He sipped.

How did this square with Jodiah Ayreg? Was he a man in a doomed affair of love, twisting and conspiring with another soul for all of the foreseeable eternity? Did he curl up to a warm body, night after night, and share the trials and tribulations, the joys and sorrows, with only that other person to be his shelter, his rock, his anchor, and his sanctuary?

No.

There was a time, once upon a very long time ago, that Jodiah Ayreg knew what love was. He was a younger man, then; younger even than he was now under the Emperess' hand. So full of life, with ambition for political and personal power, a desire to lead the House of his father, and the drive to be an icon of good in the world; to cut out the evil Her hair was the color of spun gold, and her eyes contained all every bit of depth as the great sea, and matched it wave for wave as being untamable.

He loved her dearly, and she him. It could only have been the son of Jacyn Ayreg himself to ever pull that hellion to his side.

Kasiyah.

Another name lost in time. A figure forgotten by any who yet draw breathe, and never known by those who exist as the immortals do. He sat there in his quarters, an untouched glass of Rhilshenian spiced bloodwine craddled in his palm. He didn't need to drink it; he wasn't vampiric in the least. But, on occasion, old habits were enjoyable to tread again, and Jodiah was no stranger to the taste of blood upon his lips.

No stranger at all. The Scourge of Worlds used to quite enjoy rending foes piece by piece, and feasting upon entrails, whipping himself and his greater minions into a wild pack of murderers amid the gore-spattered throne room of Doomhammer Keep.

He sipped.

How many times, even after his awakening, had he fallen under the eyes of a female in Rhy'Din? How many did he have ot turn around and send on their way before they finally began leaving him alone?

Worse that; how many, and why, and how, did those that did manage to successfully seduce him, and draw him in? As the one-year mark of his return to the ream nears in the next month -- it would likely be without fanfare and without occasion, given that he was occupied in Rhilshen still for the time -- he has known three women.

Am'thyst. A precious jewel, stricken by the world he had left behind. He had heard of her revivessence, though he did not seek her out again. The hardship of losing her the first time was... entirely too unbearable. Perhaps this would be the closest thing Jodiah Ayreg had ever known after Kasiyah as being love.

Obsidian. A creature of the heavens, though one doomed entirely to fall sway under her own vices. There was a time that Ayreg could not see himself without her visit whenever the wind blowed just right. She had drawn him in, oiled the gears, and taught him the joys of physical love again. In the end, it was simply not to be.

Belial. The sister of Obsidian, strange as it might have been to have both as his lover, and at the same time. It was a troubling time for him, but he learned much. Belial was the flesh to Obsidian's spirit. The solid, gritty reality of life compared with the ephemeral ghost of fantasy. Perhaps, in the end, Jodiah himself even preferred the meat to the sky above it. One will never know; abandoned to protect him from an enemy, instead of allowing him to fight alongside. It was actually rather insulting.

Grief had passed. Heartache was gone.

He sipped.

Jodiah did not dislike love. He had nothing against love. Love was powerful; this fact could not be contested. It was not weak, and it was not foolish. It simply made those who were afflicted with it weak, and foolish. In a way, it was almost like a cancer, only one that one could not cut out with the sharpest of knives, nor carve it from their heart with an axe.

When all is said and done, it could be argued that, for some, love simply isn't there. It isn't meant for everyone, is it? That single, special person to spend your nights with, until the end of your days? To lay with in times of desire, or lean upon in times of need? Envy, hatred, lust. These things found station where love failed, and failed consistantly. It was a curse, but one that did not allow for even the most devout and pious of clergy to dispell it.

And you say that love conquers all? Well not for you, and not for me.

Not for any of the heartbroken.

He sipped.

Rhy'Din. Rhy'Din was an empty shell. An influx of strange technology continued to raise the 'standard of living' beyond the horse-and-sword he was familiar and comfortable with. Even the blaster, a gift from Belial, remained unused. It was left, abandoned itself, in a drawer in a dresser in his Estate of Taiva. It would have likely never been used at all, were it not for a desperate need in his battle with Garen Corlagon.

He sipped.

He had nothing left for him in Rhy'Din. In the face of the growing boom of technology and high artifice, his place in life had to change. He was old-fashioned, preferring the methods of the past; where battles were decided with gallantry, and tactics, and the rallying of forces under one's command. Not with the push of a button, and the eradication of a population center. The great wars of Rhy'Din's past had all but become extinct; the great guilds gone and, for the most part, forgotten. Now, battle was on a far more personal level, and the armies that marched in the days of the guild wars were smaller, police-style forces, such as the Scathachian Sisterhood.

So be it. But he didn't have to like it.

This uplifting in the world at the hands of artifice he didn't understand (such as the night when a man named Varick attempted to explain the fundamentals of some kind of magic known as 'electricity' to him) served only to make it stand out in sharp relief how out of touch he was with women.

How?

They could be nice, certainly, but females the likes of Tera, or of Jewell, of the spawn of Ravenlock, Cassandra, of tragic Charna, or even Ultrinnan simply did not appeal to him. The clothes they wore? The weapons they used (be it sharp knives, or sharp words)? The things they did? It... it wasn't for him.

He sipped.

What happened to the days of the glorious past, when women fought alongside their men in battle? Where are the battle-hardened women, true women, who strapped plates of steel over their bodies? For all of the supposed sex-appeal of those ridiculously lacy little nothings that women wear as smallclothes, Jodiah Ayreg could never get past his own attraction to plate-and-mail.

The times, how they have changed.

Perhaps that is why he has grown fond of his shadow, in a way that only a male can (or should; another growing trend he has become disgusted with was how easily women seemed to be finding... comfort, within one another) grow fond to a female. In many ways, she reminds him of the glory of the past, much as his lifelong obsession has, and still does. Vicious, cunningly cruel -- real women, with real strength -- and none of the pansies simply waiting to be rescued like the meaningless little victims that they were.

A dichotomy of black, and another of white.

What else could they be but dichotomies, after one, when one must be a cold and hardened killer, and, at the same time, wholly woman?

He sipped.