[Deaths] on a battlefield
Title: surprise!
'Verse/characters: Deaths; Eduard De'Ath
Prompt: 81A "phantoms"
Word Count: 407
Notes: after calling cards and gifts, before miscalculation.
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He'd had expectations. He could admit that, because he hadn't said anything about them aloud, and certainly not to Azrael's face.
If he had, he'd probably have gotten another rusty laugh, but no correction. He wouldn't have given correction to a question like that, knew his brother wouldn't have, nor just about any of the rest of the family he'd ever met, including the Horseman's Son.
Intellectually and viscerally both he'd known power could be skeined tighter than it naturally rested--was capable of doing it himself, of passing among humans as human--and that it unskeined, especially when one was working or fighting, again from personal experience and observation, but he'd had no idea of the extent of the mechanism.
Or if he had, he'd forgotten it a long, long time ago.
All of which was covering the fact that he was standing there with his damned jaw hanging open, ready to catch flies or someone's sword, watching his many times removed uncle disappear and reappear like it was as simple as walking.
Even the Morrigan had paused to watch, temporarily perched on a knee-sized hillock, her sickles at her sides.
Her expression spoke less of awe, though, and rather more of hunger. Which realisation gave Eduard enough of his brain back to snap his jaw shut, get him moving again as he made a mental note to tell her not to take a swing at the Horseman's Son. Please.
He'd thought he was talking to the death's home, perhaps to listening stones or someone who would carry messages to the death himself.
If the half-familiar haze across the field that thinned abruptly as Azrael dropped out of the air again was any indication, he'd in fact been standing surrounded by the death when he spoke his message to the fog on the hill in Iceland.
Wondering if anyone had ever briefly regretted petitioning the Horseman's Son, he tripped a grizzled man who might have been priest, crusader or smith in his lifetime. Two exchanges of clashing, ringing steel passed before he neatly tore a hole in the man's arm and started ravelling, ignored the pained yelp as the man disappeared. Shaking his head, he threw the handful of threads upwards as the man's gladius dropped to the grass.
This changed the game considerably, much more than he'd anticipated.
He heard the Morrigan start laughing somewhere behind him, and the haze grew gently thicker as someone else died.
'Verse/characters: Deaths; Eduard De'Ath
Prompt: 81A "phantoms"
Word Count: 407
Notes: after calling cards and gifts, before miscalculation.
---------
He'd had expectations. He could admit that, because he hadn't said anything about them aloud, and certainly not to Azrael's face.
If he had, he'd probably have gotten another rusty laugh, but no correction. He wouldn't have given correction to a question like that, knew his brother wouldn't have, nor just about any of the rest of the family he'd ever met, including the Horseman's Son.
Intellectually and viscerally both he'd known power could be skeined tighter than it naturally rested--was capable of doing it himself, of passing among humans as human--and that it unskeined, especially when one was working or fighting, again from personal experience and observation, but he'd had no idea of the extent of the mechanism.
Or if he had, he'd forgotten it a long, long time ago.
All of which was covering the fact that he was standing there with his damned jaw hanging open, ready to catch flies or someone's sword, watching his many times removed uncle disappear and reappear like it was as simple as walking.
Even the Morrigan had paused to watch, temporarily perched on a knee-sized hillock, her sickles at her sides.
Her expression spoke less of awe, though, and rather more of hunger. Which realisation gave Eduard enough of his brain back to snap his jaw shut, get him moving again as he made a mental note to tell her not to take a swing at the Horseman's Son. Please.
He'd thought he was talking to the death's home, perhaps to listening stones or someone who would carry messages to the death himself.
If the half-familiar haze across the field that thinned abruptly as Azrael dropped out of the air again was any indication, he'd in fact been standing surrounded by the death when he spoke his message to the fog on the hill in Iceland.
Wondering if anyone had ever briefly regretted petitioning the Horseman's Son, he tripped a grizzled man who might have been priest, crusader or smith in his lifetime. Two exchanges of clashing, ringing steel passed before he neatly tore a hole in the man's arm and started ravelling, ignored the pained yelp as the man disappeared. Shaking his head, he threw the handful of threads upwards as the man's gladius dropped to the grass.
This changed the game considerably, much more than he'd anticipated.
He heard the Morrigan start laughing somewhere behind him, and the haze grew gently thicker as someone else died.