.
The slow, gradual sink of it will continue until his blade suddenly stops. Unless he applies something more forceful other than that silken, gliding attempt to reach her insides, the tip of his blade will scrape something within the lining of her leather corset-vest...
...metal?
"What about that?" she muses, mischief evident in her stare. "Maybe we have something in common, after all."
For she is no assassin and she could hardly be called a warrior. What she has become, for all the best efforts to steer her another way, is a swindler and a thief. She lies for a living. She survives because she cheats.
Something falls from her sleeve, and rolls between them. Even in the dark, the winking, red indicator light of a live incendiary pierces the deep black. She's already pulling away by then, and she is fast when given the impetus to move, leaping backwards. But she doesn't turn her back and she is still looking at him right in the eye when she puts some distance between herself, him and the grenade she had just dropped on his feet.
And all the while, she laughs.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with The Long Game!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Cassidy Cain's The Long Game for 27 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Her history, the real reason why her eyes gild with recognition when she stares upon his trappings is something that she carefully keeps hidden. She tells of songs and connections and bargains, but it is the one thing she makes a point to avoid broaching with the man with the wandering train of thought. But if he is what she thinks him to be, if he is a thing cut from the cloth of a hunter, does he realize something else? The cut of her breath in her chest when his coat flashes just so. The contracting of her pupils when his blade gets too close.
These are not details that would pass by a hunter, someone trained to trace the behaviors of those who run. They would not pass by, especially by one with such obscene eyes.
"Everyone in this world exists only to be completed," the man counters, his voice never rising above that cutting, cold lilt. "As the earth always turns underneath the till, the body always turns away the years. This dying place is no different." He remarks, his eyes turning downward as his probing, piercing blade finds a mate above her skin. Even as she cuts a wild and mischievious stare, his blade's pressure does not stop, folding and doubling. The tingle blooms between them, causing the warm metal just beyond her corset to grow colder. His chin lifts. "Neither is the one who runs."
This man is someone who hunts, even kills, as a matter of course. There is positively zero chance that he does not register even the slightest hint of weakness. But that is not why he continues on, as if hellbent to break though even this, a personal barrier. He may notice the leading way of her, the chasing lies that so easily dance across her tongue. At some level he might come to appreciate it. But he is with a purpose, and all of the teasing in the world will not keep him shy of it.
Without compromising his blade's force, his eyes glance downward at the attention-grabbing bauble dropped between them. The attention is momentary. To follow her when she leaps back, laughing would be to lose a leg in the blast. Instead, the man's coat whirls as he drops, just as the incendiary blast goes off.
The blast causes the nothing to shiver as it cuts through the killer with searing force. In the end, that may have been the story of most, flames searing in a boiling, roasting morass around him. And for a moment, that is the story of him, a pyre as Cassidy stands in the featureless black. At least, such is so until a slow breath, vivid with annoyance, rakes through the nonsense space.
The voice is unmistakable, even from within the twisted knot of consuming flame.
"You underestimate your own will to be completed."
In the end, the saber bisects the flame, leaving the scorched coat and burned hand evident on the hunter as he just cuts the entire affair down, his blade slicing down tongues of flame as if they were sheaves of wheat. But it is not merely that that he does. His form is something that she should be intimately familiar with, the quick, military scything motion something that belays the black wave of force rippling from that blade. Blue-streaked night unfolds from steel, cutting through the light and snuffing it to embers as in one stroke, he is free of the flame. In the second, a ripple of obscene force curls out from the blade, the energy wave blooming as it eats the space between them with harsh relief.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Enmity Radius!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Enmity Radius for 98 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Everyone in this world exists only to be completed.
He says this just as the grenade explodes, blotting out darkness with heat and fire. Standing several yards away from the impact point, the blonde draws in the last length of her cigarette afforded to her, the filter clutched between her teeth. Brows lifting upwards, she inclines her head; the amusement implied on the line of her mouth has not faded in the slightest, her facade remaining as it is in spite of the riot of instincts swirling within her. There had been a time in her life when all she sought was this. Three years scouring the wilds of Filgaia for the proper means to die, challenging every man, woman and monster that came across her path in hopes of retrieving some respite from an incredible amount of personal suffering.
But that was then, and this is now.
"Is that right?" Cassidy replies, a thin plume of smoke wafting up from the dying embers of her cigarette. "Well, like I said, luv. It's nae in my nature tae rule anything out."
Her blood is up, heartbeats drumming savagely against her bones, threatening to drown out her own words - so loudly, so violently that she is almost certain that the Gebler agent could hear her while she stands so still. It is the twisting of the smoke, however, that enables her to see what's coming - that something is, though she is ill-prepared for the sudden invisible tidal wave of force that's suddenly upon her before she knows it. She takes it straight to the chest, some of the impact curbed by her protective vest. It sends her flying off her feet.
Despite the dull ache and the bolt of pain searing up through her chest, she twists, with the grace of a practiced acrobat, landing on her boots and with soft knees. She skids backwards, but as she does, fleet fingers draw both pistols out and fires from both. Bullets tear through the black, spinning red and pulsing with their own heat.
"I s'pose it's too late tae talk about this like two consenting adults?" In spite of her words, her lips split into a wild, brazen grin. "Wonder if you think there's such a thing as a person being too interesting!"
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Bullet Blitz!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra guards a hit from Cassidy Cain's Bullet Blitz for 51 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
He has a particular method of moving forward.
The more Cassidy moves around, the more she will get the sensation that she doesn't -- truly -- feel like she is going anywhere, like the world's floor is spinning to accomodate each step. In the truth of her eye, the body of her doppelganger is an excellent point of reference, and as she moves on the rink of black, the body appears to stay in one spot relative to her motions. But though the movements she makes are real, the movements of the black space seem milliseconds out of time with her motion. And as he approaches, the world seems to twist to accomodate it.
He lacks any particular agility, to look at things realistically, his blade swaying to one side as his approach is each step in slow and appropriate relief. He steps over the body on the ground. Measured and deliberate is each step he takes, the hem of his coat rippling gently in the still air with the motion. Horrific blue eyes focus on her as she lands again on her boots, those terrible things shining, hunting points in the dark. In a heartbeat, in an eyeblink, he jumps the interstitial space midstride, appearing no less than a handful of steps away from her, never breaking stride.
In the next, he is at his previous location.
He never responds to her admission, the conversationalist he was a moment ago dead and gone as he sets mind to the work he will do to her temple. Even moreso that she has drawn her gun. He never takes cover as she opens fire. The first shot slams into him, heated bullet spinning through layers of leather effortlessly, drawing whirling rivulets of blood and a bloom of crimson over his body as the first blast embeds itself in his center of mass, and causes a pause in his horrific gait, his body twitching back with the motion of it. Unlike her, who is more alive in this moment than in any moment prior, the blast hits him like it might have any hung sack of dry seed on the side of the railroads. The one who fell is supposed to be dead. Is it not so?
One hand raises, and the second shot slams into a sketched field in front of him, arcane runes floating in front of him, unimpressionable and implacable calcula drifting across an imposed physical boundary that does not truly exist. Fingertips spread faintly as he regains his stance. Inexorably, he begins to advance again, stepping over the body on the ground at his feet.
Even as he goes, she can see vague reflections of him in her peripheral vision. If her attention is drawn, even for a moment, the space between them halves. Then it quarters. Then it halves again. By the time he is moving, it is hard to tell exactly how far he is away before his free hand slams into her throat, his body launching into a full out dash as he moves all of his weight behind the tackling attack that carries them both into the air. He blinks, slowly, calmly. Each blink is sketched out in painful relief, as it is the only respite you can get from eyes that are three shades too painfully bright.
"Are you offering me your consent...?" he asks, mildly, in the midst of trying to crush Cassidy against a ceiling that doesn't exist.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Nemesis Pressure!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
DC: MISS! Cassidy Cain completely evades Nemesis Pressure from Isiris Shango'Ra!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The more she moves around, the more disorienting it is.
She knows what she is dealing with isn't just a physical threat, but a metaphysical one; she has dueled Symbologists before but the way he wields his magic against her is distinct. She has never encountered anyone who can do this before and that may be enough to give him the advantage - the familiarity of a terrain is something that she has always taken into account and even used. However, while his sorcery is unique, its effects are not. In particular, this isn't the first time she has fought in a dark room. This is not the first time she has fought when her wits are addled and suffering from effects akin to hallucinations. There had been a time in her life when she had been trapped in spaces similar to this.
The first seventeen years of her life had been turned towards one purpose, and one purpose only.
Cassidy stops moving, one hand holstering one of her pistols; it does wonders in abating that growing discomfort - there are times when the mind tries to rationalize the irrational, and one can easily be disturbed and distracted in trying to make sense of it. So she ceases entirely. For a few precious seconds, she does nothing but breathe as she feels the shadows come alive in the dark, stretching for her in her periphery and with adrenaline soaking into her senses, so does everything that she wants to forget rises to the surface, all associated with the first half of her life when she was being groomed to be another monster entirely. With it comes those buried, but unforgotten instincts. With it comes all the training drilled into the marrow of her bones. With it comes all that accumulated muscle memory.
Her eyes remain forward. She does not bother tracking the way the space warps around her and how he seems to be so close one moment, so far away in the next. It will only confuse her for when he really strikes.
And he does.
His palm surges forward and she twists in the last second, letting the gray-clad body rush past her. A creature of deadly, errant grace whenever she is motivated to be - and aside from her greed, nothing motivates her more than her own survival - her hand is already falling onto the small of her back. With those two pistols visible, the blonde trickster opts to draw out a third hidden gun; a beautifully engraved revolver, its argent patina depicting all manner of acorns, falling leaves and fanciful creatures in the midst of a heated duel.
A foot steps back as he drifts past, shifting her weight and applying pressure into the ball of her foot to brace her against the gun's significant kick-back. She draws a bead at the back of his skull and fires a single glowing red slug.
"Ach, luv. I only made one offer this evening, and you had the balls tae want more." Laughter etches over each syllable. "But like I said, I'm nae all that generous."
GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action!
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Sucker Shot!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Cassidy Cain's Sucker Shot for 113 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Feathers flood the sky.
It is impossible to believe that the man might survive. Truthfully, there is no hidden plate on his body, nothing to otherwise deflect the myriad gunfire with which he deals regularly. Even as he surges into the sky, and above all of the rush of wind, he sees her, slipping lithely to his side, her mind bulwarked against the staccato horror of unreality. When he passes her, their eyes meet once last, for only a breath of time.
Then he is in the sky.
And then he is without a head.
The impression is only a second, existing ephemerally in the mind's eye. Even so. The bullet finds its home. The heavy slug rockets through his skull, sending bits of black tumbling far afield into the empty sky and across a ceiling that should not exist. The rogue blonde can almost hear the sound of skull fragments hitting the glass-like floor like so much spilled candy. But where the aftermath of things should be, the shattered fragments of face and other varying nightmarish bits of viscera, there is only feathers falling from the sky. When he hits the ground, he doubles over, taking one step too many into his landing for it to be perfect, for it to be of grace. He stands slowly.
"Did you expect any less," he explains calmly, even as the black drains from his head and off into nothingness. He straightens, turning to face the woman with that gun. One eye is closed--the one over which his blood drains. It is impossible to tell why he is still standing, even as the blood drains over the dark grey of his coat, the blackness of the trails shifting as they stain in strangle rippling patterns. Smoke drains from the wound, black and more pregnant with promise than anything she has seen.
One hand raises to his lips, dripping in blood. He samples it briefly, resting his lips against it in a slow draw, as if to drink and savor the meter of his own life.
As he straightens, the gaping wound in his skull becomes more prominent. It is a bizarre, alien thing, a chaotic morass of starlight and iridescence. His breath has not changed. His mouth draws into a slow, inviting smile. "You shouldn't take offense to it now. You could have just went to your knees." Even as he speaks, the patterns of blood on his coat shift, the coils of a snake with wings, the iridescence of the patterns enchanting, and as inviting as his smile, dancing to a slow rhythm that cannot be heard.
Whatever it is, it isn't Symbolism he uses.
"Fighting against it...spending all of your days struggling. Is that not effort ill spent," he explains quietly. As he does, his wound gets visibly worse, a bulge of black appearing from his head. Slowly, a bird pecks through the shadowy morass surrounding it. "Would it not be easier to worship your own mortality," he asks mildly. "On your knees, lips on your gravestone?"
His headwound bursts, his skull disgorging a fluttering black into the air towards Cassidy. The birds flood the hall of the dark between them, chattering and cackling, breaking his silhouette, making it indistinct in the distance. The nightmare agent's voice seems to cascade across her in whispers, as the horrific things swallow her in fluttering, choking dark. For one, horrific moment, there may be no actual direction that is not saturated in moving dark. "You know it to be true," he accuses. "It's the only reasonable existence as we iscariot."
Then her own grave rebels against her.
From the fluttering black, the body of Cassidy Cain-- whose wound almost matches the agent's own-- bursts from the ground, trying to latch pale, lithe hands onto her thighs. Compelling as he goes, the agent resumes his approach, even as the body he favored with his touch only minutes ago writhes to unseeing life, blank eyes staring lifelessly as a grip like iron tries to drag Cassidy onto her knees and to the ground, trying to climb and force the living rogue onto her back, the dead ghost grabbing at whatever bit of fabric or bone or flesh presents itself wildly, the clawing grapple not stopping until Cassidy breaks free. Or Cassidy just breaks.
"Or will your hunger itself consume you whole," the nightmare agent wonders, bloodily.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Merciless Genesis!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain critically Guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Merciless Genesis for 22 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
She ignores it all.
She ignores the feathers raining from the sky. She ignores the way his head seems to explode from the distance. She even ignores the disembodied sounds that follow - of a skull bursting apart, like glass. How avian leavings shift on the black ground to be swallowed up by then. Whatever does not come from her, she pays no heed, treating them as hallucinations or distractions. It is more helpful, to her, to attach herself to the things she knows are real and the only guarantees she has of that are her own thoughts and actions. Her heart continues to drum its battledance against the cage of her bones as she watches someone die, and come back to life again.
Emerald-and-gold eyes catch blood, however, when this nightmarish unreality splits apart to reveal him bleeding and the way he tastes his own blood. Satisfaction burns within those virid depths and that wild grin only becomes all the moreso. It is not the smile of someone who relishes in her opponent's pain, but the challenge he presents and all the things he does that triggers all of her primary drives - the need to feel gloriously, savagely alive being the most paramount of these, and she always feels this when she dances so close to her own death. And Gebler agents are, for all that they have been demonized in her childhood education, so adept at dispensing it.
"I dinnae know what I was expecting, luv, but you certainly dinnae disappoint. I only accepted your invitation because I was curious." And when he smiles, himself, the first show of it through the entire evening, she laughs again, rich and crystalline within this bubble of oppressive darkness. "Ach, well, dinnae worry yourself over that, I'm nae offended." Lips twist in a lascivious smile. "And while I could entertain certain situations in where I'm willing tae get down on my knees, none of them are certainly nae for worshipping my own gravestone. Ay, it's certainly easier, tae embrace the blissful cold. But unfortunately..."
Cassidy lifts her shoulders in a shrug. "I've been a difficult person since I was born," she tells him, with an expression so helpless it might actually be genuine. "Cannae help but suspect sommat is up when a thing is too easy."
She purses her lips, blowing the smoke away from the barrel of her revolver with flourish. "Personally, I'd rather kiss someone." Eyes glitter from under her lashes. "And more."
More is certainly what she gets. The non-ground underneath her suddenly erupts, breaking apart as her own corpse's arms suddenly come alive and reach for her, but before those cold, dead fingers can complete their grip, the woman is already drawing the knife-blade from the belt around her hip - after a flash of cutting silver, she severs digits through the bone as she half-leaps, half-pulls herself away from it. Her heart lurches up in her throat, though she doesn't check the blood on her blade. She does not give herself the room to believe that anything that is happening is real save for herself and her opponent.
"Well, that was surprising," she tells him gamely. "I'm relieved tae know you have a sense of humor. Is this the part where you tell me tae stop hitting myself?"
Pulling out her pistols again, she fires another hail of bullets towards Isiris' direction. Unlike him, she has no sorcery to speak of and by and large, her attacks are very straightforward. For some reason, however, despite the presence of the strange knife-blade with a longsword's hilt, she does not seem all too inclined to use it on him.
At least, not yet.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Bullet Blitz!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Cassidy Cain's Bullet Blitz for 45 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Haunting eyes settle on the surprisingly short blade as it cleanly bisects the fingers of the grasping body. Life is not always as perfect or as graceful as our esteem would prefer, and the affair is a filthy one. Even with no fingers, the slender body is pulled forward by an unseen hand, spasming with unnatural movements not at all reflective of the living Cassidy as she grasps with nerveless, digitless hands after the escaping rogue, leaving streaks of black on her breeches as she breaks free.
The blade is a curiosity set aside for now, the potential of its meaning filed somewhere in the back of his mind. The coalescence is deafening now, bringing his attention to the forefront, even as the sanity erodes from the world around them, crows cackling in the frontless black. His headwound trails black as he stops his approach, genuinely pausing as Cassidy recovers, the taunting and daringly forward lilt to her voice never quite surrendering. Her ideas occur to him as novelty, the hallmark of someone whose despair is buried much deeper than his current level of preparations can reach.
But he is no fool.
"Do you imagine that this nightmare will end if you close your eyes?" he asks mildly, noticing the direction of her attention. Her gun. Him, the way he moves, and each foot that she puts in front of her. He looks up absently, as the black tile that makes up the world begin to shift, discrete portions of black shifting in sections, and jumbling, like an insolvent puzzle. "That if you merely look at what is 'real,' concerning yourself with the next word, or the next limb, that this trial will end...?"
It's hard to even look him in the eyes now, because his head is currently spraying black into the air intermittently. If she finds herself staring at the shadows too long, it begins to form black bones, grasping for her. Don't look.
"No," he answers.
"No matter how strongly you try to believe it, no matter how breathlessly you tell me your dreams, this is not something your body will obey. It does not understand the circumstances in which you suffer. Only that you are. The body wants to intimately submit to what it feels, in accordance to its nature. Someone such as you knows that a kiss will test it. But for everything in-between, only a killing will prove it."
Though her moves are simplistic, her aim is unerring, and even in a world where his position is indistinct between eyeblinks, even in a world where taking aim at him is enough to be subject to horror, her gun fires true. The heated blast belts a shot of smoke through the air with its gunfire, each bullet punctuating a wordless retort that cuts him short. The first comes eerily close to punching through his arm. Then, the killer flares his coat open, flooding the air between them with black. Further shots fall into the dark between them, never to be heard from again.
He narrows his eyes.
"It will never be easy, for you," he promises, from somewhere behind her.
The interstitial space between them vanishes between gunshots. The nightmare agent is in contrast never graceful, never lithe. But he crosses space in a single step, the reality of things buckling at will. Cassidy has eyeblinks to react before the agent lets loose with a flash of the blade, the deadly arc of a saber sharper than could be real tracing an eruptive line. He will hit her in the back with his sword hard enough to lay her open from shoulder to hip. If he finds her lacking, only her steel and her leather will keep her alive. He will cut through her corset. He will cut through her gunbelt. He will cut through her plate. His own attack, executed with brutal Solaris military precision, dispenses with trickery for one, sick, twisting moment.
One moment that he moves to take everything from her.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with A World Without!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A World Without for 79 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
He wouldn't be wrong about her despair.
Cassidy has spent a lifetime burying whatever suffering that has defined her in an effort to free herself from her past entirely; nothing else would do but the utter annihilation of what had come before with all of her focus set on the now. It is difficult, perhaps downright impossible, but it hasn't stopped her from trying and these reasons are unfailingly her own. The trickster's facade serves her well, as it enables her to at the very least appear impervious to whatever slings and arrows anyone could use to fell her; her smile doesn't waver, she laughs now and then, and as their bout continues, her tone remains conversational - as if sparring with a friend.
But blood never lies; it continues to rush at a breakneck pace through her veins.
He talks about the present nightmare and she grins at him from her position. "Nae exactly the sort tae close my eyes when someone's trying his damndest tae kill me, luv, nightmare or nae," she tells him dryly. "Methinks that's a touch counterproductive tae my chances of survival. But if you're asking me, underneath it all, whether I think this is going tae end, ay, I do. Believe that. You'd be something else indeed, if you can go on forever."
Her revolver lifts, arm bending at the elbow. "Never did have the brain tae be a philosopher," she tells him. "I dinnae spend my days contemplating life and death, too busy living the one I've got my way for that kind of nonsense. But if there's anything the last decade has taught me, it's the incontrovertible fact that if I can bleed it, I can kill it. So really, luv, I dinnae have tae believe in the nightmare. All I really have tae do is last longer than you."
Her wild grin tempers into an easier, almost gentler expression. "And ay, that will nae be easy either. But..."
She doesn't continue the thought. Black on black suddenly floods the space, the bubble warping again around her. Her eyes fix on the Gebler agent as he moves like a ghost; for a moment, she loses track of him.
His breath gives him away, somewhere behind her.
The blade cuts, it rips open gaps between metal links, blood staining steel, though she manages to avoid the worst of it at her twist and turn. The knife-blade is out by a whip of those dexterous fingers, the curve of his saber finding the guard that protects them from getting severed at the knuckle. Her stance shifts at the sudden onslaught, dancing backwards as he presses forward, but her defense is solid.
Her movements do not speak of a dabbler in the edged arts. While pain fills her eyes, there is no grunt or scream, and all focus poured into that fluid attempt to protect herself from a devastating blow. Trickster, liar, swindler and thief....and something else.
For the art of the sword speaks of a life of either privilege or military...or both. And the way she looks while she meets his blade suggests a lifetime of study.
"Tch," she murmurs. "Would nae be any fun at all if you force me tae spill all my secrets."
With that, she rips away from him and twists. She never presents her back to him longer than necessary, but it enables her to hide the fingers clutching her knife for just a moment when she pivots, digs her weight into the ball of the foot slightly behind her - it forces her body to curl in, before using that same lightning speed to suddenly lunge forward. There is no way that blade, no longer than a knife, would be able to reach him with the distance she has placed between them...
...but in her turn, she triggers a switch, and the blade suddenly unfolds into its true length. The longsword moves to drive between his ribs, before ripping away to attempt another stab, to plunge at where his liver would be.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Blade Dance!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: CRITICAL! Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Cassidy Cain's Blade Dance for 74 hit points!
GS: Cripple! Statuses applied to Isiris Shango'Ra!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The chaotic whirl of blades wring steel from the black space. It is here that the heavensent killer is most honest. In the exchange, there is little time for soured reality, and the only truth is the sword and the flesh that it shears into.
Blood stains the blade, threatening to cut into her corsetage. Metal links shear at the weight of his blade swing, rupturing them and threatening to dispose entirely of her defenses. It's really the only way she can tell he is in fact connected to the real world at all-- from the way he quietly ascertains her defenses and, nightmare by nightmare, tries to cut them away.
Cassidy whirls past the killer, his body leaning into the motion, her blade coming to parry hard against the curve of his blade, which matches the design of no known blade on the ground. He steps into the blow, and pursues. Though the razored edge of his blade finds the guard of the thing, his strength is real, intensely so, and he leans into it, holding the clash long enough to make a return strike impossible. His face meets hers, flat and bloodied, in one inverted moment.
"You'll spill everything," he promises. "And beg me to let you spill more."
As she whirls away, his eyes flip one side to the other, obscene blue eyes snapping from weapon to exposed weapon on her form as she rips free of the clash, his step after one of precision. That weapon.. his eyes narrow.
The blade unfolds. His hand blurs.
His shoes skid across the ground just by a moment or so, one blood-soaked hand held tightly on the blade. Just above the lethal mark he manages to guide the blade, her weapon embedded in his middle. He smiles, a droplet of blood welling at the corner of his lip. Slowly, his blood coats her blade. This blood is red, not like the staccato and shifting black that drains out of his skull. "You're wrong, you know."
As he speaks, his bare hand the only thing preventing her from fileting him, she can see his blood travel, the steel baptized in crimson in a dance once more. It wells at the guard. And then it begins to drip over it, in a way that no steel actually can. Rivulets of it will begin to coat her hand. It is almost seductive, the way his blood goes to her. "Think. It's easy to believe that that's the nature of things, isn't it? Do you not feel pleased, coating yourself in me? Working in blood...as you have so many times before?"
Her bladeplay has taught him many things of her. She must break free. The blood is not natural. It is not normal. It wants to travel the length of her, wants to hold her there. If she waits too long, if she entertains him for even a moment, she won't be able to move, the winding spiderweb of his blood forming gossamer thin lines of tension across her body in a horrific binding. Maybe she will break free now. She must. If his blood touches her and touches the ground at the same time, her body will forget how to escape, or that it ever should. "Does it please you to think that I won't stop?"
He raises his blade.
"Not until the world ends."
She must escape. Or he will cut through her four times in the same eyeblink.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with A Cruel Orisha!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain critically Guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A Cruel Orisha for 36 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Metal rattles - he was bigger, stronger than her; his coat does well to mask his build and were she less surefooted, he certainly would have managed to knock her off balance when the Gebler agent presses up hard against her defenses. She shifts her footing to compensate, and does this as fluidly as the rest of her movements. But not once do her eyes fall away from his from between the deadly criss-cross of live steel.
You'll spill everything, and beg me to make you spill more.
"Is that right?" she wonders, with that signature sharp smile. "I remember the last time I begged someone. Dinnae much care for it, so whatever you want from me, you're going tae have tae try and take the hard way."
The point of her blade meets the wet squelch of muscle and the hard scrape of bone, when skin and blood vessels part like a red sea when she drives her full weight to let it slice along his palm. It is only his grip that stops her from spilling actual black blood, a disappointing scarlet blossoming over fine steel. It holds nothing special, nothing like the charge of sorcery coating his own saber, but the craftsmanship is fine, its edges honed and primed to end lives when she feels the need. In the last few years, she has only bared her sword but twice. There are only so many ways to fire an ARM, but the technique in which one wields a sword is always telling, speaking deeply of the past and the ephemeral stuff that makes up her tattered soul.
"And like I told you before, luv...I dinnae take kindly tae people who take from me."
Blood slides along the length of her longsword, but to keep it within his grip would be folly. For all of his many wounds, she finds it difficult to break free. She tightens her grip on the hilt, curling her other set of fingers over it - God only knows when she had holstered her other pistol, but she is just as quick with her fingers as she is with her tongue. Her heartbeat escalates when she realizes that he intends to hold her there. To do...
...what?
She can taste it in the air, something dark and deadly over the horizon and panic rises within her along with the insistent staccato beats of her heart. Her eyes tighten on the corners and her lips curl to bare her teeth. It is another smile, but it is grim and determined, that gold-flecked stare narrowing dangerously. Does she not feel pleased to coat herself in him?
"I'm nae much for killing, luv," Cassidy replies. "But considering you're determined nae tae stop, it'd be my pleasure tae prove you wrong on that end." Like she said earlier, she wasn't a saint. "Nae going tae lie....it's been a long time since I enjoyed hurting somebody. Maybe you'll make me a happy lass, after all, before the night is through."
He raises his blade, and everything inside her goes on high alert. With that, she yanks her sword forcibly away from him, uncaring as to whether she slices his hand open in the process, crimson drops lost in the dark when she flicks it aside to dislodge the viscous fluid that threatens to crawl on her, into her. She swings it forward the moment it comes free.
Sparks fly when both blades clash. She manages to stop the sabre just before the curved end cleaves right into her skull. Blood wells from the cut he leaves on her forehead.
She laughs again. "Ay," she says, breathless. Pale cheeks flush rose, the rush of her near-death experience ignites her eyes and makes them downright luminescent in the dark. "You almost got me there."
Cassidy pushes up then, in a sudden show of strength born from that surge of adrenaline keying all of her instincts to fight for her life. The edge of her blade swings in a deadly arc, in an attempt to slice at his wrist. Lightning footsteps take her forward, throwing a feint on his left, before cocking back a fist to drive it straight into his eye.
"Try it again! And again! And again!" Punctuated by a flurry of slashes and ripostes. "Let's see what happens when you try tae take from me!"
She leaps forward there, ducking low. Tightening her grip with both hands, she twists the blade and sends it surging upwards in an effort to bisect him along the sternum.
"Show me how your heart beats, if you have one!"
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Blade Dance!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Cassidy Cain's Blade Dance for 45 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Pairs of eyes like knives meet eachother in the dark.
The pain is momentary, for someone like him. She can feel the blade scissoring against bone when she rakes it free of his bare hand, his sword dropping like a guillotine the moment she breaks contact. His blade slams into hers with lethal weight and force. Her movements are graceful, agile, slender body like the water lapping across the mountain. His strikes are jangled, crisp, and violent. They are not quite in line with reality, as lightning cut from the sky wholesale.
The guillotine never reaches her neck, and to think that it disappoints him is not an unexpected idea. Haunting eyes cast an unreal life over the flushing pallor of her cheeks. Her breath beating in her chest like a butterfly's wings, she still manages to speak. The unreal danger of even being this close to him is evident. His eyes widen, staring her down capriciously, his killing gaze flicking lightly over her grazing injury.
He almost got her. Almost. "How unfortunate..."
She fills the rest of the space between them with violence, breaking their grip of four hands with a whipping cut to his wrist. His stance breaks, his body faltering as he takes one step back after another, his blade immobilized as she punches him right in the face, a flurry of cuts slicing into him, his responses rendered impotent as he expends her anger and adrenaline on his body, emptying her indignation in metered blows, cutting him right down the middle.
His blade drops to the ground, his stance wide. His knuckles slack, his sleeves hanging limply at his side as his spine sags. His eyes stare into the sky. Blood weeping from the cut around his head and down his body, he soundlessly forms words. His lips work, his tongue never being brought to the affair. Of her skills, it would be of no consequence to suss out his words:
- This dance...will never end. -
He chokes, laughing soundlessly.
And then Isiris cuts himself in half, his body surging through the cruciform total of their mated cuts. His saber flares like a moon in the dark as he gives birth to himself, his viscera blooming in blackbirds. He bursts free, coming for her. In that vertiginous instant, it would be fatal to try and determine what part was real and what part was not.
"...initiate phantasmal surge."
The endless black has its limits. The killer's moongilded blade does not. He comes after her like a harvester mowing grass, each step formed and perfect. He could have been a general in Gebler, the Solarian influence on his blade so clear in his moves. But while others were lucky to cast a small gout of flame in concert with their blades, he is something else. He fights in this space as if she were a hundred men, his blade blooming out in great waves of black. The cutting force flays the black, slamming into very real barriers--and carrying right through them. Crippling force shears the infinite space, causing iridescent motes to crawl across the affected zones with each stroke. Slowly, parts of the shopfront tear away, crumpling into the ground around the tiny building.
The illusion cast by the feather she touched before begins to break down, weakened by disbelief and discare. The seemingly infinite around them is quite finite, once that man releases the full breadth of his attacks. They have been fighting in circles around the same room, again and again. Now they are fighting in the wreckage of that room, as the abnormalties in the nominally seamless black break down, revealing the darkened storefront again, section by sparking section. The nightmare agent cuts into the walls far outside of his steel's range, his flaying blade leaving great black angry shear marks wherever he goes. They are wounds in the earth, and as if the earth itself could bleed, arms of pale shadow-dripped energy seep from old wood and dirt alike, reaching from the wounds and grasping impotently at whatever presents itself.
If she is cut into, those arms will reach from her wounds and try to strangle her directly.
It does not feel like a dream. Not anymore.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Phantasmal Surge!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain critically Guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Phantasmal Surge for 15 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
How unfortunate...
"Ay," Cassidy agrees, her tone light and easy through her narrowed, determined gaze and the teeth-baring grin on her lips. "It is. If you had only come sooner, luv. If only."
Her sword sweeps in a practiced motion, and when she feels danger rise again, she dances several steps backwards, the silver point of her weapon inscribing a sideways parabola in the air when she returns to her stance and when her movements stop, she has switched from a two-handed grip to a one-handed one, long, pale fingers curled securely on the hilt. Blood trickles from the cut on her forehead, slipping in a thin, crimson rivulent along the side of her face, a single drop clinging to the delicate line of her jaw. The diagonal slash he has scored into her back burns like a thousand suns. Her heart beats like a war drum within her chest and it takes everything in her not to be swept away by the sheer high of it. Every nerve inside her feels like a livewire, fire and electricity rushing through each, a circuitous loop reaching every fiber of her being. The urge to laugh, to throw her arms wide and spin around like a whirling dervish assails her, but to give into the insanity of it is to give him what he needs.
And as she said before, she is not a charitable soul.
"Where were you," she wonders, breathless and exhilarated, every stitch in her expression reflecting his laughter, her own more implied in the look of her than actually heard. "In the years when I wanted tae die?" Her virid stare casts upwards, only briefly, as if to address some silent cosmic witness to the proceedings. "How typical of you, you stingy bastard."
The space warps again, around the Gebler agents. In a flurry of midnight avians, he bursts free, saber clutched in his fingers and his own crimson life blossoming from the spaces in which she has cut him. As he moves, as he fights, the darkness shatters, bleeding away into bits of black ether, revealing the empty room she had stepped into and the ruin they have caused within. The yawning abyss in which he has trapped her is gone, leaving nothing but pure, unadulterated violence in its wake.
With a resound laugh, as Death himself approaches, she dashes forward to meet him.
Black energy shears off bits of her clothing; it tears at her sleeves, the tops of her breeches, her protective vest, exposing parts of the metallic framework that provides unexpected protection on the most tender parts of her. He leaves his own marks, slashes, nicks and cuts that sting, but nothing so significant that it actually deters her movement towards him. Her sword remains crossed in front of her, swinging to slip in between torrents, to parry and cut through the waves she can't evade, and once he's within range...
"I told you earlier tae take what you want before I take sommat from you," she tells him, skidding sideways and twisting into the arc. Her pupils shrink. Her smile widens back into that wild, reckless, relentless expression.
Despite the injuries she has already suffered, her greed and the wild, fiery storm the prospect of being made to beg and taken has generated all culminate in a blur of motion - of crimson red fabric and dark leathers, of pale-gold tresses unfurling at her wake like gilded streamers. Her blade flashes from all directions, seeking to cut, stab, impale and eviscerate, working figure eights around him as her footwork nimbly navigates her around the mess they've made together, treading over the splashes of his blood and her own, leaving streaks soaking into ruined wood. He is even more dangerous up close, and when the distance dwindles between them, every cell within her practically vibrates with anticipation. And suddenly, just underneath another sweep of that bladed arm...
"I think I'll take your heart."
Her revolver spins into her other hand, and fires those glowing red slugs in near point-blank range at his chest.
GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action!
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with The Way Out!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Cassidy Cain's The Way Out for 80 hit points!
GS: Cripple! Statuses applied to Isiris Shango'Ra!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
He tears down one world.
Then he tears down the next.
All to lay out the road for her to come to him.
"Where have I been?" he asks. "Waiting for you."
By the time the nightmare weaver's blade finally lowers, the storefront is shattered entirely, great scything lines of angry black forming the failure line for entire cross sections of the building, halos and pyramidal chunks of wood and glass slipping from the run down building whole and crumpling at the front of its facade. And in the face of it, she runs to him.
Her blade sketches a labyrinth of violence, the mazelike trail the point of her sword makes driving him back. His own saber ricochets off of hers in song, the tones of clashing steel gaining a particular harmony from the resonance, speed and sharpness of the blades. Black light flares from his saber as he locks it with her unfolding blade, his coat whirling with the movement, making his defenses indistinct, strokes sometimes meeting steel, and other times falling away into a patch of night cast by his body. They are inked now in the moonlight cast from the sisters overhead, former agents of the sky meeting one another in clash after clash.
All pretense cast aside, the killer snaps his blade forward, reality slowly coalescing into his eyes when he catches her revolver by the barrel with the blade of his weapon, battering the thing out of the killing radius with sheer force alone, as if it were nothing more than another sword for him to break. The bullet slam into his lower half, ripping free a momentary honest blood. Is it truth? Is he truly thinking of it? He moves fast in that whirling moment--faster than his calm would have one believe.
"Will you take my heart," he wonders aloud, his voice still the same unflappably eerie calm. The man who bleeds from a thousand cuts, with a hole in his head and in his waist, the man with the bleeding hands, the one who fell and the one who stood, he never raises his voice an octave. His eyes, those bright, painful eyes glimmer as he moves against her, rhythmically terminating his whirling defense and her gunfire carnival by kicking out a heel to force her to sacrifice position or have her instep broken. Then, lowering his body through the annals of pain, he raises his blade, aiming the very point at Cassidy, crossing one hand over the other, the cutting edge held at an angle to his body to threaten almost every point of attack. The stance makes him appear all the world like an angry scorpion.
She will recognize it, undeniably, as a Solarian assassination stance, used by only the smallest fraction of Gebler's special forces.
"That, I give to you freely."
He steps forward, his first few steps prefacing the brutal surge of motion he displays as he rips through the precious remaining space between them. There is no time to think. The castling position of the blade was such that any evasion to the left or the right would be followed up with a killing slash. Every agent who knew the particular stance used it slightly differently, and the relentless tactical nature of the thing was such... well. There are mass graves filled with the bodies of those who have attempted defense, only to have guessed wrong.
But standing still means that the agent will split her exposed metals and bury his blade up to the hilt in her chest.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with The Promised Gate!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain critically Guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's The Promised Gate for 30 hit points!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes Cover! He gains 50 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Where have I been? Waiting for you.
"Hnh. I bet you say that tae all the lasses."
Cassidy manages to buttress herself with her modified sword, a calm center in the middle of a black hurricane when the storefront shatters behind her, wood, glass and awning exploding out into the thankfully vacant street. She advances when he steps back and around her, difficult to follow with the way his coat billows about him, but her eyes are sharp and like some manner of quick, relentless predator, they latch onto the sight of his free-flowing blood. Sparks fly when his thrumming blade meets her own - spartan, compared to whatever sorcery coats his blade, but more than deadly enough when placed in the right hands. And at the moment, the right hands are her own.
He successfully knocks away her revolver - a gift from the same artifact hunter who had once tried to impress upon her the value and immortality of history, and the muzzle discharges hot lead in a place blocked from view by the way he twists away from her most devastating blows. The cuts he has left on her burn, like hundreds of lashes left on her skin. She tries not to think about all the treatments she will have to give herself to eradicate them all before they leave permanent scars, for at some point, she intends to erase this encounter off her body, though it is undeniably an indelible part of the roadmap of her tumultuous life. Blood rills into her red shirt; a fitting color to hide it. Against the scarlet hue, the spots could be anything.
After another resounding clash, they whirl away from one another. The blonde breathes hard, her tortured exhalations coalescing into spectral mists against the unforgiving cold of a desert's evening. Her eyes widen when he closes the distance with faster-than-lightning quickness. Her own death rises to embrace her.
The folding blade crosses defensively in front of her, braced on the other end by her free hand, having holstered Noah's revolver somewhere at the small of her back. The forward drive of his body sends her skidding backwards, boots leaving unmistakeable grooves on wooden slats. Blood seeps out from wounds forced to remain open once more as wild green eyes meet cool ice blue irises between lengths of wicked steel. She feels the jagged edges of the steel skeleton hidden within her corset-vest dig into her flesh, from where he has rent it apart, as if flaying a body made of flesh.
Once again, she manages to avoid the worst of it.
That, I give to you freely.
"Ach, luv," she murmurs, her foot suddenly rising, leg bent at the knee in an attempt to drive her heel into his groin, dragging her blade along his in the process and sending blue-white sparks flying against his face.
"It's nae as exciting if you just give it tae me."
A hand hooks behind her, fleet fingers scooping up a stool and sending it flying towards the Gebler agent, and through the sailing wood, that same hand whips the revolver back out again and fires two more shots, aiming to send both bullets through the flying stool and into her opponent. And unlike her usual wont, she aims high - where his face would be.
GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action!
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Sucker Shot!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
DC: MISS! Isiris Shango'Ra completely evades Sucker Shot from Cassidy Cain!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The killing charge slams into the rogue's body and blade like a freight train. It is only the skill of the slightest rejection by her thinner blade that keeps him from splitting her steel in half, her body driven backwards by the assault. He steps into it -- trademark to the killing thrust of that particular style -- and whirls to pursue, his steel slamming against hers again and again. The battle has lost all sense of slow torment, the whirling clashing motions of the two long since having abandoned reason and wit.
The rills of her protective cagewear have been as mangled as his coat has been mottled with red. Each in turn looks as if they were attacked by some beast in the night. It wouldn't be an entirely inaccurate guess.
History is a bloody, merciless thing, something that conjures monsters.
And the longer they battle, the further back in history they go.
The killer turns his leg in the depths of the whirl, a split second before Cassidy's heel slams into where his groin would be. Despite his coat making him appear several size classes larger, he is not a grand target. But motion and strength are independent of size, and his weight shifts perfectly, expertly, throwing his knee forward, down, then up in a gambit to throw her weight off of her remaining leg. It is enough to throw her off balance, enough to knock a less graceful target to the ground, and that would have been the story of it. She is not so easily cut.
One hand thrusts out at the flying stool, his body breaking into pieces as the stool slams into him, chewed up and eroded by bullets, his grey-red coat folding in on itself as the fragments of the stool fall into it, the bullets cutting through the fabric, biting off waves of black that split off into smoky motes, wings of dark unfurling from a hundred directions as the nightmare conjurer surges through the attack almost entirely, fluidly appearing amidst the flock, making his form indistinct, hard to target. As the birds surge into the sky, striped shadows surge across the battlefield as well. He takes the halo of light from one of the moons, folding it around his wrist as he opens a hand. The moonlight's motes appear at 22 degrees from his wrist as the crows surge. Finally, he opens a hand, levelling it on Cassidy.
"You deserve everything I give to you," he explains mildly.
And then he fires a spear of imagined moonlight faster than the eye can see. It pierces through the building. It pierces through the adjacent ruins. It pierces through the rocks, the dirt, the grass. As far as the eye can look on a clear day, that is how far the droplet of propelled moonlight will go, travelling entire fields in an eyeblink. If Cassidy is between his hand and the place where the light ends, her body is simply forfeit.
The moon's glow can be harsh to those it does not favor.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Demiselene!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: CRITICAL! Cassidy Cain takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Demiselene for 210 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
She misses and it could cost her.
Cassidy might not be easily cut but her defenses are compromised and she knows it. The alarms scream inside her as she pushes her body in an attempt to get away from the last strike. Because she knows that it's true. She deserves everything she gets from him. She didn't have to follow him, taunt him, play the game. She could have ignored the feather and the girl, but she didn't.
Everything inside of her sings, of pain and the sheer high of never feeling so alive until moments like these when her life hangs in the balance. It flashes before her eyes, in all of its riotous color. Her inevitable demise cuts through the air and scores towards her like molten moonlight. She crosses her blade before her.
It is not enough to save her footing, but it is enough to save her life.
The force of it launches her off her feet, sends her bowling over, her body crashing through furniture and shattering them at her wake. Rotting, damaged wood explodes around her in a torrent of splinters as she bounces, as steel snaps over her corset. She rips through the wall and tumbles into the other room, but like a cat she manages to somehow get on her feet mid-somersault, grinding her bootheels and sinking low on her knees. Blood blossoms from gouges on her shoulder.
Sweat pours from her temples, crimson stains her teeth. Her opponent lies beyond the hole she had just made.
She takes another one of her grenades and with shaking fingers, she lobs it through the opening. Her revolver spins back out and fires a single slug towards the incendiary as it flies towards him.
The discharge of that one, desperate bullet cracks like a sonic boom through the sudden silence.
GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action! 100 Temporary HP gained! All statuses cleared!
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Sucker Shot!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Cassidy Cain's Sucker Shot for 111 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The spell was one of his most simple, one of the killing blows he had learned long before the fall, along with several other techniques. Back then, they had learned several simple techniques created by geniuses, repeated in drills over and over again until they were refined into perfect killing techniques. But there was something different about the spells that he initiates. Something different, something blasphemous and warped, as if the same military and refined techniques were bent and warped in an Ether that matched nothing else the sorcerers knew of or were comfortable with.
The killer straightens as Cassidy is blown clear into the next room by his moonlit blast. The refraction of her blade forked some of the force from his spell, prisming the lightspeed attack into a spray that sheared through various sections of the building left standing. She struggles to remain standing, her body beginning to tire. But stand she still does, and fight she still does.
Exquisite.
The grenade sails through the hold, and blasts wide as she triggers an airburst with deft aim. The hole is blasted through with incendiary force, flames eating the rest of the far room. She uses the fact that she's in a different room to make use of her explosives. He knows this much, and yet obscene blue eyes have just a second to look up towards it as it flares bright in the air, flood filling the room with fire.
It is interesting, how the flame takes on a sound of its own, once it cuts through a building. Fierce and unforgiving, it is unsurprising as to why the ancient ones called it a roar.
"Do you know ... why ... you were chosen, Cassidy?" he asks.
The flames around him turn black, churning. They gain a chittering, cackling demeanor, as tongues of flame flit free from the fire, becoming blackbirds who flutter into the open sky. He emerges from the curtain, as if he had never even attempted to evade it, leaving his life to faith. Everywhere he steps, the flames turn black, shivering and spreading diseased black veins in his wake. The fires he walks through no longer obey normal physics, their kindling raw and chaotic, like a freshly bleeding wound. He steps through them, his coat trailing tongues of the horrific fire. His body trails smoke, and flame. She struggles to stand, and though he is burned, stabbed in a hundred places, with a bullet wound directly to his skull and trailing blood as if it were a king's court cloak, his gait never. falters. He walks with purpose, and disastrous intent as he bears down on Cassidy.
He calls her by name, as if he had heard her before.
"You were the one who followed. Even though you knew what it meant for you. Even though you knew it could be the end of you. You still came to me. As if it were predestined, you and I. I have fought sinners and priests, heroes and self-styled devils. Whether a god or a devil, they fall all the same."
He brandishes his blade, suggestively proffering it between them.
The cutting edge turns up, menacing edge shining as it catches the moonlight.
"But some fight to live. And others fight to die."
"You stayed, when you could have run. You came to me." he considers absently. An attack never materializes as he thinks, his blade merely planted there, point teasing at the fibers of a burning timber. As he says this, he begin to fold out of space, the smoke he trails beginning to break into sections, like the pages from a book. Slowly, the dismantling trail begins to eat away at his physical form, pages from a book ripped free and floating away on the wind. First, his free arm and coat peel away into nothing. Even as he does so, he continues. "You want to take something from me..."
"But I have already taken from you."
By this time, there are more pages and birds in the sky than man. Even so, his sharp, obscene eyes continue to stare. It is hard to scrub the idea from them from the ground, from the glass, from the wood. "It would be pointless to continue from here. Your body is not able to withstand it. Your mind is not able to withstand it. But you want to. For my own sake, hold it tight in your heart. Come to me, over and over again, if needed. I am -Ra-, the one who fell. Find me."
"And as many times as is needed, I will make you real."
The last thing to flutter away into the dark is the light of his eyes.
That horrible, obscene light.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The explosion roars from the other room; a hand lifts to wipe the back of her knuckles against her mouth. Emerald eyes striated with gold gleam in the dark, watching intently as the red-gold tongues of fire shift to black. It tells her enough - that he is still alive, that he has managed to withstand the blast. And when the smoke parts like a curtain around him, he emerges, bloodied, shot and burned. He looks, if nothing else, worse than she does, but he manages to take his steps as if his own injuries have not taken a toll on him. He bleeds, however, crimson welling from his wounds and as she said before, if something bleeds, it can be killed.
Just because he does not feel pain, or manages to compartmentalize it well, does not mean that he isn't dying at every step he takes.
Her heart beats like a mile and she straightens up from her defensive half-crouch, planting a hand on her hip and arching a brow. Her stamina might not be endless, but her own bravado is a never-ending swell, lips curling upwards in an amused expression as brows perk upwards.
Do you know why you were chosen, Cassidy?
"Thought maybe you found me absolutely fascinating," she tells him, lifting her chin in a defiant angle. "Dinnae think I was all too far off the mark, otherwise you would nae be yielding. Nae one tae believe much in preordained destinies and I certainly lived half my life shitting on the very idea. But I s'pose it would nae be me, either, if I ruled it out. So, really, your guess is as good as mine, luv."
A wounded arm crooks at the elbow, fitting her hand somewhere at the small of her back, lashes lidding low over her eyes when he tells her that it is pointless to continue from here, that her body and mind couldn't withstand it, that he had already taken something from her. "I think," she begins, curling her fingers into the engraved revolver wedged there. "You oughtae let me be the judge of that." Her smile widens. "I'm, as always, ready tae gamble and you'll find out sooner rather than later that the fight in me is nigh-near endless. As it stands, the only thing you're taking from me, luv, is the satisfaction of ending this decisively, and between you and me, I like my odds."
In the end, his tangible form takes flight within the beats of a hundred obsidian wings, filtering out from the holes in the walls and ceilings surrounding them. As he fades from view entirely, she chuffs an exasperated exhale, rolling her head back to stare upwards at desiccated rafters pierced through by blue-white shafts of moonlight; no matter how vibrantly red it flows, blood looks black underneath it. It is all that is left of him, when body and spirit take to the skies.
And a name.
"Make me real, ay?" she murmurs in the dark. "I'm nae the one that's trying tae exist like a trippy fever-dream."
Slowly, the bloodied sword in her hand folds in, returning to its shortened knife-state. She wipes the blood clean, before sliding it carefully in its sheath, until the guard falls against the metallic edge of it with a click. Her fingers linger on the hilt, eyes staring down on it. Her amusement fades, leaving only an unreadable expression as she looks upon the rarely-used weapon.
A deadly instrument she tries her best never to use, and not just because of the secrets it could spill.
With a sigh, she turns, to slowly, gingerly, make her way out of the shattered building, and back into the city's beating heart.