[Rearing Stallion] White as Ash (Saelian)

[Arionyx]

1st Winter, 514AV “Slow down, Mirelle.” In the doorway of his dark stone home, Arionyx clasped his upper set of hands on a human woman’s shoulders, tilting his head to the side and downward in an attempt summon her green eyes back to his dark ones. “I can’t understand you. Take a breath.” In the midst of settling in for the evening, the Ethaefal had been idly sorting the chaos that had been his sewing kit when someone began frantically pounding at his door. After pricking himself with a needle and sending a mild curse into the air, he opened the door to find Mirelle, a fair weather friend he occasionally shared drinks with when the nights ran long. She was a pretty thing. Young, meek, dark haired. Arionyx’s preference, though little more than that. She wasn’t coherent this evening. Something had riled her and frightened her out of her wits. If Arionyx was going to make sense of her panic, she needed to stop and articulate. Her flurry of words had sounded like a random mix of common. Fortunately it was easy to calm her, and within a moment she was leaning against his chest. Lifting her away from him, lest she get any untoward ideas, Arionyx carried on his patient scrutiny and waited for her to explain. His lower left hand rose to nudge a strand of hair from his friend’s face. When she finally looked him, he smiled fractionally. “There. That’s better.” He let go of her shoulders and folded his upper arms over his chest. “Now, you saw a what?” “A Widow, Ari.” The very word made her cringe. Arionyx only narrowed his eyes, confused by the word. It took a moment for him to realize that she wasn’t referring to the traditional brand of widow. “At the Rearing Stallion. All gray and wicked and awful.” “Was he threatening you?” “She.” Mirelle shook her head. “And no. No, I dashed right out. I threw my drink too, but I don’t know if I hit it. Oh Gods, Ari, what if I made it angry?” Threw her drink? Arionyx glanced off for a moment in thought. Symenestra weren’t a welcome race in Syliras, but he might have been miffed too if someone had hurled anything at him. “Do you want me to have a look?” he asked with a pre-emptive sigh, having realized where this was heading. Mirelle nodded quietly, biting her lip. Arionyx sucked on his tongue for a moment, then glanced backward into his home. Well. He had nothing better planned. This was an unpromising start to winter. He faced forward again. “I could use some fresh air anyway. Go home Mirelle. Don’t worry about tonight. Good?” *** In apparent celebration for the changing of the season, now that the Watchtower gem had finally turned blue to signal the cusp of Winter, the Rearing Stallion boasted a thicker crowd than usual. Clothed in dark golds and drab, earthy tones, the four armed Eypharian slipped easily into the tavern beneath the bustle. He met eyes with one of the barmaids and offered a nod of familiarity, but lingered near the door for a moment as he looked over the Stallion’s patrons for the evening. Sunset hadn’t occurred more than two bells ago, so the dark had not fallen long enough to visit most of the Sylirans with its usual nocturnal lethargy. All of the best seats in the house were already taken, the bulk of the crowd having gravitated toward the warmly burning hearth. In a better mood, Arionyx might have bartered for a seat among them, but he wasn’t here purely for leisure tonight. The gray creature was not difficult to find in a tavern full of life and color. There were not many girls her age with hair so very ash white, nor black claws so wicked. She looked like a herald of Winter herself, beautiful in a sort of terrible way. A bronze skinned Eypharian with a six foot frame, the surface of him shimmering with gilt in the fickle firelight, appeared at the side of the Symenestra’s table. His regard for the girl was mercilessly cold, though dispassionately patient. A lower hand rested on the surface of the table while an upper arm crossed his torso. The arm’s sibling rested on top, so he could rub at his goatee. At first, as unabashed as he was, the Eypharian didn’t seem certain whether to talk to the Symenestra or devour her whole. “Pardon.” As if he hadn’t been standing there for a full chime. “I apologize for staring. I haven’t seen one of your kind in years. Do you mind if I join you, miss?”

[Saelian Ash]

Not fun. Saelian shivered as she stuck her overlong hands out from the warmth of her cloak, just far enough to wrap delicate digits tipped in black around the steaming mug of tea. She’d asked the serving girl specifically for a drinking vessel made of ceramic, so that the heat of the beverage could bleed through its sides, and lend its thermal energy to her cold hands, as well as her insides. Her fine, ashen eyebrows were drawn down into something akin to a frown. The trek across Kalea had been arduous, and fraught with far more peril than she had anticipated, even in her least optimistic moments before setting out from her homeland. The voyage across the sea had been horrible, and she hoped never again to have to set foot on a boat. Yet throughout her journey, that had spanned half a world and more than one season, she had been ever drawn forward by the beacon of what was, in her imaginings, a shining goal. Syliras. Famed city of stone. The walled fortress of the Windoak, and its adherents, the knights who maintained order, discipline and safety within those massively thick ramparts. For weeks and weeks, weary day upon weary day, the young Symenestra had clutched fiercely at that image, and the purpose of her sojourn to this foreign realm. In her mind, and in her heart, she felt it was a mission of great worth, and she endured the hardships and dangers of travel for the good of her race. Once she reached her destination, and could really set to the task she had undertaken, it would all be worth it. She was sure of it. Now, sitting in this noisome tavern, quivering with cold despite the roaring fireplace nearby, she felt… deflated. Here she was, the place she had set her sights on over a year ago, when she had first broached her desire to go on a Gleaning with her father, feeling slightly gloomy and very, very homesick. That was probably the true genesis of her upset and melancholy. True, Syliras was no shining gem of culture. Its veneer of civilization was thin indeed, not even as thick as the coating of grime that seemed to darken its already grey walls. But this hadn’t really come as a shock to the Symenestra. Vastly different from the hanging orbs and dangling silken ropes of Kalinor, Syliras was still much as Sae had expected. Prepped by her father, who had ample exchange with traders from all over the known world, she had fortified herself for the culture shock to come. But can anyone truly understand what it means to be in a new place, trying to adjust to calling it “home”, however temporary, until they are actually there? It was this thought primarily, that she was destined to stay here, possibly for quite some time, that had the girl rather distraught. Everything was so, so different, as expected but in ways she had not been able to grasp, until now. She missed her family terribly, and their house, and the city with which she was so familiar. She had checked herself into a tiny, flat, Spartan room at the Traveler’s Row, and it had been so depressing that she had fled its solitude, seeking something to drink, as the fare in this city was not well adapted to her digestive capabilities. She’d need to find employment, before her funds ran out. And she knew not a soul here, although she had quickly noted the wide eyed berth that most of the residents within the city walls had given her. She had thought she was prepared for that as well. But the reality was very much like a cold slap in the face. She was lonely, and discouraged and now full of self doubt, as to whether she was really up to this task. Would she let her family down? She just didn’t know. Light purple eyes were downcast, staring at the vapor that spiraled upwards from her cup, when a voice at her elbow made her jump, visibly. “Pardon. I apologize for staring. I haven’t seen one of your kind in years. Do you mind if I join you, miss?” Those amethyst orbs turned and tilted upwards, taking in the height of the man, or being, beside her, though truthfully, if she had risen from the stool she would have been able to look him in the eye, easily. But her gaze dropped quickly, back to his shoulders and the many arms that seemed to protrude almost comically from his loose fitting garb. Almost comically, though Sae could tell from that haughty expression that here was one unused to being laughed at – not that she felt like being merry in that way in any case. At least the startling manifestation of such a creature was enough to bring her out of her funk, for a moment anyway, and her eyes widened in surprise that he should ask permission to join her. She knew him for what he was, having seen drawings of his race in books, and her heart beat a little faster to think that here she was, getting to meet one in the flesh. Her mood lifting the more, feeling a flush of mild excitement, though no rose bloomed on her pale cheeks, she nodded, quickly, and with an elegant wave of a hand removed from its temporary, warm perch, she motioned to the other stool beside her. ”Yes, sit, please,” she replied, in passable, though accented, Common. Her attention diverted from her feelings of isolation, her eyes brimmed with curiosity, and she blurted out rather awkwardly, ”You are Eypharian? You go to Kalinor?” Sae chewed on her pale lips for a moment, as she lamented softly, ”It is my home. I arrive here, today. It is a big time since I left.”

[Arionyx]

Seeing that this Symenestra wasn’t quite as vicious or evil as it had been purported, Arionyx nodded his head in gratitude and pulled out a chair for himself. His lower arms set themselves neatly on the table, while the upper two rested upon their elbows, laced their fingers, and created a place for the Eypharian to place his tufted chin. His dark, piercing eyes scoured over the Symenestra with a sort of thorough observation, inspecting her as if the woman were an intricate carving in a marble wall. This particular ‘Widow’ was nothing like the Symenestra the Ethaefal had known in decades past. He had expected confidence, self possession, cleverness, and a predatory light in her eyes. Rather, the traveler in front of him looked lost, alone, and axious. She had been so lost in her own drink that she had barely noticed his approach, if she even noticed him at all. Instead of the ire that Arionyx anticipated, he began to cultivate a sense of pity for the girl. Either she was lost, or she was more clever than he could have anticipated. “Welcome to Syliras, in that case.” The Ethaefal raised a black eyebrow, confused by the Symenestra’s question. Her grasp of Common wasn’t entirely solid, and he wasn’t certain how much that was obscuring her meaning. At least her accent was pleasant. “I am Eypharian yes. At the moment, anyhow. My name is Arionyx.” Without lifting his chin out of his hands, Arionyx offered one of his lower hands to the girl in an offer of a cordial shake. In Ahnatep, it might have been considered rude to offer anything but ones uppermost limbs in a gesture of civility, but he had quickly found that few in Syliras seemed to make a distinction. “I have not been to Kalinor.” Arionyx attempted to answer the girl’s thinly worded inquiry. “Nor do I have any intention of visiting it. A cavern city, correct? Not my favored sort of place, I’m afraid.” Among the fifteen hundred other reasons to avoid a race of monsters. “What brings you all the way out to the Fortress City? You have a name, I venture?”

[Saelian Ash]

Saelian herself didn’t quite grasp the stranger’s meaning, when he said he confirmed that he was Eypharian “at the moment.” She attributed her lack of understanding, though, to her own imperfect mastery of the language they conversed in, and let it go. Perhaps during the course of their exchange she would come to know what he meant. What was more important in that moment was that he had welcomed her, and given his name, two hopeful signs that here might be one who did not look aghast and then look away when he saw clearly what she was. Sae was quite proud of her race, and felt no shame in her appearance. It was nice, though, to be greeted and not shunned. When he lifted one of what she now had counted as four total hands, unless he be hiding more under his clothing, she extended her own, with its filed talons and long, spidery fingers, upon which the calluses worn by years of training as a weaver would have been apparent to all but the most insensitive of touches. She took his, golden in hue, like Sina herself, and replied, “I call myself Saelian Ash.” The name, Symenos as it was, might have sounded quite sibilant to his foreign ears, but it was also pronounced with a slightly melodic cadence. “Yes, a cave. That is my city, Kalinor. A beautiful cave, under the earth. Very big.” Too big in fact. Many, many of the structures, erected with the optimistic hope that they would all be occupied, remained empty, devoid of families, for her race was one on the brink of extinction. But to the girl, it was home and she had found it lovely. “It is sad, that you do not come there.” Even as those simple words fell from her pale lips, the idea was sparked in her head, that perhaps she could persuade this many limbed creature to do just that, his adamant assertion to the contrary. She had been down hearted, but it hadn’t taken much to rekindle the verve of her initial enthusiasm for this journey, and its ultimate purpose. For was not that the exact reason she had come so far? To convince those she encountered that her race was not one of murderous seducers and kidnappers, but one of refinement and elegance and intelligence? She was perhaps jumping the gun here, thinking the very first person she met would be the one she might induce to take that long, arduous journey back through Kalea. But perhaps she could be forgiven her excitement over having someone who was at least willing to talk to her. “A cave is a fine home. I regret to leave,” she opined wistfully, her eyes tarrying to the fireplace beyond him for a moment, and then flicking back, with a purpose lighting their jeweled depths. “I come here to learn, about those who do not live there. And to teach too, about my home. To…” She thought about what word she wanted and came up with, “…share. Knowledge. I come for knowledge.” Yes, she had left out the minor detail about trying to take someone back to Kalinor with her. She wasn’t completely stupid, when it came to gaging how these outlanders would react if hit with that right off the bat. Her father had told her. The traders that came to their city came voluntarily. Apparently very few others did. Sae’s gaze dropped to contemplate Arionyx’s several arms, and she observed, “You are from the desert? You like it there? Hot. And with much sunlight. This you like?” her head tilted just slightly as she asked curiously, “Why come to the city of rock walls, where there is not much sun?”

[Arionyx]

When the Symenestra retracted her hand, a graceful if callused thing, long, slender, and tipped with claws, Arionyx turned his own hand toward himself. A strange appendage for a strange being, and an unusual sensation. The skin of various races did have their strange nuances and textures. “Well met, Miss Ash.” He rubbed the insides of his fingers over his palm, then pulled his arm back to lie with its brother. Yes, a cave. Arionyx’s cool gaze flipped upward again. Although he wasn’t emotive, the Ethaefal appeared to be a rapt listener. Despite the brevity of her description, he watched Saelian in front of him as if she were giving a dissertation on economy of the Alahea Empire before it was destroyed in the Valterrian. At the last of it, when she expressed some sorrow that Arionyx did not go to Kalinor, he raised both of his eyebrows and privately smirked. Saelian had just met Arionyx. Perhaps it was her accent, but he found it mildly charming that she seemed personally disappointed. While Saelian had left her home, it seemed her mission was a scholarly one. To teach and to be taught. Noble, although perhaps a bit much to place on shoulders as narrow and young as Saelian’s. Despite his reason for coming, Arionyx found himself sympathetic to the Symenestra. She didn’t seem very much like a threat to him. From the corner of his eye came a figure swathed in blue. A barmaid had made her way to their table. That was fast, considering the crowd. Arionyx stiffened and straightened his posture in acknowledgement, but kept his attention on Saelian until she was finished speaking. “Ah, what a question. A moment.” The Eypharian turned away, quietly delivering his order for an ale—‘something dark’, he said—and smiled courteously as the barmaid withdrew to find him a mug. Arionyx placed himself back into his conversation with the Symenestra with a certain, deliberate pace. “I did like the desert. I love the sunlight.” He really did. “I lived there for a very long time. Unfortunately…” Arionyx turned a palm to the ceiling. “Some things aren’t meant to be. I settled here after the Djed Storm. The desert lost its meaning for me. I am starting over.” It wouldn’t be his first time. The Eypharian placed three of his arms in a tangle in front of him, but still held his chin aloft with his upper right hand. Syliras wasn’t an ideal alternative to Eyktol’s steady sunlight. To start with, his home had no windows. The lack of sunlight felt like deprivation and starvation. As a result, Arionyx had found himself eating more and working near the windows of the Elegant Weave. However, he could no longer find contentment in Ahnatep. “It is very hard to leave home,” Arionyx observed, his dark eyes making quiet assesments of the Symenestra’s strange form. She looked starkly out of place in this warm atmosphere, and he found himself wondering what ‘home’ would look like for her. “I miss mine very much. How long do you plan to stay abroad until you go back? Did anyone else travel with you?”

[Saelian Ash]

Saelian listened attentively too, relaxing as the conversation seemed to progress in a fairly normal vein. She was in fact quite eager to learn, about these other beings. The world held many races, many places, and many secrets too, she was sure. It was exciting to consider the prospect of learning first hand about such things, and Arionyx was proving to be, unwittingly, a balm to her uncertainties and doubts. His arms alone were reason enough to keep her gaze fixed upon him, as he spoke of his desert home, and his love for it, and his loss. Once again he used something akin to an idiom that she had trouble translating in her head, “lost its meaning.” But she listened without interrupting until he had paused and put another question to her, and a second, to which she replied readily. “I stay until Spring becomes Summer. Or maybe I stay until Fall. Travel in the Unforgiving in Winter is hard, very hard. Spring too has many storms and sometimes snow.” Her expression reflected her opinion of the difficulties of traveling over snowy mountain passes, with a dip in her finely arched brows. Once again, she made no elusion to the ultimate purpose of her journey, and that she might tarry even longer than the Fall, should she be unsuccessful in talking someone into returning with her. In truth, Sae didn’t even want to contemplate that possibility, the dilemma of extending her leave of absence another two or three seasons beyond the next summer, or the ignominy of coming back empty handed. On top of that, it was a given that Naevena, her older sister, would be getting married at some point in the near future. Sae would be heart broken to miss such a seminal event in her family’s life, even though it would signal her sister’s eventual death by birth. Although Sae’s own Lhavitian mother had been “procured” by her father expressly for the purpose of procreation, that was only because he’d had no luck securing a second wife of his own race, after his first perished giving birth to Naevena. Valayin was a firm believer in the duty his daughters would owe their people, to sacrifice their lives at an early age in order to produce one pureblooded son or daughter. Both girls had been raised to know and accept that this was their destiny, and to face their gruesome fate with pride, looking upon it as the ultimate honor to do their part to keep their race from extinction. There would be no Harvesting of a surrogate mother for their children. Sae did not believe in such a craven way around what nature had decreed. If her own future husband would take another wife after her death, that was acceptable, understandable. More children were needed. That was a bald fact. But she knew and acknowledged her duty to contribute to the dwindling gene pool, and when the time came, she too would die giving birth to her sole offspring. It was just how things were, and she had never considered that there were any other alternatives for her, or Nae. None of that morbid reality passed through her mind at this moment, though, no more than the realization that she would continue to breathe, or that the sun would rise in the morning. Her mind had already moved on from thoughts of how long she might need to stay in Syliras, to Aronyx’s second question, and she went on to answer that as well. “I am alone in the journey. This is the way, for my people. It is the way to age, to be an adult, not a child. It is common. Kalinor is difficult to come to?” She looked at him quizzically, wondering if he was understanding her. “Traders come. But others do not arrive. We travel out. We go to other cities, to learn. To share. We go alone, to learn, about ourselves too.” Her hand came up to her chest, which she tapped at lightly with her black nails, emphasizing what her words struggled to convey. A journey of self-discovery, wherein the young Symenestras would return with a much broader knowledge of the world. Some did so for the express purpose of thus being better equipped with such knowledge to have a successful Harvest when next they ventured forth. But this was not Saelian’s goal. If she was a pawn in her race’s attempt to do some PR and clean up their bloody image, she was naively unaware of her role in the campaign. In a much more pedantic tone, she mused, “I must work, to stay. I have only little money after travel. And I must find a room. I have a room, now. Traveler’s Row. But I think it is…sad. I want a pretty room. But first I must locate working.”