Set
" There's a black bird perched outside my window, I hear him calling. I hear him sing. He burns me with his eyes of gold to embers. He sees all my sins. He reads my soul. "
“Someone once told me that crows are all liars.”
He grins ‘round the mouthful of grass, tasteless and brown, his yellow eyes shifting along the dimming horizon before settling on her dark form. There is a trace of familiarity about her that stirs something in the back of his mind but it is fleeting, gone before it can fully come together. The magic deep in his belly is repulsed by her; it burns to take from her what it can, lashes like a recalcitrant child when it cannot. An ear flicks forward, followed briefly by the other, teeth grinding against one another as he swallows. The magic immune were once few and far between. He wonders how much else as changed.
It has been a long time since he has interacted with the living. His gaze meets hers for longer than might be socially acceptable, nostrils flared wide once and again, locking in her scent. The island … when he’d left Beqanna there had been no island. No islands of consequence, at least. His gaze narrows. The Chamber is gone, too, he supposes, the pines and mountains of his youth lost to the shadowlands. He sucks in a stuttered breath, exhaling slowly. “Niceties.” He turns the word over on his tongue, savoring it with a low, self-deprecating chuckle. “Overrated, don’t you think?”
An errant itch distracts him when the crows begin to flock silently around them, gathering high in the trees as the sun enters its circadian death throes. Lining the edge of the forest they linger, bits of scale and death hanging from their beaks, the discarded Hydra heads picked clean of flesh, skulls left to bleach in the rot of autumn. They watch Set and Caw with their black marble gazes, eerily unmoving. He raises his head, looking behind her. “Why leave the island now?”, he asks, eyes leaving the murderous assembly on the question, seeking hers out again. She’s a bit odd, the black minx, vaguely reminiscent of a little roan he once knew. He shifts his weight to face her, unsteady, like gelatin, easing the dull twinge in a neck still knitting muscle together.
SET
alliance champion, once king, mage