Closed Respect (Matthew)

[Razkar]

"Wait, what-No!"

Razkar's disbelief disarmed him better than any opponent could. He had just enough time to stutter and burble those three words before Matthew was streaking from his side, thick and sculpted arms pumping, hard thighs pounding-

It was over in a couple of ticks, but Razkar would reflect after that it seemed to last bells. And it was such a magnificent beast, too. Fixing his eyes on it, he was struck by the sheer... poise, of the creature. Tall, lean of limb with thick ruff under a grey snout. It looked up in surprise, expecting to see some young challenger to his territory and instead...

Well. Something of the same, I suppose.

Razkar didn't blame the poor bastard when it just froze. How would he reacted if... an insane goat or a deranged chicken suddenly charged from the undergrowth at him? A creature that he'd always associated with killing from a distance, with curious sticks held in their paws... but now charging headlong at him, leaping-

Oh, fuck me...

"Get out of the way!" He bellowed, snapped out of the sheer absurdity of the moment by the flash of those talons in the afternoon rays of Syna. He'd seen men gored brutally by bucks who didn't die easily; Matthew's beauty would not protect him from such a fate. "Stay down! Give me a clear shot, damnit!"

"I've got him!"

"That's what he fucking th-"

Then Matthew was pounded onto the ground, landing with a ripple of snow and sludge exploding into the air, and Razkar never got a chance to finish his bark of annoyance because the buck straightened up-

-with the human on the ground-

-and he fired.

Were it the shot he'd been intending - patient, steady, fired from cover and with his target unaware - Razkar was certain it would have caught the buck smack in the throat and he would have bled out quick. But that was not the case. He was rising, moving, bow shifting constantly, trying to find an opening, and he had only a tick to still it, aim, loose-

-and the buck roared in agony as the barbed arrow buried into its flank, scarlet stream splashing into the dirty, churned-up snow. Leaping high but landing heavily, it bounded away, smashing shrubs to twigs. Razkar cursed softly, venomously, running over to Matthew and crouching even as he notched a fresh arrow.

"Are you badly hurt?" He asked hurriedly, looking Matthew up and down quickly before answering his own question. "Doesn't look it, more is pity-"

His hand moved fast, accurate and merciless. It grabbed Matthew by the collar and jerked him upward, the heat of his gaze now burning close and personal into the harlot's blue orbs. Razkar's brows crushed down on his black eyes as he snarled.

"Do not do anything so stupid again, boy. Now Caiyha's child suffers. Now we must chase it down as it bleeds out, slowly, painfully, in pain and in terror, life slipping away."

He dropped the harlot and reminded himself it did make their job easier, too. Much easier to follow bright scarlet that faint, frozen tracks. The trees and undergrowth still rustled and crashed, though, fleeing buck moving fast... but already slowing, by the sound of it.

"Move!"

Like a dart he launched after the stricken beast, following the trail now written in blood not hooves, arrow notched and half-drawn, face stamped with fury and lips moving in a rapif whisper.

Blessed Caiyha, grant my feet a swift path in your domain. Allow me to atone for my sorry partner's error. Grant me the speed and skill to end his pain.

[Matthew]

Stupid. He was already aware of his mistake by the time he had hit the ground. In his eagerness to impress Razkar, he had completely abandoned common sense and gone with the first insane idea. He hadn't considered that the deer could simply bolt, or that it could lower its head and gore him through. He had only thought to hold it in place while easily fired the killing blow, which was the idea of a child. His mistake had been the desire to impress. He was beyond that. He rarely felt it. The fact that the Myrian made him feel it was a wonder in itself, and he wasn't exactly sure how he felt about it. Whatever the case, if the looming animal decided to trample him or stab him with its sharp antlers, he wouldn't blame it. It would be the smart thing to do, unlike what Matthew had just done. Instead the buck screamed, whipping around as an arrow buried into his flesh, blood spraying and a sprinkle of it staining Matthew's hand. It blurred away, snapping twigs and bursting through low-hanging limbs, the harlot quickly staggering to his feet. He had barely managed to start getting up before the Myrian was there, whipping him up all the way in a motion that the harlot didn't even manage to see. He was like Kaie when it came to physical movements, all a blur of motion that Matthew didn't process until it was much too late. He only nodded quickly at Razkar's hissed commands, completely accepting what had been told. The Myrian was completely right. He didn't quite understand the part about Caiyha's child, but even his socially inept mind understood that now was not the time. They ran, Matthew barely keeping up, darting through underbrush and leaping over fallen trunks. His only saving grace was the sight of the buck ahead, now on the ground, having hit one two many fallen limbs and low-hanging branches. It had crumpled into a small pile, eyes holding none of the defiant shine that they had before, instead darting about with terror and pain as its body shuddered with labored breaths. It was no doubt in pain, and Razkar's previous words became clear. He pitied the animal, respected it as a gift, and was angry that it had been put through such a torment. A question sprung up, and Matthew would wait until the animal had been slain before he phrased it to the Myrian, unless the Myrian wanted him to take part in the killing for whatever reason. Matthew doubted he would even reach Razkar before the animal was slain and approached. The Myrian was quite fast. When he did reach him though, then the question would slip out. "You are a mercenary, correct? If your target was wounded by you and ran, would you feel the same fury at yourself? Or is it different with... Caiyha's child?" The Goddess was obviously somewhat foreign to the harlot, with the way his calm speech briefly stumbled. The question was another one of morality, similarly innocent to the quiet questions he had uttered when they had interrogated the whore. More interesting was the way his face twisted for a brief moment, roaring with darkness and rage, eyes deep pits of swirling black and teeth rotted to the core. He only screamed a single word, but the word was not his own, spoken in the voice of something that wasn't of this world. "Monster!" Then his face was just as it had been before, curious and calm, the previous vision having never existed for anyone but Razkar.

[Razkar]

Forgive me...

Words from Razkar's childhood whispered through his mind as he beheld his and Matthew's botched, blood mistake. The scene was far too familiar for the memories not to seize upon it, crafting vines and swamp and tawny, spotty fur onto snow, dead pines and the brown coat of the panting creature lying on the...

Red. A mattress of it, a carpet. Oozing out from that ragged wound, the barbed arrow doing its job. Every branch and tree and leap the buck had hit or attempted, it just tore deeper into it. Now it had lost too much, and Razkar was suddenly a boy of thirteen summers, shamed and without skill, making up for his mistake.

Matthew's mistake. Not yours. You are correcting it.

"I agreed to his coming," Razkar murmured to himself, hearing the harlot crash closer to him, "I am responsible, too..."

Without a backward glance at the human, the Myrian started to march closer to the deer, face a grim mask, raising his bow, drawing as he moved, stopping perhaps ten feet away-

Black, agonized eyes stared at him, begged him, not understanding, not wanting anything but a surcease of agony.

Razkar's hand did not tremble. He would not fail the Green Goddess again.

"Go onto the next place," he whispered, "And find your peace."

The bow thrummed; the arrow whistled, then its song ended in an ugly thunk of metal and wood smashing into jelly, bone and muscle. Razkar was not yet an expert bowman, but at ten feet against a stationery target, he might as well have been. The arrow obliterated that staring eye, bursting it, burying in the buck's brain and ending its pain instantly. Razkar lowered the arrow, and his head along with it.

It was a gift, after all. Food and fur and the chance to better enhance his skills. But more respect was afforded to it than an enemy, simply because it wasn't one. It was just there. It was prey. And without respect for the prey, a hunter was nothing more than a murderer.

The Myrian sat down and got to work as Matthew walked over. First he used his gladius to cut around the places his arrows had pierced, widening the holes and working the barbs out. He washed them off and replaced them in his quiver.

"Do not waste anything." He said, without turning around, concentrating at the task at hand and unsheathing his kukri. "A very important rule for a hunter. The first one, in fact. Do not waste, do not take more than you need."

The steel flashed and he stabbed the blade into the buck's belly, just under its throat, sawing down the white underside fur until it stopped at its balls. He withdrew the blade and an ocean of stinking, steaming, squirming intestines flooded out of the hole, pouring from the eviscerated corpse like a dam hit by a catapult. The Myrian crinkled his nose and stepped aside, laboriously turning the creature over, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

"Right... now it gets messy..."

"You are a mercenary, correct? If your target was wounded by you and ran, would you feel the same fury at yourself? Or is it different with... Caiyha's child?"

Razkar didn't have to think about the question for long. With his hands and body focused on carving the fur from the buck, his mind was free to ponder the harlot's incessant queries. He put his kukri to one side and was slowly skinning the buck with his double-bladed dagger, moving the thinner, finer blade between fur and fat and muscle, few inches at a time, but always moving.

"Yes, I would, and yes, it is." He answered enigmatically and then smiled. "When I am hired as a sellsword-" he stressed the word, giving Matthew the more common name among "merks" for what they were "-I am hired to do a job, and do it well. Be it killing or defending. To meet an enemy and leave him alive, to flee and heal and then perhaps return... that is a dishonor. Not just as a mercenary, but as a Child of Myri."

His eyes met Matthew's again, filled with that steely, holy conviction that the harlot knew filled them when he spoke of his pride from his people and Goddess-Queen.

"We are the Chosen of the Goddess of War. We kill our enemies when we meet them. We do not chase them down like a dog after a rabbit. And Caiyha's children..."

That look morphed into something utterly unexpected. Gone and evaporated was the hardness, the certainty; replacing it was an old pain, a misty shame that Matthew's stupidity had brought into sharp light. Even his hands stopped at their task.

"I was thirteen summers, and hunting with my mother. I botched a shot at a deer... much like this one. She made me track it down myself, through the swamp. I killed it with my ax and... and just before I did, he looked at me. I saw all that..."

Razkar struggled for the word, and shook his head.

"... bleakness, that he felt. And I had caused it. Caiyha's children do not deserve to suffer so, not at our hands. We are required to hunt and kill them... but they do not choose to oppose us. That is why-"

His words choked off as he looked back up and Matthew's face became a nightmare. Eyes like whirling black holes, sparkless and daemonic. Teeth looking like jagged, tiny rocks, a Yukman in all but skin-tone, screeching one hateful word at him, blasting it out like a vomit of disgust-

-and Razkar reacted as he had been trained.

The Myrian threw himself over the corpse of the deer, grabbing at Matthew's throat with his free hand, the other pressed to his face-

-only to find a stunned and very normal-looking (well, perhaps normal wasn't the right word for the stunning harlot... the bastard) Matthew gazing up at him, eyes wide. But Razkar was not so easily dissuaded. In any other world, perhaps he might think it was adrenaline, or guilt, or some malady of the mind, anything. But he was on Mizahar. There the gods were real, not just invisible and inscubtable recipients for prayed, whose very existence was a matter of debate and conjecture.

There, they were real, and they meddled, and they were not often pleasent in their meddling. There, magic and djed were as real as water and the corpse under his heels, and what had dogged his steps for the whole morning might not even be his friend.

"What was that?!" He snarled, covering his fear as best he could with his anger. "Do not lie to me, human! Your face, it changed! I saw it! What was it?! What are you?! Answer me or by the dead gods and the living I will bury this thing in your eye..."

[Matthew]

"Sellsword." Matthew corrected himself quietly, not loud enough to interrupt Razkar's explanation of things. "Do not waste." Another verbal confirmation that he was listening, his eyes soaking in every step and every motion that Razkar went through. He cleaned the arrowheads, preserving them for later use. Barbed, perhaps to hook into the flesh easily? If someone tried to tug them out, then they would end up ripping a chunk out along with it. An oddly crooked knife, used to slice the belly of the beast open, steaming chunks of gore and blood slipping out. He was cleaning the inside of the animal. Matthew's eyes flitted over the different intestines, labeling them in his mind, repeating them back to himself in his head. Heart, liver, kidneys. Then he was skinning, cleaving fur from flesh, likely so he could put the warm material to good use later. They made coats and clothes with fur, did they not? Was flesh still attached to the fur? If it was dried, perhaps it could be woven into leather, made into a bag of some sort. He wasn't sure. He didn't really now how to craft anything from fur, he could only imagine. Dishonor, Child of Myri. One would only added to the unclear definition of the other word. Sure, they had discussed it before, but not in enough depth to fully sate Matthew's curiosity. Could that depth even be reached? He hummed a small tune to himself, still watching Razkar's hands work while Matthew's mind worked. An odd look replaced the look of hardness in Razkar's stare, sorrow instead welling up. He spoke a memory, and Matthew tilted his head. He couldn't remember a lot from his childhood, oddly enough. Sometimes that bothered him. He did remember bits and pieces, but never full memories. He had been in a good family, he doubted anything bad had happened. It was probably his own faulty mind that made his memories fragments instead of whole pieces. Razkar paused a moment, and Matthew absentmindedly finished his sentence, though it might not have been the correct words. "-why you kill them-" There was a blur of motion, and suddenly Razkar was upon him. His hand was around Matthew's throat, his other hand on Matthew's forehead, tilting his face back so Razkar's wild eyes could stare into his own. Razkar was babbling, and Matthew's survival instincts kicked in. They had been reacting in this specific way more and more lately, especially when it came to Sunberth. His head ached with all the effort he put into keeping himself alive. His eyes went glassy. Throat constricted, hand lifting. On the tips of my toes, air becoming precious. Options? Magic, stun, cause him to release. Then what? Run? Would be caught. Attack? Would be slain. Magic dismissed. Running dismissed. Fighting dismissed. Blackmail? Analyze weakness. Physical? None. Mental? Edreina. Svefra not under control. Would likely only anger. Weaknesses of no use. Grip tightening. Air precious. Options left? Speak. Words. Choke out. Hypnotism to aid? Admitting guilt. Use truth. Simplest response? Simplest answer. His eyes refocused, all in the span of a breath or two. "-I..." He swallowed, finding it hard to speak, Razkar likely feeling the human's adams apple bob against his palm. It was very hard to breath, much less talk. "-I do not know. I am Matthew, a prostitute from Sunberth. I am human." He choked out the words, eyes staring at the Myrian, Matthew's gaze more confused than anything. He had no time for fear, fear would make him respond instinctively. Instinct was bad in most cases, for his instinct was not trained. Razkar had likely acted on instinct. He had seen something. How had he seen something? Matthew would have checked him out with Auristics, but he had no room to focus. Common sense, then. "-Why... why would I do anything? Out here? I have seen you at your most vulnerable. I have seen the thing that matters the most to you at her most vulnerable. So... So-" He paused, gulping for air. The world was starting to feel funny. He didn't have much time. He forced the words out. "-why would I choose this moment to torment you? The two of us, alone, you fully armed?" The final word was gurgled and Matthew struggled a bit, the tips of his shoes pushing at the ground to try and give his throat more room to do its job. His blue eyes glanced down, over the front of Razkar, trying to see anything out the ordinary. A web of odd words over Razkar's chest caught his eye, hidden beneath smeared feces. Matthew's stomach turned for a moment. Matthew, who had willingly involved himself in acts of sex that would make a normal man lose his lunch. Matthew, who had sacrificed any sort of pride, any sort of respectability. Matthew, who rarely felt a single thing, and when he did feel it, he felt it distantly. Matthew the Harlot, and for a brief moment, Matthew felt disgusted with himself. Blinking rapidly, his watering eyes rolled up, words broken and strained now as he stared at the Myrian. For a moment, he felt pity. "...what have you become since Syliras, Razkar of the Shorn Skulls?"

[Razkar]

The words were rational, so sensible, balm to any mind that grasped reason and logic, but they did not loosen Razkar's grip an iota. The Myrian had been toyed with before by those who wielded illusions and lies as he wielded steel, and he would not be fooled again.

But when Matthew's eyes dropped to that spot of ink and shit on his chest - filthy in more ways than a common man would know - his eyes lost their piercing glare and his fingers grew weaker, like ice melting in Spring.

Those last words were the final curtain for his distrust and rage. To hear his clan name in the Common tongue... to hear the rank concern in a voice that so rarely expressed any emotion save curiosity...

"... the consequences of my actions."

With those cryptic words he let the harlot go and went back to his work as if nothing had happened... or, at least, his body did. What was true before was true after: his body worked, but his mind was elsewhere, churning away behind his focused eyes and slicing, chopping hands.

"You have seen that scar below Edreina's shoulder?" He didn't wait for an answer; he knew how intimate the Harlot and the Svefra had been. "That was me. A man... no, an animal..." The memory of Ekvan sneered through his mind and then vanished as fast as he'd killed him. "... had her at his mercy. He used her as a shield, so I... removed his use of her as a hostage."

The Myrian's hand drifted of its own accord to the hilt of his long, straight gladius, and then back again to his work. Crunch after crunch, until four of the wet, splintering sounds had cracked across the clearing and the hooves and feet of the buck were amputated and set to one side.

"Some leave them on the hide. I don't. No point in having a cloak with four sharp, heavy weights attached to it..."

He was still there to teach, after all, and once the lesson was imparted, his tale continued.

"My actions were... judged unworthy." Just a little more. Another push. "By Yahal. He appeared before myself and Edreina. She was rewarded for her devotion to me and I... and I..."

His voice stopped, stalled, and so did his hands, just before they peeled the majority of the deer hide off its back, revealing the musculature of tendons and yellow fat and red muscle under it all. The feet were gone and only the head still kept its skin and fur, but the rest was... a parody of a corpse. A grotesque imitation, or the ultimate truth.

Meat, bone and muscle. With a lying tool commanding it.

"... I was found unworthy, and cursed by him. That must... must have been what I saw."

A dripping carpet of fur and hide flapped and whooshed into the freezing air, sending scarlet rain pattering briefly onto the pure snow. It wouldn't be pure again... at least by barbarian standards. Consecrated by blood, death... and respect for the slain. Now Razkar sniffed and perused the underside of the deer hide.

A rough and childish job. More meat and fat on it than on the bloody carcass... but you still need to learn.

"We'll leave that to dry while we cut the meat off." He said plainly, cleaning his kukri again as he withdrew it, replacing his dagger and continuing in that same calm tone of voice, only his gaze flickered archly to Matthew when he did. "One was... acceptable, if that's even the word. But I have not seen the effect of this curse in visions or twistings of others' features. If it happens again... we need to avoid each other."

The Myrian went back to work, hacking at a corpse as befitted his clan, nothing but the muttering wind and distant, uncaring birds on the air as he parceled up a proud buck into a fortnight's worth of dinners.

[Matthew]

Matthew was dropped, landing on his feet, chest instantly expanding and constricting in quick and deep gasps of air. His throat was sore and would likely have marks, his long fingers dancing along the slightly swollen flesh. His lungs ached but were slowly being soothed by the crisp Winter air that he sucked in. He massaged the skin as he watched Razkar, overwhelmingly curious about what had just transpired, but easily noticing that the Myrian was just as clueless as him. He still watched the lesson closely, analyzing and absorbing information piece by piece, nodding at the absentminded explanation of why the hooves were to be discarded. He stared at them for a moment, a very faint and distant fact triggering in the back of his mind. "You can make glue with those. You boil them. I think." The story was fully told, and Matthew meditated on it for a moment. He let it linger in the air, focusing first on Razkar's task. His arms slowly crossed as the air came back to his lungs, and he patiently watched at the corpse was skinned and then cut into meaty sections. To him, it looked like a work of art. He couldn't tell that it was anything less than a perfect job. He recalled each of the steps that had been taken in skinning and dissecting the corpse, filing them away for later use. Silently, Matthew stepped up behind him and then knelt next to the corpse as well, glancing over to Razkar and quietly speaking. "Can you show me how to remove a small section of meat from bone? I would like to try it myself." The harlot tilted his head, thinking back to the previous words. "Faithfulness and purity. Yahal." He leaned back and tugged up his shirt, exposing a golden tattoo of Yahal's symbol decorating his hips. A wing on each hip. "I had his symbol inked into my hips. It is amusing, even for me, to see the gold flashing when I put them to work. Sacrilegious perhaps, but it describes how I feel about him. I respect Edreina and her beliefs, but it... frustrates me that some of the Gods would force their will upon us. You, your worth is determined by Myri and Myri alone, if I am not mistaken. It isn't Yahal's place to deem that unworthy in his eyes. How were your actions unworthy? Didn't they save her life?" Though Matthew was no fan of the God, his voice still remained passive. At the mention that they might have to avoid each other, Matthew nodded silently and slowly, an odd twisting sensation briefly yanking at his stomach. He wasn't familiar with it. So, the next question. "How do you remove it?" He glanced down at it again, and once more felt that sick sensation flooding through his veins. He clenched his jaw tight, glancing away, the sensation immediately vanishing once he broke eye contact with the mark.

[Razkar]

Razkar smiled at the human's curious request, but perhaps not as wide as he would have before. The moment before, that clash of bodies... that wouldn't fade. Razkar had become the savage he assumed Matthew's friends always waned him about; Matthew had gone from a friend, one of the few the Myrian had, to a daemon he came close to sending back to the nether.

Some things change... and you can't change them back.

But you don't have to relive them forever.

"Here-" he said quietly, pulling a knife from his hunting kit and flipping it over, offering it to the harlot handle first "-I will show you... my friend."

He couched down by the carcass and resumed his work, gesturing to the mass of red and yellow and finding the smile widening a touch.

"Lucky we're doing this in the Winter, actually. Back home, the flies and crawling things would be all over it." His words were punctated now and then, emphasized without rhyme or reason as he held up a leg and got to work. "Petching... bugger... to work... with all those... bloody bugs..."

Razkar worked a little slower, knowing he had an audience of one to instruct. He held up the back leg and carved into it from the top, slowly... then faster, enough to make the bone sing.

"Hear that? You'll feel it, too, when you hit the bone. Much of this is touch, not just knowing where to cut. The fat, the gristle... keep it. It fries off when you cook it, and doesn't go bad as fast as the meat. The legs are good for steaks. Nice, thick, healthy muscle... I'll show you my recipe one day."

The Myrian chuckled as he slapped the hunk of dripping meat onto a patch of snow, sending a little cloud of the stuff jumping upward.

"Lucky, too... because cold keeps the meat good. Meat-" he reached back into the kit and kneaded a hefty amount of salt into the future steak "-and plenty of salt. Preserving. That's what it's called."

Then Razkar heard the harlot's words and smiled wryly at his blasphemous tattoo. At his nod the human got to work with another leg and he squatted there like the creature, half-naked and bestial, from the forgotten poet's verse, letting his words wash over him, turning them over in his own mind.

"'Force their will'." He parroted the words back and gave a cynical grunt. "Good way to put it, I think. But how else can they spend eternity? Humans live for... maybe eighty Summers? Ninety? My people over a hundred, but never more than a hundred and twenty. Akalaks live for centuries. Nuit for even longer. But the gods? They are... older than mortal minds can grasp. If we could, we would not be mortal. Imagine trying to fill thousands, tens of thousands of years... what better toys for eternity than us?"

The Myrian's tone became somber and serious, matching the stark, lifeless surroundings. The last time Matthew had heard him talk of the gods, it was of his Myri, Blessed and Merciless, Mother of his race. Now the fawning adoration and wonder was stripped from his voice. Razkar had met another god, a heathen deity his people had heard but whispers of... and the experience had literally scarred him.

"Perhaps that is why we love Myri so." He said in that same quiet voice, eyes unfocused as they rested on Matthew's clumsy work. "Because she was mortal once. She knew the strife and struggles and pains of those who would one day die. She never wanted more than the jungle, Her jungle... her family's..."

But if She could spread across the world, she would. You know it. Why else would you make the Pilgrimage, if not to gift the barbarians with her glory... and her wrath...

"How do you remove it?"

He blinked, eyes suddenly clear, snapping to the revulsion Matthew tried to hard to cover as he averted his own from the words burned onto his chest. Razkar shuffled and moved around to the back of the buck, dagger sawing and slicing again around the neck and shoulder. Sinewy, softer meat... good for jerky and stews...

"If I knew that... you would not be looking at it. But I fear Yahal has some lesson for me to learn. Some... penance, to make for my crime." He winced at the last word, as if it were poison to his lips. "As he saw it, anyway..."

Some cawed, high and cackling in the trees. Razkar glanced up at the bare branches, saw bright and unvarnished Syna waxing above them... but lower than she'd been before.

"Another bell, I think. Then we must pack up and get moving... and I think I'll keep the hooves." He favored the human with a smile, this one closer to what it should have been, reinforced by a wink of thanks. "Glue, yes? Good idea..."

[Matthew]

"I don't like bugs." A wide frown crossed Matthew's lips, one of the few full expressions that he had shown in awhile. The distaste was obvious in his soft voice. "Especially spiders. I know they are likely more scared of me than I am of them, but there is just something about them. It just doesnt settle well with me." He kept his eyes on the work that Razkar was doing, focusing the best as he could, trying both to memorize the strokes of the knife and the sound of the butcher song. The comments on how the meat would cook were particularly interesting to the harlot, who oddly enough had an interest in learning how to cook one day. He had baked a few times with a woman in his younger years, a girl named Amelia. Baking had been hard, but he had enjoyed it. It was a strict science with clearly defined rules, an environment that he thrived in. Ah, salt. Salt preserved meat, he knew that much. No doubt it seasoned it as well, though Matthew didn't know the exact science behind it. He really would have to learn how to cook one of these days. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted it. He forced his attention back to the topic on hand, staring closely as Razkar moved from limb to limb. A knife was in Matthew's hand and soon Razkar gestured to the corpse, informing the harlot that it was now his turn. He slowly moved forward, glanced at the leg that had already been carved, and slowly went to work on the one he was supposed to do. He pushed the knife into the flesh until he heard the sound of bone, and then he slowly carved downwards. While Razkar had been quick, Matthew was extremely slow and methodical. He had already made one mistake this journey, he would not make another. He had no skill in this trade whatsoever, so he gave Razkar ample time to notice if something was going to go wrong. That way, he would be able to correct himself before ruining the cut of meat. Slow and steady wins the race, or at least Matthew thought that was the saying. It was odd to be engaged in something so simple and primal, yet be discussing something so deep and spiritual. The harlot paused for a moment, finally freeing the meat from bone and plopping a rough cut steak down onto the snow next to Razkar's. His looked close to the same, it had just taken double the time to get from the buck. Peering at the steak with judgemental eyes, he spoke with a distant voice. "I met Tanroa on the way here. Do your people know of her? Is she pagan as well?" He spoke of it so casually, but there was a noticeable shift in the harlot's demeanor. His jaw had set, his eyes had burned for a moment. There was frustration in his body language. "I... don't like what she stands for. It unsettles me. How she looked at me. Goddess of Time, they call her. She made Time change all around me. She saw everything of me. Everything I was, everything I will be, everything I could be, all at once. It... it unsettles me." He repeated himself quietly, pausing to swallow hard and then refocus on the task. He watched Razkar and helped when instructed, mirroring his movements as best as possible. Some twine was found in the kit that Razkar had, and he used that to tie matching steaks together so they would be a bit easier to carry. He carved meat from bone a few more times, taking his sweet time, making sure that he didn't let any of the product go to waste. Soon enough the bell had passed, and Matthew was quick to help pack up in what way he could. "Let me know if you decide to make glue yourself. I'd like to learn." Of course he would. If it wasn't obvious enough already, the harlot was happy to learn everything and anything.

[Razkar]

Matthew would never be a butcher, Razkar could see that much... but a hunter? Well, that looked like a possibility. The Myrian only had to correct him a few times, mainly when to avoid hunks of milky gristle, and give him advice on how to hold the knife.

"Try like this," he said gently, readjusting the blade in his hand so it was in reverse, "Less stress on your fingers. It's not a quick job, so believe me, you're hands will thank you..."

He worked at the same time, though. The buck was hardly a monster but there was at least half a season's worth of dinners and jerky on him which Razkar wasn't about to let go to waste. Steaks and joints and strips were sliced and carved off the bones and packaged up until Razkar simply ran out of preservatives. But by that time they were not simply laden with food: they were nigh-burdened with it.

Razkar listened, too. To Matthew's comment about spiders, where he bit his tongue instead of mentioning the Bark Spiders of Falyndar, easily the size of his hand and infamous for lurking at head-level, tree-colored bodies blending in perfectly to their perches.

Another day, perhaps.

Then the harlot's ramblings turned back to the gods and Razkar flicked him a curious glance. Matthew's tone did not often change. Usually it was a monotone: not emotionless, perhaps, but... cold. Distant. Now there was just a quiver of uncertainty in his voice, the way his eyes seemed to look inward rather than at the task at hand. Tanroa? Ah, yes...

"Gods have power... where their people are..." He said after a while, words chopped up as he struggled with one last hefty chunk around the desiccated shoulders. "Like Myri... in Falyndar. Like the Dark One... in Ravok. Where there is belief, there is power. More of one, more of the other. But some things, do not require belief. Some things are, and always have been."

With a wet ripping sound the red-and-yellow slab came away and he began packing it in twine and crinkling paper.

"Time is such a thing... like Fate, and Destiny. So Tanroa, Lhex... what care they for worship or adoration from us creatures? They saw our kind, every kind, come into being before time was time, before words were words. They will watch without comment as the world ends. Who is to say this is the only world they watch? Such beings..."

He shook his head, and wondered idly at Matthew's story. Could he have shouldered the burden of knowing his future? Men always claimed they wished to have that final advantage: the ability to prognosticate coming events. But could they truly handle that knowledge?

"You are braver man than me," he said with a grunt, getting to his feet and shouldering a rucksack full of salt-stinking meat, "Some things, we are not meant to know." Razkar smiled again and his eyes darted around for a moment, quickly finding their imprints in the snow, leading to this spot and away to the devastation they'd wreaked in their pursuit. "Time to go, my friend. Home to the fire... and for glue, maybe..."

[Matthew]

The reversing of the blade position was a good tip. He had already started to feel the wear in his fingers by the time Razkar corrected him, and the relief was immediate. He also had quite a few chances to take breaks whenever he paused to watch Razkar work, which usually gave his eventually-sore fingers a bit more energy to slowly copy his movements. On the topic of religion, Razkar brought up a point that Matthew hadn't really taken into consideration, and it was perhaps the exact reason why he had been so unsettled by the encounter. Some things didn't require belief. "It is childish, but I have always wished to lead my own life, separate of the Gods. I am of course thankful for what they provide, and feel they are required for this world, but I do not wish to follow. I do not wish to glorify. I wish to peacefully coexist, and carve out my own path. I assumed that if I merely did not dabble with the Gods, then the Gods would not dabble with me. However, it is like you said. Tanroa... she did not come to dabble. She came because of reasons that I cannot understand. She knew she was going to be there on that day before I was even born. I dislike the lack of control, though voicing my dislike does nothing. It is just talk, and I usually don't just talk." He lost himself in the work, coming to find the actions oddly soothing. The slow carving of the meat and the singing of the knife against bone was a grounded experience, real and simple, as opposed to the surreal and complex experience of Tanroa. As for bravery? "I am not brave, not if I understand the concept correctly. I experience feelings of fear, I experience pain, but I do not face them out of courage. I find myself able to dismiss them in favor of the most logical choice in the given moment. If the logical choice would save me from death, then it is possible no matter how cowardly the choice, I would make it." They finished, and Matthew shouldered the other bundle of meat, staggering a bit under the weight and then adjusting it a bit so he could support it correctly. "Out of the many things that confuse me, the concepts of a cowardly action and a brave action are some of the things that confuse me the most. So perhaps I am brave and simply not aware of it. It could also be the other way around as well, really." Matthew followed Razkar, thankful that the Myrian wasn't moving at too quick of a pace. As they walked, he reviewed the lessons of today in his mind. He had taken to studying basic Intelligence concepts in order to survive in Sunberth, and the analysis skills he had put to work here today could be applied to many other things. Hunting, Tracking... Well, he hadn't actually done much of the hunting. Not the appropriate way at least. He very nearly winced at the memory. At least he would never do that again.