Icarus's blog: "Augurs, Martyrs, and Agnostics"

"Love me.

That is all that I've ever asked."

-Dyroneus. The dawn. The light.

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He was only a man. Black hair greying, leather grip fraying.

Always unraveling. The second he released, it just spiraled out of control, often rewound, often ignored.

No manner of divinity or tyrannical mischief in his eyes.

Weariness was a word that rose to lips, though caution baited it back from utterance.

From the saw-toothed, battered edge of his blade, to the dry lips and knicked steel across his body.

The weariness of too many years.

Too many years of sleeping on knives, and driving through armor, muscle and bone for his wage.

He was only a man, he swore up and down.

But as the years drug harder against his bones, and the souls of defeated foes pawed from lonliness and hunger at his ankles, he often had to wonder.

He stopped for a spell against a gnarly elm, the leaves were thick and green as was the smell of summer. All around him were whispering leaves and gossiping birds, and snickering insects.

Hardly the time or place for a snack, but he had been walking all morning and hadn't stopped for lunch all week.

Not that there was much to look forward to as he produced a fist sized brick of old trailtack still floury from the baker one town back. Years of campaigning had trained his muscles to push, pull, tear, and gnaw... but trailtack could drive nails and fend off dragons when hurled from a thong.

This was no time for a bold maneuver endangering his teeth and jaws, so he set the cube into his field cup with a prodigious clunk and poured water over to help the vile, life-shortening mixture of barely milled flour and sawdust to soften.

Even in the most humid, battering summer sun, this process could take hours, so he tucked his sword into his fists, and his chin into his chest, and nodded off reciting the most monotonous free-verse he could recall, first flirting with sleep, then outright snogging it when he came to verse 30 of a particularly unimaginative epic he had the displeasure of memorizing and writing in three languages when he was a lad.

Sleep was invariably the only escape. He never got past verse 30. Then or now.

But academia isn't for everyone, especially middle-aged mercenaries dozing under elm trees, completely unaware of the minute mantis meddling in his beard. Perhaps fleeing the old ball and chain, or worse that battleaxe of a mother-in-law.

The new boarder was of no alarm or disturbance when he awoke. A mantis had eyes, could know you face to face, could follow and watch and wager a guess at knowing you.

It was the still, siteless gaze he feared. Not of the blind, or the slumbering, but the far away beauty of secrets. The penetrating mute song of the Mistress.

Something he had tread upon once, and prayed never again.

It was the memory of her stillness resting upon his naked soul that stirred him from slumber, and stirred him more upon waking.

She was near. The birds had hushed, the insects had fled, but the stillness continued to whisper.

The splintering chill up his spine and out into his fingertips was all the herald of her coming that he needed. With a flutter the mantis departed from his ponderous gaze upon the mercenary, the mantis never knowing just how badly the mercenary wanted to sprout wings of his own and follow.

She had taken a step closer. A murmor, a rumor, a spat hex more and he would stumble on her gown.

Fly.

Fly damn you!

He spurned his legs for being the sinewy fleet that carried him away from this place, and not wings of fire, or a swift swarm of mad darkness devouring all obstacles of tree and brush impeding his path.

How sweet it would be to reign as destruction and chaos just this once in retreat.

He could only guarantee safe fugue and passage by following the path to the city of night. There she, and all the old ones could not reach, as he felt the brush of her pale, frail fingers against his cheek.

The gentle passing of a loving caress or a feign snatch at his essence?

He neither knew nor cared. He dared not tread upon it again as he stomped with full haste on a new path of slightly less certain oblivion.