October 27th, 2015


Days had passed.

It had taken days not only to recover, but also to begin sorting, dividing and securing all the items they'd confiscated from Jetrell's former home. Lexius had been busy transferring and interpreting what seemed like years? worth of the demi-god?s research in the lab, and it would take weeks, at least, to make some sense of it all. Not too long ago, the Elf might have happily buried himself in that research without a thought for anything else.

Nowadays, other thoughts existed and crept in at the most unexpected moments.

He resisted contacting Mesteno too quickly after their last tumultuous encounter. He'd spent a solid twenty four hours half buried in a sand dune meditating to recoup his depleted resources after the battle with Jetrell, but even there his thoughts had been haunted by the ghosts and spectres of whip-thin man who's flavour he could still taste on his lips days later, no matter how much spiced coffee he drank.

It was more than that, however, that finally drove Lexius from his cave to seek out the Sadist.

There was a wealth of new knowledge to be contemplated and dissected, and Lexius found that, for the first time in a long time, he didn't want to do that alone. Not when there was such a sharp, eager mind a quick teleport away. It took him several hours to identify that nagging, persistent emotion for what it was. He missed Mesteno's voice, his ideas, his unique input...his presence, however dark and dangerous it might be.

Lexius appeared without warning on his front porch, the satchel at his side and the beads waggling with amusement at his thigh. They might have won a bet amongst themselves on just how long the Elf would be able to hold out. Or they might be amused with the simple fact Lexius hadn't taken the time to check if Mesteno was even there before he'd teleported.

There was no sign of him outside. The conspicuous smudge of a crushed cigarette stub on the decking drew the Elf?s eyes, an anomaly to turn over in his head. The necromancer didn?t smoke, and disapproved of the habit unashamedly.

There was music playing, Holst's 'Jupiter' in its majestic third minute, assisted acoustically by the morgue's solid surfaces. The door to that grim chamber yawned open, the cold spilling out into the kitchen.

Lexius descended the flight of stairs to the morgue cat-footed, passing through the starkly sterile environment and ever closer to the source of the music.

The small adjoining laboratory was where he found the necromancer, the staff he'd pilfered propped obtrusively in one corner. He was studying the soul jar carved from Terrell?s womb for details etched into the (well-scrubbed!) glass, and amidst the hum from the body lockers and the music, seemed quite unaware of his company.

The Elf paused again in the doorway to take his fill of the sight before he interrupted it.

Mesteno was perched on a stool with his back to the morgue, knees in a broad splay and elbows on the edge of the worktop as he gently manipulated the jar under high magnification. Caution had him handling it with sturdy looking gauntlet gloves, just in case there was any spontaneous shattering. He did not want his blood getting all over someone else's soul receptacle for obvious reasons. He'd bound his hair back in a half-tail, drawing it from his temples to keep it from his face without having to wrestle the whole lot into something tidier. It left the small, bone carved Alfar trophy he wore in his hair visible, vividly white against all the red.

He wore only ratty jeans and a simple black wife beater that did little to hide the ladder of rings along his spine, nor the butchery of runic work cut deliberately into the span of his shoulders, rudely interrupted by the exit wounds where the shotgun had torn his clavicle apart years ago.

Protective spells intended to keep any souls from straying from within the sphere he worked in were palpable, yet there was no outward indication of where they were.

Temptingly, there was also a neat little stack of scroll tubes on the worktop too, as of yet unopened.

It'd been some time since Lexius had seen that much of Mesteno's skin exposed, and while he might have felt the rings that laddered up the curve of the Sadist?s spine once or twice, he'd never truly had a chance to examine even this much of them, masked by the fall of hair and the thin cloth. He studied what he could of those and the scarring that spider webbed across the man's skin. He scrutinized Mesteno's posture as he bent over the jar he was analysing so carefully. He soaked in every single nuance of the picture presented, as if the Sadist might, perhaps, test him later on what he had seen.

But he had not entirely forgotten he?d come with a purpose, no matter how long he chose to look. The stack of scrolls tucked in one corner of the work bench reminded him conveniently.

"Mesteno." He murmured the man's name, carrying it with a thought closer to the man's ear rather than attempt to physically breach any barrier he might have set up or raise his voice over the sound of the music.

Engrossed as he'd been, Mesteno was startled from his study, and there was a musical, glassy clink as the soul jar clipped the lens above it. There was no sudden eruption of pieces though, the contact too light to cause any damage, and the alarm which pulled taut muscles into sharply delineated relief eased out of him on a sigh carrying a low, breathy obscenity.

He set the jar down before he turned about on the stool, a pair of safety goggles perched on the bridge of his nose which he pushed carelessly up his brow and into his hair. Lexius identified, he slid off the stool, barefoot as usual and tugging the gloves from his arms.

"Well you look a damn sight better'n you did before," he remarked, though his gaze did no more than sweep his face briefly.

Looking caused trouble.

He?d not forgotten the exquisite embarrassment of being left on his own front porch after their kiss, and neither of them had spoken a word about it since, even in the hours they?d been left alone to pillage Jetrell?s manor.

"I am well." Lexius informed him. It was his stock reply, of course, even when he was at his worst, because he was well. He was alive and breathing and in control of his mind, in command of his limbs, in possession of that spark of energy that allowed him life. Once, that had not been the case. Everything was 'well' when balanced against years spent with body, mind and the shattered remainder of his soul dissected from each other and stored in separate crystals.

"Come to exchange notes?? Mesteno asked. ?Or y'know, hand over any interesting books you might have picked up." There had been one particular tome that ought to have been his from the start, a necromantic volume that Lexius had taken, perhaps purely because he knew he would want it.

Lexius studied the front view as he had the back, lips twitching faintly toward a smile for some reason or another that Mesteno would not see for the way his gaze slipped so easily away.

"Hand over?" He made that sound like a crime. "Negotiate, perhaps." His strangely colored gaze flicked toward the scrolls then across the room to where the staff innocuously lingered before his gaze settled back on the Sadist.

"You can't blame me for hoping," Mesteno replied unrepentantly, dropping the gloves on the worktop beside the notes he'd been making.

"May I come in?" Lexius asked politely.

Mesteno stepped aside, and made the sort of gracious, sweeping gesture universally accepted for a 'come in'. "You took enough out of that lab to keep you busy with study for months, Lexius," he reminded him, amused. "not t'mention your new specimens. What did I pick up amongst my meagre rewards you wanted so badly you're already here to 'negotiate' for it?"

Meagre was not really an appropriate word for it, but of course he was negotiating already, manipulating lazily by making it sound as if he thought he'd come out of it the worse of the pair.

Playing the gentleman, he nudged the stool the Elf's way with one foot, and contented himself with reclining against the worktop, arms folded and a lick of amusement playing about his mouth offsetting the stern, serious set of his brows. Bad acting as always. He couldn't play it serious, because he was quite frankly, too pleased to see him.

The beads chortled even before the Elf stepped into motion. No telling, though, which one of the two amused them more.

Rather than allow the distance between them to linger (as he should, Lexius knew), the Elf moved directly Mesteno's way and actually settled his ass lightly to the edge of the stool the man had nudged out, the heel of one of his boots hooked back along a lower rung to keep it from sliding away.

"I can blame you for whatever I like." He noted absently as he settled, gaze finally drifting to the soul jar. He saw it, of course, was scrutinizing the details, but the majority of his attention was with the necromancer and something inside him unknit just a fraction.

"Why Lexius, that was almost juvenile," Mesteno remarked. But he liked it. The small fact that things seemed comfortable between them was as pleasing as his presence.

The Elf paused, and it was a rather lengthy one, a silence in which he just breathed.

"You know that everything I learn I will share with you." He finally spoke up, looking back to the Sadist as his hand went to the satchel at his side. It was a truth, and yet a bargaining tactic of his own. Mesteno could not say he was hoarding the information away even if he'd taken things! "You know all my secrets." He added that without a trace of dismay over the fact, though it would not work in his favor when it came to the trading!

From the satchel he produced a roll of leather. Several samples in vials and dishes secured within the cushioned compartments inside. He didn't quite hand it over yet, though. They were bargaining. And Mesteno had information he wanted. "The remains of a cigarette are on your porch." A prompt, without a doubt.

It was dangerous, playing this particular game. The time would come when he was on the other end of it, the Elf was certain. It'd been no easy thing turning the conversation this way. And of course it had set off an automatic clamouring inside his head, the muscles tightened across his frame. Lexius closed his eyes for a moment and to attempt to systematically shut down all those negative reactions.

Mesteno's words filtered in and he looked his way with lids kept narrowed over his blue-violet gaze. He finally let something of a smile curl at his mouth again, head canted just a touch to one side.

A gift, was it? Did Mesteno really believe he would get as much from the exchange, wrapped in his conditions, as he would without them? It seemed a preposterous notion, but the Elf didn't challenge it. Instead, he answered the question.

"Something more base."

His fingers had been itching to touch since before he'd walked into the room, the distant echo of a want that was smothered under the rest of his reactions but refused to die. "I do not like pain for its own sake, Mesteno, but I have always enjoyed the struggle and I do not mind leaving or wearing bruises or even broken skin. But such violence, at this time, may well lead to an inappropriate reaction on my part." He didn't, couldn't, risk doing something so terrible it would put even a sliver of fear in the man. It was a thing that preyed on his mind even now, when he could ponder it dispassionately. "I need your patience and your willingness to allow me to...savor. I cannot start the way we did before. It is too much."

Pessimism owned a corner of Mesteno?s mind, and assured him in stoic, persuasive tones that entertaining any of the 'base' ideas parading across his sexually deviant mind was foolish.

The Elf would vanish again.

He was setting himself up for the very disappointment Lexius had promised him only days before.

But it couldn't erase the stirrings of desire, hearing the Elf speak the way he did. He picked up on words like struggle, bruises, broken skin, and wondered whether those bestial urges he had would be content with small beginnings. It was quite possible that he'd been spoiled by the extremes Evander had welcomed, and by Samiel's willingness before him to explore boundaries most would have considered sinister. Lexius was far older than both though, and the necromancer wasn't about to question his tastes. He considered it all quietly, wondered whether it was even emotionally responsible to engage in things carnal at this point.

Desire won out. It'd already done things to the sharp features of his face, the levelled eyes gone hungry, salacious, a mouth well made for vulgar things.

"All right, Lexius." How intimate he sounded, sotto voce - the music had stopped, reached its end. Appropriate. "Consider my offer to be anything, tame or perverse. I won't try to break you. Just don't run from me once we get started. That's all I ask."

Lexius wondered at that, that he could stir desire in the man even without the promise of violence as accompaniment. He didn't expect it would last much beyond this one time. Lifting his cup as the Sadist laid out his own condition, he drank away the last of the water then set it carefully aside to the counter beside him next to the box and the roll of leather.

"Very well." He agreed quietly as he unstrung the so-silent beads from his belt and pooled them around the cup. Rather than initiate anything just yet, though, the Elf asked another question.

"Do you require that, Mesteno, to find your pleasure? The breaking of another." His gaze was still mostly obscured by the way he'd narrowed his eyelids, but there was a sharpness to his regard now. "Were you to have full freedom, what is it that you like and how?"

No doubt the necromancer was a wanton wretch, his impulses easily inspired by the right words, formed by the right mouth. Perhaps there was a scrap of incubus blood in him, to be so hungry for it, and yet he'd turned down the advances of his visitor and Aiden both, the former of whom would all too likely have submitted uncomplaining to his perversions. Instead it was the Elf who seemed to hold sway over his desires, conditions or not. Lust was a curious thing.

Lexius' questions were difficult things to answer. He felt, somehow, that a few wrong words might put a stop to things before they began, and yet it wasn't in his nature to be dishonest.

"It's not a necessity," he murmured, and though he itched to initiate in some way, this was the Elf's show now. Anything, he'd promised, and so he'd have to lead. "In fact I'd go so far as to say a lover who stubbornly refuses to break and weathers everything I dole out, invites it..."

Was even better? Talking about it made him restless. His hands were tight around the edges of the worktop to either side of his hips, fingers white knuckled.

"Struggle is welcome. I like to fight for it. Earn it. Punish once I have it, especially if there's still struggle. But I would never desire a lover to endure it just to please me if they hated it. There's some pleasure in that, too, making the release harder than a man?s ever known even when he's hurting. I like that, the confusion, to see them when they're gathering their wits afterward and aren't quite sure how it happened, how they still got off on it."

He was watching the Elf so closely as he spoke that it was plain he was expectant - whether he thought the serenity would fail for revulsion, or desire was uncertain though.

"Don't worry, Lexius. I won't be disappointed if I don't get to split you open like overripe fruit." He smiled. Just a faint twitch of one.

----------------------------------------------

In the messy aftermath, it hadn?t taken Mesteno long to start pulling his clothes back into order. They were face to face again finally, and old apprehensions, the aversion to having too much skin on display had already begun to set in.

Lexius didn?t attempt to stop him. Instead he was fastening laces, belt. The ache behind his eyes kept his typically smooth brow furrowed. Indulging this way had cost him, though he?d expected it. The flaw that had come with his rebirth had never ceased to plague him.

Each watched the other, not out of wariness, but to get a better look now that they weren?t so indecently occupied.

"I would like to see you fully naked." Lexius blurted. That really hadn't been what he'd intended to say. He cut it off before he got more explicit. The edge in that rough tone spoke enough about the reality of the desire. It wasn't something he'd just said to reassure.

"You've seen more of my skin than I have of yours," Mesteno reminded him.

Perhaps back when he?d been lying naked on the table, horrified by the sudden absence of his clothes, Lexius had only been examining him in a clinical fashion, but it didn't change the fact he'd had nothing but a bit of muslin to avoid indecency.

The remains of his shirt were hanging uselessly, the fabric torn. He shrugged loose of them. Perhaps a small concession to the Elf?s clumsily confessed desire.

The patchwork of burns and bullet holes, surgical scarring and metal Lexius had willingly pricked his fingers on. Ugly and expansive. He let him look. Let him see the faults in his hide, pulled taut over the whip lean physique, but said nothing. Aside from, "Maybe if you negotiate well next time, you'll see all of it."

The Elf wanted to investigate it more closely. He wanted to touch every one of those scars and holes where Mesteno's flesh was shiny and jagged, hollowed and ridged. He wanted to bite that tattooed bird right across its inky chest and drag his teeth across its wings. Lexius jerked his gaze back to Mesteno's face and took a carefully measured breath.

"So I have." Lexius admitted at a murmur. He did not offer to strip and tie up the score even if it had looked, for just a moment, as if Mesteno wanted to reach out and touch him. That dark, animal need that was now curled up, mostly sated, behind the shattered bars of its cage stirred in approval of the notion.

Other parts of him, disagreed.

No walls were erected, but he kept the distance between them. "Do I need to negotiate?"

This hadn't been about the book. Mesteno had made that clear. At least, the Elf thought so. Now he thought perhaps he'd been wrong. The idea was... disconcerting. It drew a frown to his lips and had him looking away.

Mesteno picked up on the miscommunication fast enough, and he padded closer as Lexius stooped to collect an abandoned vial of oil from the floor.

When he straightened up, Lexius found a scant few inches between them and a slim, tawny hand lifting to slide against his cheek, heel of palm tucked along his jawline. He barely kept himself from leaning into it no matter the repercussions.

"Next time,? the necromancer told him, ?I mean t'have you. I know you don't want me to, you find the idea... off-putting." The same way Mesteno did about nudity, though only because of personal misgivings. "Think about it though. And maybe I'll man the fuck up and let you get me all the way out of my clothes." His tone was warm, intimate but thereafter he slipped past him to head back out of the morgue, his stride stubbornly denying that there had been anything questionable afoot. "You can borrow whatever you want," he called back over his shoulder, with a nod toward the pile of scrolls.

He'd never intended to keep them all, anyway. If he discovered there were three of each, he intended to make sure copies were evenly distributed between the Elf, Pharlen and himself.

Lexius watched the Sadist as he spoke, somewhat still, listening as the man laid out his intention in that particular tone. What a dichotomy of feelings that stirred up! His jaw tightened beneath, but his gaze latched on his mouth. He didn't get a chance to do anything (foolish or not!), though, because Mesteno stepped away, stepped past him, and headed for the stairs. That might have been a muttered curse given in Drow. There was no telling what expression might now be on the Elf's face, but his gaze bored into the metal and the flesh of his spine until he was completely gone. Lexius didn't say a word.

Lexius bore the storm he'd created in Mesteno's thoughts without a flinch, and he focused solely on the quiet, still surface the man presented in the wake of the question. He reflected back patient serenity, calm acceptance of the parts of those emotions that belonged to him, but there was a certain tension tightening the line of his shoulders and sharpening the harsh angles of his face.

His eyes had lidded somewhat when Mesteno projected the memory of the note, the only outward sign of how he processed it in the renewed grind of his jaw, the quick jump of a tendon beneath his teeth. He needed another root, but he didn't reach for one.

In truth, Mesteno had said nothing Lexius hadn't already worked out on his own. He knew Evander was still local. He knew Mesteno's issue was the man's obsession. He could feel Mesteno's certainty it would never fade. But he'd lived too long in RhyDin, too long period, to be so sure of that himself. The note only added to the problem. What the Sadist had said there at the end was a position he could see himself filling, as well. The solace, the substitute, the filler....the thing to be conquered. He felt that same thing mirrored back as Mesteno wound down and reacted without thinking at all.

Lexius rapped his knuckles hard enough against the stone table that it would likely leave a bruise and tightened his grip on Mesteno's knee a little painfully (given their tendency to be creaky!) as if it physically jerk them both from that vicious reflection they were suddenly sharing.

It sufficed to command Mesteno?s attention beautifully. The clamour of doubts subsided sullenly even if a bubble of pessimism remained that refused to be squashed.

"Enough." The Elf?s voice was crisp, cutting, a slice through the tumult of the moment. Too harsh. He took a breath and eased his grip, dulled his tone. "I understand." A calmer assurance. "Now understand me. You wish from me a thing I have given no other. Something I have had others covet merely so they could know or say that they had had me. Something I find, to my own surprise, that I might finally be inclined to give."

Even setting aside from the flaw that made everything more difficult, letting Mesteno have him in that fashion would have been difficult. Adding in the layers of complexity from the Sadist's situation only made it that much more tangled.

"Do you understand, Mesteno, you have more of me right now than any has ever held? And despite the flaws and the incompatibilities and the absolute insanity of every part of the situation, I...want to give more. I have spent weeks doubting that conviction, doubting the very fact I can have feeling independent of what seems to be embedded into me. It is...daunting to find that not only can I, but that they can run this way given everything that has come before."

He snapped his jaw shut. He wasn't making enough coherent sense. He needed to think more before he spoke.

Mesteno was temporarily struck mute, uncertain what to say. He'd accepted Lexius' desire only to have things one way in bed, even understood his reasoning, but he'd foolishly supposed that perhaps there might have been a slip, an exception in his past where he'd made allowances. Perhaps for one of those men he kept portraits of in the hallway.

It was the confession that he had more of him just then than anyone had before that drew the necromancer?s hand to the one on his knee, and pressed it there despite the bruises he would sure he'd have the next time he looked.

"I understand." Quietly. Intently. "I know what it must cost you to even consider it. So be sure. Be absolutely sure. My wants shouldn't factor into it. This shouldn't be about making a sacrifice on my behalf. So if you want to, I'd welcome it. I'd do everything I could to make sure it wasn't something you regretted."

Even, one might assume, staying his teeth and ignoring those brute urges he had to break anything which surrendered to his vicious hands.

"And know there's no rush,? Mesteno went on. ?Whatever you give me, whenever you're inclined to, will be enough."

Lexius had decided the situation was insane.

There were definite incompatibilities, and they were both quite flawed in their own ways. It was ridiculous, had been from the very beginning, to pursue anything more than a distant friendship, to indulge whatever foolish feelings either of them felt. Lexius had always been terrible at managing his own emotions and it seemed he'd grown no better at it. Ignoring them, suppressing them, was the smarter path. That was something he'd become quite skilled it. Yet when Mesteno reached to cover his hand (and the dissonance vibrated sharply behind his eyes) the Elf did not pull away as he knew he aught. Instead, the Elf gave a low, harsh chuckle.

"Your want is inextricably linked." A somewhat wry admission, that. "As with so many of the things I have already given, I would consider it for no other." He was studying Mesteno's face all over again. Even that thread he?d wrapped into the man's mind squirmed.

What was it about this particular man that had drawn him out of decades of self-enforced solitude and deliberate remoteness? He knew the reason he had begun, the logic behind why he'd first started talking to the Sadist in the first place, but that in no way touched upon his need to continue.

"I will be certain." He finally murmured, more collected despite the fact he could not find an answer written in Mesteno's skin or tucked away in a secret fold of his mind (not that he'd pierced that deeply!). "Your patience is..." unanticipated, amazing, incomprehensible, "...appreciated." He chose the mild word, of course.

The Elf did love his understatements.

Mesteno was out on his porch, and Lexius still dead to the world when it happened.

Perhaps it was just the weariness stealing over him after too long spent awake playing sentinel, but when Lexius? sandalwood beads appeared, brushing between his fingers, the contact brought with it a compelling lethargy. Not even autumn?s enervating, incessant buzz could keep the will behind those innocuous spheres from claiming him.

The dream they ushered him into took place seamlessly within the world he?d moments before drifted off in. Still out on his frostbitten porch, only now with a visitor.

Gem was as beautiful and buxom as ever, with the exact same smile and shade of hidden worry in her amethyst colored eyes. Her hair might have shone a little too silver, her skin might have gleamed with some inner moonlight glow, but her voice sounded just like her voice, if whispered gently on the wind rather than coming directly from her lips.

"Mesteno?"

His head snapped up sharply. No amount of lucid dreaming had prepared him to recognise the faults in this one.

"Cara mea," he managed to murmur to the question she made of his name. "Be careful, mind your feet." He rose clumsily to meet her and make sure her approach stayed safe. Days later and he still kept finding glass from the broken windows.

"You're the one that should be minding." Gem chided Mesteno gently, but knowingly, as she lithely stepped onto the porch to come stand near him. She stretched out one hand and touched his chest, head canting back and up to meet his gaze directly with her own. Her eyes were pure jewels of color. She was, in that moment, far more stunning than even any Elf had a right to be. "You have a secret." She whispered. As if Mesteno only had one! Perhaps in this case, it was only one that mattered.

Smiling impishly, she stepped back and away from him and held out her hand before he could question her declaration. "Let me show you."

"You know the worst of mine," he reminded her, "and you've a hundred years on me to have piled up more."

He wasn't denying it of course, only pointing out that it was mildly hypocritical, even if he knew by that impish smile that she wasn't really chiding him. He did reach for the hand she offered him, but it was his intent to bring her to a stop there on the porch, rather than let her lead him from it. He didn't want Lexius to wake alone and think that he'd left him there. It might imply blame, and he wasn't sure he'd the skill to reassure him otherwise.

"Nunc non est tempus, mi amice," he told her, the Latin slipping out unchecked. He corrected though, grimacing for the error. He tried again. "Now is not a good time. I need to stay here - you can't tell me?"

Why Gem should look somewhat pleased that Mesteno balked rather than obliging her was a mystery, but she did. Perhaps it was just the sunny disposition she chose to show the world, a ray of brightness that swallowed all the darkness inside it. Her smile curled all the more deeply as her tiny fingers closed tightly around his own.

"Oh, chev," she murmured, sly and knowing, "you have no idea." As if she somehow knew more than the 'most' Mesteno had cited.

He frowned, finally accepting that there was something amiss, something more than just an addled mind. His hand went limp in her small one as he tried to get a fix on what it was.

She gave it tiny tug, so small it wouldn't even strain his fingers much less sway him from where he stood, as her glittering, amethyst eyes grew large with something akin to wonder.

"You have to see...? to see...see. Her words echoed for no discernible reason.

"Gem, something's wrong--," he began, barely even registering the strangeness of her words, and then all too fast he was falling forwards, thought he must be collapsing, and his heart seemed to lurch up into his throat.

Gem's eyes seemed to be expanding alarmingly. Or maybe he was growing smaller? Her tug pulled him on and, within moments, he'd fallen into the swollen pupils of her eyes and was left floating alone in a void of absolute blackness.

Mesteno had no form. He was consciousness itself without substance, awareness without body. He wanted to reach out, to find something solid, but he seemed to lack the limbs to do it. It was as if he were a dream voyeur, had the same strange lack of physical limits he'd experienced when attempting astral projection, only he was fully aware it wasn't him that'd compelled himself from his body.

"Gem?" He thought her name, rather than saying it, for he was lacking lips and tongue, but even the thought was a tentative whisper.

The blackness that surrounded him was absolute, unsettling and complete. This was not the Umbral plane he travelled, solid ground under his feet.

Instead he was one with the darkness. He was the darkness. Until he wasn't.

There, just ahead, a million miles away, something like light flickered briefly before the eyes he did not have, and he felt an echo of it flickering wildly inside of himself somewhere...before it exploded (he exploded) into countless pieces.

Had the Elf been awake and with him, he might have offered some mild commiseration. Perhaps even a quiet reassurance. Mesteno was suddenly walking a road that Lexius had been no more prepared to tread when he'd found it.

This time, though, that path had gone looking for someone, rather than waiting to be discovered as it had been by the Elf.

Mesteno, who'd once been nothing but awareness, was now everything at all at once. He was trillions of worlds being born in an instant. He was the light from countless stars and all the darkness that stretched between them. He was the matter of every planet, every moon, every comet and asteroid. He was the infinite energy of life itself and the endless finality of death. He was the thing from which all other things had sprung. He was existence. He was time. He was all.

He was going to crack, adrift in that endlessness. And then, quite suddenly, before the immensity of it could collapse his mind, he was nothing more than the mind of a man once more.

"Do you see?" Asked a voice (a million voices) from all around him.

The words offered a much-needed anchor, and despite the insanity of the multitude from which it seemed to come, he recognised them. He?d heard them before in a battle he?d been little more than a hapless bystander to.

There ahead of him, pouring forth from the beginning, he watched the universe and all within it being born, expanding, growing and changing as life begat life and coiled toward death only to be born anew. Each iteration was a little different, a little changed, a little...less, yet somehow more.

Too much, too much! he insisted, unsure why his mind might suddenly be exposed to it all unless the sheer unending enormity was supposed to send him bat-shit crazy.

If only he'd had eyes to close against it, he would have. He was have happily traded places with the unconscious Elf if it had brought him restive oblivion, but there was no escape, and so he faced it with all his usual bright curiosity torn and twisted into dread. He felt too large, his limits amorphous and intangible, and had never realised until then what a comfort it was being confined and small.

No man should see this, he replied, and had he been possessed of teeth, it would no doubt have been grated out between them. But that resentment was a good thing. He was feeling something other than fear, and so he latched to that, too. Why did you bring me here? he asked.

There. No tremor to his thoughts. Stubborn. He was gathering himself, petulant even now.

Not so many generations from the start, stretched between and coiled around the filaments of light (of life, of power) was a peculiar darkness that thrummed a note of perfect harmony to match the Sadist's soul. He recognised it intimately. He had no chance to strain towards it before it was gone again, and the missed opportunity left him feeling bereft. His essence went skating along those strands of energy that stretched far and wide through his universe.

Somewhere amidst the streaming strands of light he coursed along as if he were on a wild amusement ride, Gem's body resolved into being to float before him. She was made from stardust and power and wore the same impish smile on her lips as she reached out and patted the cheek Mesteno did not possess.

"You're right." She agreed, infinitely amused. "It really was made for a woman's eyes." Laughter broke the vision of her apart, but the sound of it lingered on in a wooden rattle somewhere inside his straining mind.

He understood now, that Gem had been plucked from his mind for the very purpose of calming him, luring him into the damned ride he was a helpless passenger to. It was just like some limitless power, that Divinity who?d claimed Lexius, to play with a man's head like that.

Knowing that it wasn't her, he offered no response to her amusement, and certainly not to her commentary about it being made for a woman to see. He was far too stubborn to offer a retort to a statement like that.

Mesteno travelled the light for a small eternity, touching down briefly on word after world, place after place, as he went. Here twin suns burned in an emerald sky where the light sank into the murky grey water of a swamp. There the light impacted the jagged peak of a mountain covered in strange blue moss that writhed and wiggled beneath a singular sun. Onward, to another place where the highway of energy Mesteno rode inexplicably reached into the miles deep bottom of a canyon. It gleamed on the floor of an ocean full of purple water and thrashing sea life. It shimmered in the centre of a long dead city gone to eons of ruin. It pulsed from the depths of an Amazonian-like forest. It glinted in the frozen ice of a racing comet. It winked like a shard of metal buried in the face of a meteor. It was on every world, in every place, and Mesteno seemed to visit them all.

With his earlier fear shed, with his pride so prickled, he observed it all with intent. He might not like it, this being dragged about, ragdoll-esque, but he'd be damned if he was going to waste the opportunity to see things that so few must. He'd rallied, and so had his curiosity, and in places there were things he saw things he suspected he'd seen before, but they were gone too quickly, and there was so much more he wanted to pause and see in more detail, his mind uncomprehending, or awed.

Finally, somewhere amidst hopelessly tangled skeins of power, Mesteno was set down on his last world, put back in his body in a most inhospitable environment.

Sand surrounded him, creeping onto his skin as if it was alive while a brutal (but familiar) sun beat down from the sky overhead.

Now he felt heavy, weighed down, and it took him a moment to realise he had his body back, even if it was just the lie of a body in his head. He shuddered, a vicious thing that rattled along his spine, and he slipped down to his knees, bunching himself as if to take root there with his fingers buried in the very sand which seemed to creep into his skin.

Familiar. Good.

He remembered what it was to breathe, to feel the heat on his skin, and everything he'd experienced out there, in that vast melting pot of creation, began to seem so surreal he wondered if he hadn't imagined being there.

He?d barely had a minute to collect himself before a russet colored jackal stood before him, tongue lolling from an open mouth as if it were laughing at him.

"No rest for the wicked." The jackal's jaws hadn't moved, but it was clear that the animal spoke the words.

Mesteno had tracked the jackal's approach with a suspicious squint, but aware now that this manifestation of his body was just a mental creation, he wasn't concerned about any harm it might do him. Nor was he surprised to hear that voice coming from its unmoving jaws. Better to hear it from an animal, than from the faux-Gem.

"You have a low opinion of me," he groused.

It came lunging at him, teeth flashing, to drive him up out of the sands and get him moving despite the oppressive heat.

"Pay attention!" The jackal advised in a familiar voice as it bounded away after the initial attack, trotting easily along the edge of a sloping dune. It left no paw prints behind and moved at a brisk pace.

Around him, the sea of red-gold sand dunes went on forever, with no clear visual markers with which to mark his location. He could be anywhere. But on the horizon, far ahead of their current location, there was a smudge of darkness that suggested mountains, maybe cliffs, the fanciful might mistake for the wings of some giant beast erupting out of the ground. The jackal was headed toward them unerringly when its body went over the peak of a dune and vanished.

What else was he to do but pursue? He wasn't going to sit there in the sand for the rest of his life, and he had this notion that might very well happen if he didn't play along.

"I liked you better when you were beads," he told the voice-in-a-jackal.

The Elf didn't linger over pushing himself out of the bed, but he did pause long enough to reach and stroke a thumb over his watch-cat's furred head. She permitted it with her usual wintery appraisal, restrained a swiping paw, and watched as he pulled on the pants Mesteno had folded beside the mattress for when he woke. The room only swayed a little bit, but Lexius? stomach certainly had a thing or two to say about his extended nap, as did his physical form. He ignored it all, setting his jaw and heading for the bedroom door with carefully controlled steps and the trousers only barely clinging to his hips. He needed to see Mesteno, because he didn't quite trust himself yet to reach out with a mental thread to find the man.

After his unexpected trip, Mesteno had come around feeling all the more exhausted, his head full of things he might have thought for a fever dream if not for the lingering smell of burnt flesh and the brand he'd found, discreetly placed amongst the scars on his chest.

He was furious, but it had been ephemeral. There was not enough energy in him to sustain that kind of rage, and he'd made his way into the leaf strewn living room, deciding to put quill to paper simply to record what memories he could while they were still vivid, spider scrawl penmanship beside bold bullet points; things seen, things spoken, what had been suggested...

That part troubled him more than anything.

So it was when Lexius woke, Mesteno was not there to offer reassurances. He was sat on the bare floorboards not far from the hearth in his living room, where he'd actually taken the time to start a fire.

Instead of the argent moonlight, there was a ruddy gleam to the sparse contents of the room, and shadows danced like sooty devils as the breeze swept in and made the flames lick wildly upwards, brittle leaves cast about like fragile pinwheels. After the windows had shattered, Mesteno had relocated his notes, and the books he kept in there room down to the morgue where they'd be safe from the elements, and it made the space seem more barren than ever. The warmth was a small pleasure though; he could almost imagine it was just camping, with the view out into the woods.

Out in the living room, a tiny little pygmy owl winged silently into place in the empty frame of a window, chirping quietly as he landed.

Despite the muted roar of the flames, the owl's chirp was enough to bring Mesteno's eyes up off his work to observe the little herald with a somnolent blink. The owls didn't generally come anywhere near him unless Lexius was around, so his head canted toward the hallway behind him expectantly, the quill abandoned to smudge ink on a half-written page.

He'd spent so long waiting, and now that there was a chance Lexius might be awake, he found himself anxiety bitten. The worst of a multitude of scenarios he'd conjured up over the past forty-eight hours came squabbling for attention at the forefront of his thoughts; What if he decided he didn't want anything to do with him anymore because of the risk? What if he'd been mentally damaged by the war they'd waged?

What if?

Lexius senses were particularly sharp in those moments, as if the physical and mental ordeal had left them scraped to raw acuteness rather than smothering them to dullness. He could smell Mesteno on his skin despite the careful washing the man had given him while he lay unconscious, could scent the wood burning in the other room. He could hear the crackle of the fire (such an out of place noise in his limited experience with the man) and the softer scratching of the quill, the quiet call of the owl. He could taste autumn on the brisk air and, beneath that, the Sadist's flavour and something like ash. He could feel the grains of the wood beneath his bare feet and against his palm as he touched the hallway wall to keep himself steady. What he couldn't sense was Mesteno's mind and that was already making him just a little bit crazy.

Mesteno might have laughed if he realized how precisely his own thoughts were being mirrored by a typically more rational elven mind. But, really, what was so irrational about the Sadist deciding all of this was far, far too much trouble to go through? And if he hadn't been damaged yet, why would he want to chance becoming so at some point in the future? Mesteno had yet to show any true fear of him, but this incident was bound to breed a certain level of caution, if nothing else. As it should. Lexius was not looking forward to bearing witness to it.

He paused at the exit of the hall, one hand still on the wall there, when he spotted the Sadist situated before that fire he?d smelled. Plainly he?d dressed to combat the chill in lamb?s wool, leather and jeans, hair loose to provide an extra layer over shoulders, neck and back. The fire picked out the threads of colour in it violently, left it burnished whilst gave a ruddy faience to his reflective eyes where the light edged around the sharp cheekbone and angular jaw on one side.

His chin was up tilted so he could get a better view of the newly woken Elf, but there was no sign of alarm upon seeing him, and no hostility that suggested he wanted him gone sooner, rather than later. Lexius' grip tightened on the wall as he finally met Mesteno's gaze directly.

"You are well?" His voice was rough with disuse and dryness, but the tone was as intent as his gaze. It didn't seem he would relax until he had the answer.

Mesteno?s first impulse had been to reach up towards him, perhaps stretch far enough to catch him by the wrist and draw him down to sit, but good sense intercepted action before it could begin. Touching him now that he was awake felt like something he should wait for an invitation for, the extent of his instability still uncertain. The absence of the mental link was proving a true inconvenience.

"I'm well," he replied, chin dipping a faint nod. "Better for seein' you up and about again. I wasn't sure how long to leave you passed out before goin' t'get help."

Lexius' eyes narrowed into fine slits, as if he didn't quite believe the man completely. Mesteno would say he was well even if he was actively bleeding! He gripped the wall just a little bit more strongly to stave off the urge to reach out and pull off the man's clothing so he could have a look for himself! Never mind the renewed, more insistent temptation to wind thought to thought and inspect the Sadist's mind with his own. To simply feel that connection, if nothing else

"You need a drink," Mesteno told him, the dryness of throat all too obvious. "Sit, I'll get you some water, or get the water heatin' for your coffee if you want it." He was already snapping the notebook he'd been writing in closed, leaving the quill sandwiched amongst its pages to play bookmark.

"No." The denial was swift and, perhaps, a little bit harsh. Lexius heard it and took a breath to smooth out his next words. Mesteno did not deserve more harshness, especially when it seemed he wasn't harbouring any ill will for what had happened.

Pessimism danced a 'told you so' throughout Mesteno?s unmonitored thoughts, and though he attempted to school his features into serenity, it wasn't happening. Worse yet, Lexius had turned his gaze away, and he mistook it for displeasure.

He set the notebook down, and rose with as much dignity as he could muster under the circumstances. "That's fine. I left all your things together," he managed evenly.

"I need to return to the desert." Lexius spoke a bit more smoothly now, gaze shifting back to Mesteno and the fire.

All that hair, the gleam of his eyes. Too many damn clothes. And his mind, which might as well be a million miles away. It was better he go back. He could remain here, but it would slow his recovery. He'd been unconscious as long as he had been because he was here, not there. And despite Mesteno's equanimity, he was probably ready for the Elf to be gone. Yet...

"Come with me?" He hadn't meant to ask, to presume upon the Sadist even more, but the words just up and marched themselves right on out of his mouth without his permission. He didn't try to take them back, but that subtle bit of relaxation was gone as he braced himself for the refusal.

The subtle displeasure thinning the necromancer?s mouth seemed to soften, the severity of tight drawn brows smoothing. Now he was plain confused, and the tension he saw in Lexius' stance did nothing to enlighten him. They were back to the awkwardness of mixed signals, and he wasn't sure if joining him then was the wisest choice to make.

Mesteno had never made such bold claims as to consider himself wise though, and he nodded, agreeing despite all the good reasons not to. None of them stacked up well against 'don't care, want to go'.

"Sure, s'probably warmer than here. Let me bank the fire so I at least got something to put the new windows in." Rather than leaving the fire untended and return to a burnt out shell of a cabin, he meant!

Lexius wanted to relax again, give in to the near giddying sense of relief that coiled somewhere across the back of his brain. Mesteno had, against all good sense, agreed! But there was clear displeasure in the Sadist's expression, even if it was fading. Confusion begat confusion. It kept the Elf pinned in place, fingers still tightly curled around the edge of the wall as if the wood might ease the itch in his palms and fingertips.

He knew he should not be carefully gathering his aching Will and stretching the more-than-sore muscles of his mind. He absolutely should not be thinking about reaching mentally for the Sadist right then and damn the consequences. That's what had gotten them in trouble in the first place, his own ability to ignore the consequences. Another look flicked over the room reminded him of that and dashed cold water onto the idea of doing anything mental. But he could talk, at least. Speak deliberately.

"Mesteno." He said it like he was tasting every syllable of the man's name, with a certain grave undertone that infested the sincerity of what he said next. "I wish to touch you," in so many ways! "But I am not certain it is welcome. Or advisable. I apologize... for what happened." There. He did relax a little then. It was said out loud and plain. Lexius straightened from his lean against the wall. "I will get my things."

Mesteno had moved to crouch by the fire, moving the remaining logs further apart and using the ash to smother the flames, adopting the shadows in place of any fireside tools, their added chill and manifest solidity helping to further extinguish heat and light. The room cooled rapidly after that, and the warm, rosy ambience was replaced by the same, milky light by which they'd got themselves into trouble two nights before. He wasn't so fixated on his task that he didn't hear the Elf though. In fact that grave tone with which he spoke his name gripped him as if by the nape, assured he turned his eyes back to him as the embers faded. He was convinced he was going to hear something he wouldn't like.

The necromancer wasn't prone to owlish blinking, but for Lexius' confession he wasn't lacking in obvious reaction. His chin sank low, and he lifted a hand to plaster wide-splayed fingers across brow and eyes. He shook his head, the ends of his hair swaying heavily.

"I thought--," a solitary shake of shoulders, coupled with a sound that probably passed for relief and soft laughter together. "Your touch is welcome, Lexius. Can't comment on advisable, but that won't stop me being glad of it. Now quit makin' me think the worst. You got me all tied up in knots." And he wasn't going to explain what he meant by that!

"As you say." The Elf replied. There was a breath of amusement in those words, more self-directed then aimed outward, then Lexius moved down the hall back the way he'd come.

Night reigned in the sandstone canyons beyond the cave's entrance, casting the striated stone into silver and grey bands beneath the touch of Rhy?Din?s twin moons. The gaping entrance of the cavern overlooked that stunning view with nothing but the twin pillars of rock masquerading as a doorway to hamper the sight. Despite all that open air and the vague drift of a dry, dry breeze from without, the cave still maintained a comfortable temperature.

The cave was redolent with the rich scent of the spices Lexius used in his food and his coffee, both of which he was making the most of. He?d joined Mesteno at the table, where the man had seated himself on the rug, rather than upon the cushions, the Elf?s beads crawling stealthily over his arm.

The necromancer had recounted (to the best of his ability) what had happened, filling in Lexius? patchy memories, though he struggled when it came to the metaphysical battle that?d ensued. "I thought it was all over, went to get the dogs away from the glass, but there was this feeling like-- like something was trying to get into my head."

His mouth adopted a similar frown to his brow, and he shook his head in auto-admonition. "No, it was you, or parts of you, that thing that makes you feel bad when we're in physical contact, the flaws or maybe what's left of the red dragon. Maybe all of it. It was trying to choke me, metaphysically speakin', and you know how that had to end up. My life's threatened and I have precisely zero control over what's in me, so it was trying to swallow you, like it was reaching along some kind of bridge. Or maybe just the mental tie?"

He was hypothesising as he went, but had recalled then that the tie had severed the moment Lexius came. "I don't know what, but there was some kind of link," he insisted, as if he thought Lexius might not be willing to hear of it. "Anyway, your friends here intervened," he gave the dangling beads a little shake before letting them pool back on the table. "Spoke in my head again to remind me you were theirs, and whatever was going on just stopped. When I came in to check on you, y'were out like a light and all the crazy shit going on in the bedroom had stopped."

Lexius had watched the Sadist through the telling, gaze flicking to the way he toyed with the lax string of beads before returning to study his eyes, his face, as he explained what he'd experienced. He nudged the coffee mug he'd filled for the man a little closer to him with a carefully precise push of thought even as he refilled his own and digested both the food and the information. He curled one hand around his mug and dropped the other carefully, deliberately, to cup his palm over Mesteno's knee before he spoke.

"I should not be alive." It was not a promising beginning. He said it so matter-of-factly, too, as if commenting on an inalienable truth. Thankfully, Lexius went on to explain himself. "What I did when I died, is within a psion's power to do. But there is a limit to the amount of time one's soul and mind can be housed in such a way before everything begins to deteriorate. I existed in that state well beyond the limit. That, in addition to the crystals being...improperly prepared," improperly was putting it mildly! ?and the taint of the dragon I tried to remove through the process..." Lexius trailed off, shook his head and eyes the beads again. "It all should have negated any possibility of a rebirth."

Yet, there he was, live and in the flesh!

His gaze lifted back to the Sadist's, sombre and weary. "I suppose they," he paused, changed the wording, "...it, was not done with me and they knew of no other way to put me back together but with the flaws I now hold." He still had secrets despite how many he'd revealed to the Sadist, Lexius murmured another he'd been musing over for some time. "When I first met you again in RhyDin, learned what it is your soul does, I pondered for some time if they'd brought me to you to allow it to cease, to take back the mistake of allowing me to exist again." It sounded like he might be pondering that idea again. It had, for a time, held no little bit of appeal.

Mesteno reached and settled his free hand lightly, briefly over the Elf's to let him know the touch was welcome, before it joined its twin around the mug. The coffee had cooled enough while he spoke to allow a tentative swallow. A moment later and he shook his head, a denial that the beads would have ushered him to an end.

"You're wrong," he sounded almost belligerent. "Or were wrong, to think that. They're way too possessive, way too invested in keeping you alive for such a thing. They probably have some masterplan for you that neither of us can even guess at, but I do know that they want you fixed."

And he was going to have to explain that, wasn't he? He couldn't just claim it was a gut feeling, couldn't lie about something so important.

"Today, a few hours before you woke up, I was sat out on the porch and it felt like I was startin' to fall asleep. The beads were with me," he used his mug to nudge them, "all fussy and clinging, when f'most of the time they've been clinging to you like an anxious nanny. Anyway, long story short, they were in my head, talking through the faces of people I know, telling me I had to see things. And they took me so long and so fucking far and filled my head with so much I thought my brain was gonna burst."

Lexius? gaze had drifted to the beads again. His expression had shifted to a full on scowl, both for their lack of behaviour and Mesteno's mention of his brain bursting.

Gaze snapping back to the Sadist, Lexius finally reached out mentally to establish the tie. A thread of thought snaked out, swift and sure, to tangle itself into Mesteno's mind and burrow its way on in as if finally coming home. The sense of the Elf's worry came with it, interwoven with strings of relief and a sort of thundering satisfaction at finally establishing that missing connection. Finally!

"What did you see?" Lexius asked, intent and already examining for himself that everything was as it should be, that all the patterns he'd become so familiar with, that all the parts he had touched and adjusted himself were still there and undamaged.

Mesteno had become astute at recognising the tie when it established by now, and he lifted his eyes from the beads as he felt it slip into place. He offered a sense of welcome, of something like the bump of heads wolves might offer in greeting, that lean and rub, affectionate.

It was mildly surprising to the Elf, and once again Lexius felt the urge to make that connection more permanent. But no. He banished the thought as quickly as it came. As flawed as he was, it risked too much. That didn't stop the thread from engaging itself a little more snugly where it had taken hold.

"I saw too much," Mesteno told him quietly. "It was like I was bodiless, just pulled about from place to place. One moment I was everything, connected to it all, to time, to light and death, a part of every scrap out there, the next I was hurtling through it, watching planets grow and stars being born, visiting worlds that look nothing like this one. It was all a rush, not nearly long enough to study it all, but I started writing some of it down before the memories could fade," he admitted. "If you want to see when I'm done, I don't mind."

But of course there was more. "It brought me to the desert in the end. To a tear in the ground and to The Well. Same place I had to crawl through when I was at the Obelisk and you had to call me out of whatever head-fuck it inflicted on me." He suspected, but could not be sure, that Lexius knew of what he spoke, but he called it forth into the forefront of his mind anyway, and let him see Lan there, morphing into the steel grey dragon. The details of it were hazy, as if he were recalling a dream rather than something actually seen with conscious eyes, but it was the best he could manage, and he let it drop as the tattered edges became hazier.

He lifted the mug to his mouth again, and this time gulped the liquid as if the heat and spice were helping to settle some unspoken anxiety. "It asked me if I was strong enough to devour the dragon. And the dragon Lan became, it started turning red, then it ate me. Well it charred me first, then it ate me."

Lexius? eyelids had dropped heavily over his colourful eyes as he concentrated the bulk of his vision on what he could 'see' along that tie. The surprise came again, veined through with streaks of concern. There were changes in the patterns of Mesteno's mind despite the lack of damage. Maybe the lack of damage was a surprise, as well, given what the Sadist was describing that he'd seen. It was too much. Lexius remembered it well. And no mind could experience it without being changed, expanded, broadened and awakened in ways that could prove unpredictable. The Elf spent a long time cataloguing the differences, unconsciously rubbing a hand along the top of Mesteno's leg as he did so.

By the end of the tale it, was Lexius who was in adamant denial mode.

"There will be no devouring." He stated flatly. He'd welcomed the idea not so long ago. But not anymore. Not just yet.

"Relax," Mesteno told him, as if that flat tone had indicated he thought he might be about to try devouring things at any given moment. "If I'd been inclined t'do it, I would've while you were unconscious. I didn't do anythin' inappropriate, up here," he tapped his own temple, "or anywhere else."

Still, he wasn't going to leave the subject alone without adding a little. "To be honest, I don't think I could selectively remove those flaws from you anyway. I don't have enough control over that kind of feeding to do more than take a little or a lot, or target a specific person. Trying to pry apart what was right and wrong in you to leave the rest unharmed?" He shook his head as if he thought it impossible. Maybe given time, practice, guidance from someone else with similar feeding habits he might have stood a chance, but not now. "The only other way I could think it would work would be for me not to be selective, but for them," and the way he said it implied the voices playing mouthpiece for the divinity, "to drag the parts they did want back out of me, as if I were... a filter?" He wrinkled his nose as if he weren't sure on the metaphor.

He'd talked a lot by this point, and left little out, so he was watching Lexius expectantly, hoping he'd offer a little more back than that laconic, dark reply.

There was something in what the man had just said, in the idea of acting as a filter that had Lexius contemplating it. The problem was, what would the Sadist lose in the process? He was rather sure there'd been no mention of that part of the process at all! Never mind the fact he hadn't been 'assembled' so well the first time. He had to wonder what made them ? it - think it could do any better now. Lexius knew for a fact his existence was carefully guarded and the knowledge of it sometimes chaffed, but not nearly so much as now when they were trying to drag Mesteno into it, as well.

"You will lose something." He finally predicted. "That it has been in you as much as it has thus far has already changed you. To invite it in willingly..." He let this trail, held up his hand for Mesteno to see. A hand that had once belonged to an albino, a drow, an entirely different being altogether. "It will change you." He wasn't precisely grim about it, but his tone was certainly heavy.

November 18th, 2015


It had been more than a week since Lexius had returned to the desert for his recovery, and Mesteno had been absent for a portion of it, off-world entirely to visit the city of Madrid. The Spanish capital was a far cry from Rhy?Din?s nexus tangled streets, but it concealed more threats than the uninitiated might suppose, and the Turk had warned him it might bring trouble. Not that it had dissuaded him from going.

It'd been a success, this single day's visit, but he'd yet to contact Koyan about the matter of his findings due to the minor issue of his battered old phone having died in the psionic blast. The screen, like every other scrap of glass was quite shattered and it had been his intention, this night he left the temple where he worked, to reluctantly source a replacement.

Silent as a scrap of insidiously drifting smoke, he made his way along the familiar streets with reckless inattentiveness. It was not overblown confidence which kept him from his usual watchful habits, merely a distracted mind, and one he'd berate himself for before the night was done.

It was bound to happen given Mesteno often took the same route to where he parked his van. That he didn't stick to a particular schedule had temporarily hampered the efforts of those interested in his comings and goings, but the right time and the right place finally happened as the stars aligned for the Gods rather than the mortals. The city had too many eyes and a more than a few of them were concentrated in the district Mesteno went to work. Lips passed on what eyes had seen. The Titan-tainted man had finally been identified and placed.

Dressed in the usual monochrome palette the temple preferred, the sleek, clich? blacks bearing traces of grave dust, his breath rose in coiling clouds, and he kept his shoulders hunched beneath the thick wool greatcoat, a double breasted, brass-buttoned affair which offered the lie of civility to off-set the untended mane of his hair. He wasn't very far from the temple at all when the attack came, completely out of the blue and from the air.

They'd looked like nothing more than gargoyles perched atop the ancient structures in that section of the city, but they proved to be far swifter and less stony than the image of the creatures they'd been cast into. Two bronze beasts, man-shaped and be-winged. He heard them before he saw them, the descending effigies closing in quick enough he'd no opportunity to consider tactics. They descended with clawed hands reaching to try and snag him off the street, and he, irritatingly swift as ever, threw himself low against the rain-slick cobblestones as they snatched at him. Brass claws scraped across the front of his coat, but failed to seize him.

It bought him a few precious seconds as his boots slithered for purchase to see him upright, as furious as he was startled, and he swatted at one of his attackers with a wave of shadow as they swept over him in a rush of heated air and metal wings, screeching metallic protest for his escape. It was caught across one wing and sent sprawling onto the cobblestone street not too far from a group of passer's by who screamed all too humanly as the brass creation rolled their way. What few other people that were on the street scattered, though some only far enough to lurk and watch the events unfold. RhyDin was a constant train wreck waiting to be observed.

The gargoyle he'd downed scrambled back to its feet, broad wings flapping and gleaming in the meagre light of the street lamps. A good seven feet tall, it loosely resembled a disfigured man standing upright, until it fell to all fours and came charging Mesteno?s way, eyes gleaming the bright red of the forge where it had been created and wings propelling it as it leaped the last dozen feet.

The first brass gargoyle was still in the air, circling around for another try at a swoop and capture.

It was the ruddy, forge-fire gleam which brought his mind rattling to an immediate conclusion: Creature's wrought from the furnace of Zeus' master craftsman, those very same constructs which Aiden had been sent to find weapons to defeat.

He offered no warnings to the other locals who'd tucked themselves aside to watch his little street brawl, but charged straight towards them instead - or rather to the alley they'd clustered in because he wanted that gloom.

One foot in with the thing on his heels and he vanished, the air suddenly frigid and any breath expelled sinking in a crystalline twinkling frost vapour.

The cunningly crafted, brass gargoyle did not expect it, and it landed hard in the mouth of the alley, colliding with an observer that'd been too afraid to move.

Of course he hadn't gone all that far. Too risky to try and get all the way home from the Temple District through the shadows, and he wouldn't chance having them find him at the inn, one of his few refuges. Instead, he'd eyed up a balcony hastily, on the opposite side of the street to which he'd vanished. With a clear mental image and such a short distance to travel, he stepped out almost instantaneously, teeth clenched about the urge to rattle.

He wasn't sure yet whether the damn things had detected him via more than sight, whether it was the titan taint they'd used to pursue him, but for the moment he simply dropped to a cat-like crouch on the balcony, a delicate, aged piece of masonry thrust out from the side of some female only temple. It had likely only been intended for decoration, not for holding an adult man's weight, but it held for now, and gave him a good view of the street so that he could get a better look at the constructs.

Overhead, what had once been a clear night was quickly becoming overcast with dark, hulking clouds. Those clouds gathered too quickly, grew too thick, to be anything natural. The first ominous growl of thunder rumbled in the heavens. Now that his mind wasn't fixed on things of a more mundane nature (like where the hell did one get new phones) he was shrewd enough to take note. Thunder clouds. He suspected the odds he'd be dodging lightning bolts within the next few minutes were high.

Mesteno had a fine view of the gargoyle?s back, where wedge shaped protrusions marching down its spine were glowing with the same sort of gleam in its eyes. It snatched a terrified bystander up in its clawed hands and seemed about to lift off again, before it realized what it held was not its true prey, and tossed the shrieking man down the alley.

The other beast, still airborne, had already honed on Mesteno's new location and was swooping down from beneath the pregnant belly of the clouds to try and snatch him off the balcony. Mesteno barely reacted in time.

"What do you think you're doing on the property of Fair Ferluna? This Temple is off limits to--!"

The scantily clad priestess of whoever ?Ferluna? happened to be gave a scandalised gasp as Mesteno shoved past her and into the perfumed parlour she'd just opened to him without full knowledge of what went on outside. Going out there to investigate the silhouette she'd assumed belonged to some pervert spying on her and her sisters resulted in a rogue male bolting hell for leather through their irritating, sheer draperies and tripping all over their tacky, tasselled cushions as they scrambled their half-naked selves out of his path.

The priestess had barely a breath to realise the gargoyle was in pursuit before she shrieked at thrice the volume the thrown man wailed, and darted aside in her satin slippers to avoid a direct collision. If the gargoyles wanted him, they were going to have to chase him through belly-dancer boudoirs that smelled as if someone'd set fire to a hippy.

The gargoyle crashed into the balcony mere seconds later, and lunged its way through the open doorway and past the caterwauling woman, batting her aside with its brassy wings as it passed. Blood stained the flimsy drapes as the creature shoved its way further inside and across the room without a care for who it trampled along the way. Gauzy curtains fouled up its half folded wings and bits of brightly coloured fabrics caught in the sharper edges of its body as it chased Mesteno through the room with another metallic shriek. Lucky for everyone involved it hadn't been sent to kill Mesteno, but capture him, so no flames came streaking from its mouth toward the Sadist's back.

Outside, the second Gargoyle was battering at the main temple doors, shattering the locks and splintering the wood to get inside, chasing the signature feel of the Sadist that had somehow been forged into their metal brains from below. It splashed through wading pools and crashed through fanciful topiary as it went, giving out a brassy cry of its own as if coordinating the chase with its partner above.

The call from below had the Gargoyle chasing Mesteno finally letting free a jet of fire, but the gout of flame would shoot off to the Sadist's left to drive and drive him to the right down a curved stairway.

He almost slipped up in some glistening pool full of sweetly rising mist and scattered flowers, but managed to grasp the shin of a gracefully splayed statue's leg before he pitched face first into the water. He'd a gun he might have employed, if the damn gargoyles chasing him weren't metal, and the temple was too full of fanciful candelabra and lamps for him to draw enough shadows to him to successfully step from sight again. But where would he have gone anyway? He'd tried desperately to recall the particulars of the street where he'd parked his van, but unable to conjure up any useful details, he knew he'd only end up lost on those frigid walkways in the Shadowlands and end up a block of ice.

So he ran, and did his best to barge through places that might hinder his pursuer more than he. Unfortunately the damn thing seemed determined enough to simply destroy anything in its damn path, and there was enough noise and caterwauling from below that he suspected he was going to be ambushed if he attempted to descend any steps and make it back to the street.

"Sanctus futue!" He spat, instinctively lurching away from flames, although perhaps not so far as the gargoyle intended for him to go. He saw a window, turned his shoulder to plough straight through it in a cacophony of shattering glass (windows had a poor survival rate around him lately) and right out onto another of those ridiculous little balconies, this time overlooking a different street.

Two floors up seemed like a bad idea, given his knees, but even had he the time to reason with himself, momentum would never have stopped him in time. He went barrelling straight off it, and as all men did, succumbed to gravity.

He crash landed onto a wagon parked near the rear service entrance of the temple. The small door had been left open and the workers had already abandoned the scene given the commotion. There was no one there to witness him go bouncing off a fresh load of pillows and then slamming into some clay pots of scented oils... which shattered promptly upon impact, dousing him in myriad clashing floral scents.

Up above, the curtains clinging to the window he?d leapt from had gone up in flames as if they'd been doused in gasoline. The fire spread quickly, given all the combustible materials scattered about, and even began to burn along the creature itself as what cloth was caught in its body ignited too. It spread its wings again, the effort was hampered by the cloth wound through the metal, but that was quickly burning away. Somewhere inside the temple, the other creature was sending up fresh shrieks of terror and outrage as it tried to find a way into and through the kitchen and down the narrow service hall to the back. It bought Mesteno a few precious seconds, even as thunder growled through the sky again.

Scrambling backwards, out of the crushed clay and the splintered wagon frame, he lurched unsteadily away from the temple and out of sight down an adjoining alley, not wasting anytime in glancing back to see if the creature were in pursuit. There was darkness here, enough darkness he could use it.

He shadow stepped again, just as the gargoyle launched itself after him from the balcony, and lightning finally crackled down out of the cloud heavy sky to slam into the ground directly on his heels.

He emerged in the Marketplace, and not just in the now mainly empty space where the merchants set up their stalls for the day, but outside Lexius' favourite little cafe, right at that table he always had the owners keep clear for him, and stumbling all over their cushions with his stinking self. The static electricity travelled with him, so that he emerged amidst a shower of sparks and rippling energy.

It garnered him more than a little attention

The place wasn't as busy at night as it was during the heat of midday, but there were plenty enough people gathered under the awning (many of which had been leaning to catch a glimpse of the strange, exceedingly localized storm erupting over the Temple District) that his electric appearance among them caused quite the stir. People gasped in surprise then immediately regretted it for the stink Mesteno was clouding the air with.

Offering no protest to the mental invasion, and trusting him entirely not to delve deeper than the most recent memories, Mesteno thumbed open the fastenings of his jeans and slid them down off his hips, glad of the steam beginning to rid the room of its usual chill. "Bolt holes, huh? They'd be useful enough.?

Once Lexius had been able to look at this sight with pure dispassion, but it wasn't so any longer. Even as he 'watched' the memories he'd accessed from Mesteno's mind, even as he catalogued the fresh stains of bruising across the man's skin, even as a part of his brain processed possibilities and reasons and formulated plans and responses, Lexius was not oblivious to the particular allure he held even when he was trying to be alluring in the slightest.

Stepping out of the jeans pooled at his ankles, Mesteno tugged the door to the shower cubicle open. "The taint is just a marker though, right? It doesn't actually have any value to them because it doesn't do anything."

Ignoring the sting of the water against new aches and turning about until his skin was slick and his hair clamped heavy to the sleek, hard lines of his wiry frame. He was nothing more than a darkly tanned blur beyond the steamed barrier, vigorously attempting to cleanse the oil off his skin with a bar of soap that turned patches of his hide white with suds.

I will show you all of it. Every little bolt hole and secret Lexius had access to in the city were his for the taking! And I am uncertain as to what value the taint may have to them. There is something to it, though. Or to you, specifically, that they find of value enough to want to capture you alive. There was just no way to be certain of their reasons or motivations, but Lexius would be pondering it at length.

"I will bring you clothes." He didn't touch the discarded sweater and jeans, but twisted his will again to send them elsewhere. Then he was turning to slip from the bathroom and go invade Mesteno's closet.

I was being careless, Mesteno confessed darkly as he his skin reddened in places for the vicious friction. I'll have to start carrying more than a gun and a knife. Neither of them would've been effective against those things.

Grenades, perhaps. Lexius suggested as he investigated the contents of the other man?s wardrobe, brushing a hand across clothing carelessly piled and toeing aside the length of chain snaking over boots in the bottom. Now that they know the area of the District you haunt, they will wait for you to reappear there. He knew Mesteno wouldn't simply abandon his work the way he?d given up visits to the city himself. What is your plan? He asked as he carried the clothing back and eased into the heavily clouded bathroom as quietly as he'd left it.

I wonder whether Aiden had any luck finding something in the tech sector. If not I'll go hunt around there myself. Mesteno was just rinsing the shampoo from his hair when he heard the muffled sound of the bathroom door again. I'd like to find out what they want me for. I suspect the only way to get answers is to go play nice with our protectors, or I'll be avoiding the Temple for as long as this takes to clear up. Using a glamour won't help, they'll still sense the taint even if I look different, and I don't think there's a back way into the temple. Besides, they'll probably be watching from a birds eye view. Won't matter how I try and get in. S'fucking inconvenient.

The water ceased abruptly as he fumbled the button off, and wet fingers plastered up against the door before it bumped open far enough for him to reach out for a towel off the rack. He did them both the favour of getting it twisted securely around his hips before he exposed himself.

Lexius set the folded clothes on the counter by the sink then leaned back against it, fingers curling in a loose grip to either side of his hips. There was the ghost of a smile on his lips for some reason or another, but his blue-violet eyes were serious and steady. The idea of either of them interacting with the rebellious Powers was no more appealing than dealing with those on the hostile side.

A fine, slithering snake of anger escaped the Elf's control as he continued to contemplate the matter, recognizing once again how close Mesteno had come to being snatched up and taken. Realizing that, in his current state, he couldn't be as much help to the man as he could be (as he would need to be!) was downright galling. His hold on the edge of the counter dug hard into his palms as his fingers tightened, a new kind of frustration left bubbling in the wake of the anger.

"Will you return to the mountain with me?" He asked it out loud, his gaze tracking over Mesteno openly and boldly. It was a small favour, that towel.

There was a second towel on the rack Mesteno snagged up to start rough drying his hair with. "You don't want to wait until winter, huh?" he asked somewhat wryly. There was no showmanship in the way he dried himself off, though it didn?t take long for him to catch the way those hybrid eyes were roaming so boldly, and he reacted before he'd even chance to count the numerous ways in which things might go wrong. He tossed the towel aside so that it draped sloppily over the side of the bath tub, and with the other still wrapping his hips, he stepped in close to where he leaned against the counter, leaning to set his hands to either side of the Elf's. No touching, but the proximity was a dangerous thing.

Lexius' gaze stopped its wandering to snap back up to Mesteno's eyes. The Elf went still. Still of body, still of mind, as if thoughts and lungs both had seized up and halted.

"If you think it'll be worthwhile, fine,? Mesteno agreed. ?Maybe you'll even discover a way to hide the taint, or diminish it so they have to be closer to locate it in the first place. Listen to me though, if I think that anger is for what I think it is," because of course he'd felt it! "rest assured I will be careful. I will do my damnedest not to be where they'll think to look for me. There's nothin' else either of us can do, and the fault is entirely mine for fuckin' around with things I shouldn't have in the first place."

There was a heartbeat where he hesitated, as if his common sense had finally caught up with his reflex actions and warned him off anything physical, but he went and did it anyway, smudging a kiss against Lexius? mouth before he could offer any answer, lips only faintly parted. There was a strange fierceness to it though, as if he were meant more to impress upon him the depth of his determination, rather than seduce.

The disharmony in Lexius quivered in outrage, but he returned it regardless for the few seconds Mesteno lingered, and he growled displeasure for its premature ending.

"How do I smell?? Mesteno asked. ?Tolerable? You know it'll be faster if you dry me off."

Lexius kept his hands latched to the counter lest he give in to the urge to paw the Sadist like some fucking beast. Mesteno wore marks he hadn't put there and, though he'd been trying to ignore that fact and his resulting response, his anger was driven by that little fact as much as everything else. It was a new sensation, not one the Elf was used to feeling in quite this way and he wasn't quite sure how to properly deal with it.

Lexius licked his lips of the meagre taste Mesteno had left him and breathed in again only to release a low, brief laugh. That question certainly invited him to do more than just hang onto the counter for dear life. He leaned a little closer to sniff at the side of the man's neck, endeavouring to remain critical about it. He mostly succeeded. "Tolerable." he agreed. "But if I put my hands on you, there will be no more talking." And they needed to talk. The Elf drew back. "I believe it would be worthwhile. We will deal with whatever we find. But I will need you to prepare. The stones I was carving are for you. You should keep them with you."

Agreeing with the caution, Mesteno turned his back when he loosened the towel about his hips, his hair clinging to his back like bloody rivulets. Drying off was never going to be a graceful business. "I'll carry the stones with me if you say to - is it going to attune them to me or something? What're they for?" The thought of that table and the ominous feeling it had dredged up as he approached it was returning far too freshly, and it bled away any trace of good humour, self-consciousness or desire that might have been lingering about his face.

"Yes, it will attune them to you,? Lexius confirmed. ?Energy flows in certain predictable ways in most races. From what I have seen, yours is no different in the basic patterns. The stones will anchor it, help me pinpoint the places where your energy and body and soul are tied together. They will help me see what there is to be seen. They will make you aware of these tie points and patterns, as well.?

"Gotta admit," Mesteno told him as he dried his toes, "I'm a little worried about what you mind find in there. What if it's something really fucked up? What if it's something you don't like?" Something that made him wash his hands of him and decide that all those months of learning to trust him had been a waste.

Mesteno?s concerns were fair (if negatively inclined) questions, Lexius supposed. The Elf pondered his answer before he spoke, gaze steady.
"Then we will decide how best to deal with such things." He paused again, just a moment, lightening his tone a touch. "You'll not be rid of me so easily." That Mesteno was still willing to pursue this thing between them wasn't something he was going to squander away on whatever difficult truths he might discover. And of course, there were already things he didn't like that he was dealing with. Speaking of which...

"How did your trip to Madrid go?"

Feet dry, Mesteno rose from the edge of the tub, and moved across to the counter where he'd noted the change of clothes waiting for him, jeans pulled on, comfortably loose as all his clothes tended to be; they required no snake-hipped wriggling to get into.

"It went well, actually," he admitted. "Some good news for Koyan." He snagged the sweater next, shaking it out to find the hem so he could pull it on overhead. He turned a hip against the counter to eye the Elf. "You're uncomfortable with me doing things like this?" He didn't sound angry, but he was making it plain he knew of the fact he didn't like it.

The serenity about the Elf slowly thickened, and he turned his gaze to the shower stall, schooling his features into brutal neutrality while, within him, the dissonance sang a bitter sweet tune.

How best to answer the question was difficult.

"I am...concerned for your safety." Not a lie. "His situation is dire." Mesteno probably knew far more about it than he, but the Elf had seen enough to be certain of the knowledge. "I would not try to impede you, Mesteno." He looked back to the Sadist as he said the last, grave but firm. He wouldn't try to step into the middle of the Sadist's friendship with Koyan and what the man felt he needed to do because of it.

It was a truth Mesteno was appreciative of, since he?d entirely no intention of revoking his aid, nor his friendship. He?d too much to relay to the Turk about his findings in Madrid, things that wouldn?t wait.

The usual reassurances, the promises that he could handle whatever came his way, were not something he?d been able to give with his old certainty over the past few months, and he wasted no breath on such lies for the Elf, who would be able to sense otherwise anyway. Quite how badly things would turn in the days to follow, he couldn?t know, but their own troubles proved more pressing, and it was Lexius?, not the reckless necromancer who faced the greater challenge.

?Give it to me.? Koyan held his hand out to Rhys, expecting the flask. No matter Mesteno?s advice.

Rhys patted his pocket where the flask rested. Maybe the contents explained the confusion. ?No.?

?I will punch you,? Koyan threatened.

?Then come on with it,? Rhys replied.

High above, flying slowly, a giant golden eagle screamed a call that echoed through the sky far too loudly even for that size bird. It turned abruptly on a wingtip, circling back toward the Inn. Some distance off down the alley, Mesteno cursed up a storm and darted towards the shadows, where he intended to take cover until another aerial assault had passed.

Koyan and Rhys were too busy arguing over possession of the flask to notice the eagle or Mesteno?s hasty run for cover.

A sloppily-thrown punch from the Turk was easily evaded, his fist connecting with the wall rather than his intended target. After a moment spent scowling at the offending brickwork, he stuck out his good hand to demand the flask back again. Rhys ignored him and tipped a look up toward the sky after the eagle?s shadow flickered across the alley.

A moment later, the bird screamed again, folded its broad wings, and came streaking toward the ground straight for them.

Koyan was so intent on the flask that he didn?t pay any attention to death from above.

?Get down!? Rhys lunged at Koyan.

It turned out that it wasn?t hard at all to knock the Turk down. He landed flat on his back with a thud and a grunt, finally spotting the eagle. ?What the hell?? Something niggled in the back of his mind about Eagles. What was it?

Rhys had landed right on top of Koyan and ducked his head, hoping the alleyway would be too narrow for the eagle to land in. ?I don?t know! Who did you piss off??

Koyan turned his head away from Rhys? armpit. ?The ****? Your armpit smells like cheese.?

?That?s your face, old man,? he shot back at Koyan. He gave him a tap on the ear with his open hand, hard enough to sting.

The eagle was big enough that its wings expanded across the bulk of both men now sprawled on the ground. It back-winged abruptly, rushing cold air over them both, its talons reaching indiscriminately for a hold on either. Long, golden claws tipped those talons, and with Rhys uppermost, it was his coat they pierced, scrabbling at his back before finally closing around his leg.

?****!? Rhys? efforts to elbow at the eagle?s feet and get off of Koyan at the same time came to no avail.

In the sky, the clouds began to gather together and slowly darken.

Koyan kicked out at the bird?s talons, and grabbed onto Rhys? coat with both hands, even the one with the swollen, bloody knuckles. ?Kick it!? he shouted. And he kicked again too, engaging in a tug-of-war with the eagle.

The eagle screamed its victory, a deafening sound that close, and pulled Rhys back, wings flapping up a storm of air as it tried to launch upward with its prize. The kicking only made it latch onto Rhys all the more securely.

Disinclined to have Eden kill him for letting Rhys be carried off, Koyan pulled harder, teeth grinding. He dug his boots into the ground and tried to scoot back through the alley to bring Rhys with him, fists in a death grip on his coat.

Rhys was kicking at the eagle, but he yelped when a talon pierced the muscle of his calf, made all the worse by Koyan started pulling him in the opposite direction. Momentarily, he grabbed at Koyan?s sleeves, trying to stay earthbound, but the eagle was strong.

?Let him go!? Koyan roared at the bird. His back scraped along the gravel, tearing holes in his shirt.

The eagle beat hard at the air with its massive wings, succeeding in hauling both Rhys and the clinging Koyan out of the alley, and even a few inches off the ground. It was big enough to carry one man, but not two.

Rhys let go of Koyan?s sleeves and touched his hands together, concentrating before drawing them apart again. A slender blade grew between his hands and his nimble fingers snatched it out of the air. He smacked at one of Koyan?s wrists, trying to make him let go of that lapel, so he could twist around and slash at the eagle.

It finally released Rhys? legs to take to the cloud-heavy sky, shrieking anew. From the clouds, a bolt of lightning came lancing down to strike the Inn?s yard.

Koyan landed hard, air rushed from his lungs, and a moment later Rhys landed right back on top of him with an ?oof?, the knife extended outward to avoid impaling the Turk. It shattered against the alley floor.

The lightning flashed almost immediately after, forcing them both to scramble clumsily to their feet.

?The **** was that?? Rhys panted while Koyan aimed a two-fingered salute after the bird.

From the alley beside the Inn, Mesteno watched with eyes narrowed against the brilliance of the lightning strikes. He?d reached the spot just in time, via a little shadow stepping, to see the eagle rise up, leaving the men to clamber to their feet.

The eagle might have been taking a moment to reassess, but the lightning wasn?t. Again a bolt struck from the heavens, lighting up the clouds where an enormous, man-shaped figure seemed to be tossing them down at the ground. The next one hit the side of the building right there at the alley entrance, sending broken brick scattering everywhere.

Rhys rolled to the side and threw his hands up to protect his face. ?Again, who did you piss off?? He tried to scramble to his feet then, but he was favoring the leg the bird had grabbed onto.

The force of the blast, however, threw Koyan into the street where his body began to vibrate, the palms of his hands beginning to glow. Spotting him lying out in the open, the eagle shrieked and dove again.

Koyan saw what he thought was a shadow in the clouds?and then the bird. He hadn?t gathered enough holyfire to do anything yet, so he ran toward the Inn. ?Go, Rhys, go!? He was not the steadiest on his feet.

?Sanctus fut?,? Mesteno curse caught between clenched teeth. Things were getting too bad to avoid a confrontation by this point, so he did the sensible thing and went darting out onto the yard, whooping and hollering as loud as his lungs would allow. Here, birdie birdie!

?****!? Rhys lunged, bad leg and all, hoping to make it to Koyan when the eagle dove. He lurched and careened on his injured calf. Another burst of cold air seemed to emanate from his coat as he reached for another shard of ice and drew it out of the air.

Mesteno?s arrival on the scene was timely. Koyan seemed to have been the bird?s primary target, but now there were two likely victims suddenly there and it caused the massive eagle to hesitate, back-winging again, talons just missing their snatch for Koyan as its head turned toward Mesteno.

Koyan couldn?t have that. Couldn?t let Mesteno sacrifice without making an attempt to dissuade the bird?and the lightning thrower?from another attack. Stopping near the stairs, he rubbed his hands together to create more friction, body vibrating harder. Arcane words, holy words, fell from his lips in whispers. Then he flashed both palms at the bird, sending a bolt of blinding light at its head. Not just light, but heat. The symbols on his back under his shirt glowed as well, mostly hidden by the material.

Fight fire with fire, they say. He knew most likely he?d just made a gigantic target of himself.

Rhys took an abrupt kneel to avoid getting clipped by the white-hot blast Koyan had let out, then scrambled back to his feet and ran toward the porch, and Koyan by proxy.

In retrospect, Mesteno knew he really should have started carrying some damn grenades after the other night in the Temple District. Instead, all he had under that oversized shirt was a snugly holstered Colt, which he drew to fire a barrage of uncannily aimed shots at the eagle while a lash of shadows suddenly swarming up from under the tree.

The bullets hit it from the front, Koyan?s fire hit it from the back. The eagle screamed as it was set afire with holy flames. Momentum alone almost carried it into Mesteno as it fell from the sky, lashed by shadows. The shadows were steely things, dragging against the momentum of the great bird. They bound it up as surely as a boa constrictor, crushing any life left in its overgrown body and crumpling its wings up against its sides. It was left so much smouldering meat and feathers, the holy fire leaving a burned patch in the yard beneath it.

Sira had been watching from the porch as the men crossed the yard to the Inn, and pulled Bryn out of the way of the stairs, sending the big dog in through the front door, though she herself stayed out on the porch.

Thunder growled through the heavens, the sound like a million boulders grinding together, the storm localized now only over the Inn. The shadowy figure in the clouds lifted another lightning bolt and sent it streaking toward the desert man and Rhys.

Rhys flickered out of view between one footstep and the next as the bolt of lightning struck. He appeared a heartbeat later on the other side of Koyan?just in time to be shoved out of the way by the Turk?s arm. For a moment, Rhys was airborne, thrown up the porch steps and against the wall there by the blast of electricity. He hit the wall, then the floorboards, and rolled toward the railing, gasping when he came to a stop, sprawled on his back.

The bolt struck the Turk dead on, flipping him ass over ears. Singed, hair smoking, he landed face down atop the hedges near the rail. Sprawled, unconscious. Maybe dead. The soles of his favorite boots were a charred black mess. His favorite boots!

The figure in the clouds was lifting its arm again, another lightning bolt in hand, when it suddenly staggered, sending the zap of electricity to spark wildly across the tops of the buildings surrounding the Inn.

?****!? Sira swore, crouching down to stay small, first moving towards the railing to peer down towards Koyan, then looking over to where Rhys had landed. Then back out to the lawn and towards the bird, or at least its smoldering remains.

With great effort, Rhys pushed himself up from the floor and rolled over onto his stomach, eyes on the yard and on the thing that had once been the eagle. He glanced aside to Sira, noticing her for the first time, then he looked back to the yard with a curse.

Mesteno was spitting more Latin expletives, the lightning?s brilliance leaving his eyes half useless with a wash of sunspots across his retinas. He did manage to make out the prone bodies on the porch though, knew who they?d be, and rather than wait around to see if any further attacks were aimed their way, vaulted the railing (this time sans any showmanship) to check them one at a time.

Rhys was breathing, bleeding and wild-eyed. Koyan looked to be in worse shape; his nostrils were rimmed with what appeared to be soot and the tips of his fingers were black. Wisps of smoke from from different parts of his body and his hair stood on end. He didn?t appear to be breathing. Mesteno grasped him by the back of his shirt to haul him off the hedge, and Rhys got up to help Mesteno as best he could given his injuries. Koyan was heavy.

Mesteno was no healer. He knew at a glance how bad it was though as he eased the heavy man down onto his back on the decking without much delicacy. He only hesitated for a heartbeat before reaching into his pocket, grasping something tucked away there. Lexius, I need you.

?It?ll be okay,? he reassured Rhys vehemently, though his eyes were no less wild.

Rhys pushed himself up to sit again, whipping a quick look at Koyan. ?Completely??

Sira looked up at Lexius and her frown deepened. She aimed surreptitious look at the crowd before her eyes dropped back down to Koyan. ?Let me look,? she requested quietly, already reaching out with a fine lace of thought through the hand she still had on his forehead.

Koyan just swallowed at Rhys? question. And blinked a few times, hoping something would happen.

Sira?s attempt came up against a brick wall, one that she did not push against. The doctor shook her head.

There were now clear skies over the Inn. And a horrendously ugly vulture about the size of an elephant was alighting in the front yard. Just one. It folded its greasy wings and curled its ugly red head and neck, squawking at the doves in the trees. Familiar. Mesteno angled a look out at it.

?Up,? Koyan grunted, once more attempting to rise into a sitting position. This time Mesteno allowed it. Koyan grasped the hand Rhys offered, swaying as he sat up. He coughed and winced.

Lexius released his will and the barrier across the front of the porch collapsed abruptly. He tightened his grip on the rail for a moment then finally stepped closer to the group of people clustered about Koyan. The beads murmured softly. So softly. Sira?s frustrated look had not gone unnoticed.

?Koyan, will you let Lexius look you over?? Mesteno asked quietly, backing off to let Lexius have his spot.

Koyan?s heartbeat was evening out, like his breathing. If his entire body hadn?t felt like?like he'd been struck by lightning!?he?d be doing mostly okay. Barring the blindness. ?Okay,? he said stubbornly. As if he wasn?t half-charred and singed, as if his hair wasn?t standing completely on end. He sniffed.

Rhys shifted around so he could put a shoulder against Koyan?s back to help him stay sitting upright. There was something he wanted to try, but since an apparent healer?at least, he thought Lexius was a healer?was coming over, he subsided. For now.

?Your hair is standing on end,? was Lexius? mild greeting to the blind desert man as he stepped near, his grip shifting from the railing to Mesteno?s slumped shoulder to clamp down. The necromancer closed his palm over the back of the elf?s knuckles and slid a look his way that made it plain he knew he?d done something bad.

?...yes,? Koyan said to Lexius, though he didn?t reach up to feel his hair. ?Need a smoke.? Which may have been the most ironic statement of the day.

?You are a smoke, mate,? Rhys muttered.

Sira rose up to stand, field kit tucked under her arm in case she needed other bandages. She eyed Rhys to see if he was in need.

Lexius? gaze touched on Sira as she stood, Rhys in his support, Koyan with his blue eyes. The elf ground his jaw and gathered his will, extending several threads of thought Koyan?s way to investigate, though they came upon the same impenetrable wall that Sira?s attempt had. Instead of persisting, he turned his attention to the physical damage. He kept Mesteno?s shoulder tightly clamped in his hold as if to prevent the man from slinking away.

?That would probably be a very bad idea,? Sira murmured of the desired cigarette.

?The very reason he will do it,? the elf offered to Sira blandly.

?Also, your boots are kinda? ****, I hate t?tell you,? Mesteno informed Koyan.

?I heard that.? At least Koyan was speaking in sentences now instead of grunts. He exhaled. ?Favorite pair,? he lamented.

The lightning, combined with Koyan?s own source of power, had done a number on him. At the same time, his body was using the blitz to slowly heal itself, to store away some of the energy for later. Lexius nudged a few cells here, adjusted a few nerves there, attempting to redirect the priority order of healing

?His ears seemed to be in working order, at least.? Lexius? tone did not change.

?Yes.? Koyan didn?t quibble.

?Thank David for small miracles,? Rhys muttered.

?He might be more manageable deaf,? Lexius told Rhys.

?I doubt it. He?d just flail around if he?d lost that sense, too.? Rhys? jaw was still throbbing a little from the accidental punch.

?Yes.? The elf?s bland tone remained unchanged. ?Unconscious would be best.? Tempting, but he continued his subtle manipulation to regenerate the man?s vision.

Koyan muttered in Arabic, and despite the guilt, Mesteno managed a low rumble of a laugh that did not help it abate. Rhys cursed Koyan right back in a tongue that seemed to be a blend of Welsh and something much, much older.

The desert man could feel little bits of healing going on, his body knitting itself into better shape. The edges of his vision wavered a little, and he sat up straighter. No bright sparks of life, but the wavering was new and welcome. ?All right, you bastards,? he muttered. ?Rhys, you hurt? Mesteno??

?Not a scratch on me. You two?re complete amateurs,? was Mesteno?s quiet answer.

Rhys said, ?Bird tore my leg open. Other than that, just bumps and bruises.? It felt like he?d been hit by a truck, though.

The subtlety of the healing couldn?t be maintained, of course. A wild flare restored Koyan?s vision a little too suddenly. ?You ran like a chick?ugh!? Koyan had begun to accuse Mesteno, but his spine straightened as everything began to come into sharp focus too fast. He closed his eyelids.

Lexius withdrew his threads with a snap, grunting quietly. The beads gave a quiet, ominous rattling sound?and promptly slapped Mesteno?s hand. The necromancer snagged them sharply and gave them a tug hard enough to pull at the elf?s hip. It earned him a harder squeeze at his shoulder, one to which he murmured a quiet apology.

?Heal...Rhys.? Koyan made a squeak of an appeal to Lexius. This time, when he opened his eyes, he could see. Thank God. Rubbing his lids with the heels of his hands, he finally took a slow look around, placing everyone. He watched Mesteno yank on the beads and get slapped, and took note of Rhys still leaning against his back. Sira was leaning against the rail. Koyan didn?t look much farther beyond that. Drawing his long legs up, he wrapped his arms around his knees?with little spikes of pain shooting everywhere inside?and took a second to just...assess.

Koyan?s request had Lexius grinding his jaw so hard his teeth should have shattered. Nostrils flared on a carefully-drawn breath, he shifted his gaze to Rhys and waited for the man?s opinion on the appeal.

Rhys looked as rough as he felt. Alley debris still clung in his curls. Part of his face was bruised and reddened, and he had abrasions on his cheekbone. The bandage around his calf had stemmed the bleeding, but the stain on his jeans was large and dark. He just looked at Lexius. He had a strong inkling that the guy wasn?t too keen to expend energy on him, and Rhys wasn?t sure he wanted strange hands on him, even if he had just watched the elf work on Koyan. One brow lifted.

?Yes or no?? Lexius asked Rhys directly, tone somewhat clipped. His serenity was starting to crack. Out on the lawn, the doves in the trees chirped with a few branches swayed for no apparent reason at all.

?Do you have the juice?? Rhys? tone was equally clipped.

?What the hell just happened here?? Koyan finally asked. The question seemed to prompt the vulture in the yard to warbling raucously as if it was laughing.

Tight-lipped, and perhaps a little pale beneath that perpetual tan, Mesteno shot a filthy look across the yard at the vulture, as if it were somehow at fault. There was a pull beneath Lexius? hand as if he meant to head its way.

Koyan saw the vulture for the first time, recognized the sound of doves in the trees. Now that he wasn?t getting heckled about his hearing and vision, he could concentrate on his surroundings.

Sira moved from the railing suddenly and swiftly moved over to the front door. In all the excitement there was something she had forgotten?Bryn was sitting there by the door, patiently and far too obediently. He wagged his tail as he got up to pad warily back out onto the porch, sniffing the air.

?Mesteno?? Pointedly. Koyan wanted answers. ?What happened??

Lexius bared his teeth at Rhys in some parody of a smile that looked far too vicious. He let go of Mesteno?s shoulder and stepped toward Rhys to lean, clamp his hand down around the bandage on the man?s leg, and squeeze. The inky lines of a geometric tattoo slithered across the back of his hand and over his fingers toward the man?s leg!

?My fault,? the necromancer told Koyan, quietly of course, but not without sincerity. ?I didn?t think I?d get tracked here, now they?ve seen you, so...remember what I tell you about the birds.?

?But what is it? Why is it here? And why did that eagle attack?? Koyan said.

The clamp of Lexius? hand around Rhys? leg hurt. He narrowed his eyes and moved both of his hands, the air around him turning abruptly cold. He didn?t trust that tattoo that came sliding down Lexius? hand. His fingers snatched at the air, grasping the hilt of a weapon that then solidified in his hand, its blade growing away from him. ?Think twice,? he said quietly, ?if that?s meant to harm.? He met the elf?s eyes and held them.

Koyan glanced back again to see Rhys and Lexius, frowning faintly. His eyes had slowly returned to normal, a sharp glittery black instead of blue.

?Because,? Mesteno was replying awkwardly, his focus darting from the barbequed Turk to the vulture in question, and then across to Lexius and Rhys?and oh, how quickly he moved when he saw what was forming in Rhys? hand. He whipped around and a lashing line of shadows snaked out of nowhere to seize the man?s wrist. ?Do not!? Vicious.

Rhys whipped a look at Mesteno as the shout came and the tendrils of shadow coiled about his wrist?and calmly reached over to touch the darkness sliding across his skin. A rime of frost began to spread along the shadow and down it, seeping through. Normally it might have solidified what it touched, but the necromancer?s shadows were already hard as steel.

That tattoo sank down under Rhys? clothing, onto his skin, the feel of a thousand gossamer legs crawling over flesh. The elf held the man?s gaze with his own just as firmly, the pressure of his hand unchanging until the tattoo was completely transferred. Then he let the leg go and straightened away even as the ground seemed to shiver under their feet. A tiny earthquake that swiftly settled. Lexius stepped back. ?Use it if you wish. Press upon the mark and will it to work.?

?Mesteno,? Koyan snarled. ?He tried to save my ass like you did. Knock that **** off.? He wasn?t up for another fight right yet.

?If he means me harm, I?ve got the right to defend myself.? Rhys looked pointedly at the tattoo?or at least where it had been. He twitched hard, feeling the crawling sensation seeping over his skin. His gaze came back to Lexius, watched him rise. He blew out a breath. ?What will it do?? He took the blade he had conjured out of his trapped hand and lay it across his thighs, then removed his hand from the hilt, a show that he wasn?t going to try to lunge. He was asking because he clearly still didn?t trust what the elf had done. Not after the reluctance and the look. He wasn?t stupid.

Lexius stepped back again, putting himself well out of reach of the weapon Rhys had conjured. ?It will heal.? He answered as he turned away from them all and headed for the steps.

?He?s doing you no harm. Send the damn blade away,? Mesteno was insisting, but since Lexius was out of reach, he relented, and the shadows snapped back into place like elastic, leaving the man?s limb free.

Rhys tilted his head, leaving the weapon where it was. His dark gray eyes were hard and stayed with Lexius. ?In that case, thank you. It?ll melt,? he added for Mesteno.

The vulture, at least, had stopped laughing, though it was watching the porch rather curiously. Or maybe hungrily. Soon, it spread its wings out there in the yard, flapping them once to launch itself in the air. The take-off was too smooth, too easy, for such a ponderous beast, but it was up and headed toward the sky in seconds. The doves followed after it, dozens of them streaking from the trees in the vulture?s wake. Sira leaned over the railing to watch the flock go, packing away her kit and rummaging through her messenger bag.

The elf did not answer Rhys. He touched Mesteno?s shoulder briefly as he passed, steps steady and controlled, the beads muttering restlessly by his side.

Koyan stared hard at Mesteno, then glanced at Lexius. A complicated look crossed through his gaze, before he rolled over onto his knees, and used the railing to help him stand. Then he reached a hand down to help Rhys up if he needed it.

?You two owe me some goddamned answers,? Koyan said to Mesteno and Lexius? backs. He sounded...unhappy.

Mesteno offered Rhys a nod and a complicated look which seemed to harbour some regret. It was not how he?d imagined a first meeting with the ?twin? might go, but it was a little late to fix things now. ?It'll work,? he quietly added assurance to the elf?s. His focus shifted across to Lexius as he made to pass him, and a thin sigh came slithering between his lips.

Rhys tracked the elf for a few moments, then looked to Mesteno. He returned the nod. ?I hope so,? was what he said of the mark he?d been given. There were more words poised at the tip of his tongue, but rather than explain himself, he pulled the knife from his lap and tapped the blade on the porch by his hip. A tiny flex of his will sent a crack webbing through the ice, and then it fell apart. Dropping the hilt, which began to melt immediately, he reached up for Koyan?s hand and got to his feet.

Lexius paused at the top of the steps, answering Koyan without looking back to the man. ?The titan you raised left its mark. Some now are looking to impose a punishment for that crime and more.? And that was all he planned on saying it seemed, for Lexius continued on and away, down the steps and across the yard. He didn?t vanish in his usual fashion but strode on toward the walkway and the city.

?Keep an eye on the skies,? Mesteno warned. ?Storms ?n big **** birds.? He didn?t think to add metal gargoyles to that. ?I?m sorry,? he offered again to both men candidly, and it was probably unsurprising that when he turned to go, it was after the elf. It didn?t take him long to catch up.

Rhys muttered thanks and set about trying to straighten his clothes. He was a lost cause, for the most part. His dark eyes ticked to Mesteno. There was something complicated in his expression, but he nodded once before the guy turned to go.

Koyan was still staring at Mesteno and Lexius. His jaw clenched when Lexius kept going without giving him time to say anything else. ?And people wonder why the **** I drink.? Finally, he glanced back to Rhys. He reached up to run a hand through his hair...and realized it was still standing straight up. Jesus God.

Rhys bent to snatch up a bottle of water and a bottle of juice. He also grabbed that little vial the woman had given him earlier. That went into his coat pocket. He held the water out to Koyan. It would help with the frazzled hair if nothing else. Maybe.

?Thanks.? Koyan took the bottle with a shaky hand, ripped the cap off, and drank half the contents straight down. Wishing it was whiskey the whole time.

?Yep.? Rhys cracked the seal on the juice and drank down a bit of that.

Koyan took another drink, stared down at the bottle, then hurled it against the side of the inn. Water blew everywhere, the plastic cracking down the middle. And it hurt, that blip of violence, but it also did him good.

Rhys flinched and turned away from the spray of water and bouncing plastic, holding up his hands. ?What the **** Koyan?? More plaintive than angry that time.

The Turk snarled very unkind things in his mother tongue, under his breath. When he switched to English, he didn?t sound any happier. ?I?m heading to the Den. You?re welcome to come, or not.? He couldn?t say there was a shortcut to Alvaka from there out loud, but there was food and drink and respite from everything else. Notably, he did not explain his temper.

Sira still lingered there, silent, arms crossed over her chest. Or at least she had been lingering. She and Bryn padded quietly down the stairs. The pair headed off without so much as a goodbye.

Rhys made a face, but he said, ?All right.? Yeah, he noticed that Koyan hadn?t answered him. Maybe it was neither the time nor the place. He had noticed a few things and would content himself with putting pieces together until he got some harder answers. Capping the juice, he slipped it into his pocket alongside the flask which was miraculously still in his possession. ?Lay on, MacDuff,? he said, gesturing to the yard.

The desert man thought about simply vaulting the rail, but didn?t think his legs would support him. So he took to the stairs, annoyed at the funky changes in his body, at the weakness the strike left behind. Rhys followed close behind, while Koyan veered toward the mouth of the nearest alley, brows furrowed, and his temper darkening with each step he took. Soon, they disappeared into the shadows.

Lexius paused before he allowed Mesteno to go any further, staying him with a curl of fingers around his forearm. He'd gathered enough serenity back to allow an extension of power and the Elf used it to double check not only the cabin, but the grounds surrounding it, as well. Only once he was certain things there were as they should be did Lexius finally relax.

"All seems quiet." The Elf had no intention of lingering outside once he was satisfied, and herded Mesteno toward the door and inside.

The necromancer made right for the fireplace, leaving a muddy trail of half-frozen footprints, and absently dusting aside the lingering chips of ice that'd formed in the Shadowlands. He'd dragged a small, burnished urn of dry scraps of wood, thin enough to snap up for kindling beside the hearth, and crouched to start stacking them in the centre of the fireplace, hair sweeping untidily forward over one shoulder.

"In case y'weren't right in y'head to hear me before, I'm sorry," he told him, with the same gentle candour of earlier. ?I guess I wasn't doing a lot of smart thinking. The attack came out of nowhere and I wasn't expecting Koyan and Rhys to be targeted. I was leavin', heard the eagle and the storm starting and figured I'd better get out of there. Only I just skipped from one spot to another to see what was coming this time, and when I came out, the fucking eagle was all over them. Maybe he has the taint, too." Grimly!

The Elf stood at Mesteno?s side as he worked, ridding himself of his satchel and unwinding the beads from his belt, nudging Mesteno lightly with one knee to the side in response to the apology. "Do not be sorry for calling me." He could feel the flickers of guilt still sparking in the man. It was effort enough to get Mesteno to seek any assistance. Lexius was grimly certain this night would put a crimp in getting him to do so in the future. "I would rather you did, than not. It may well be Koyan carries something similar. But they have other reasons for being displeased with his existence. They simply haven't had a reason before to care about it." The grimness was in his voice now, but for those unnamed reasons and for the mere fact they were talking about the man.

Lexius crouched, and reached to draw that untidy mass of hair back over Mesteno's shoulder to better see his face...and keep it from going up in flames when the guy lit the fire! "You did nothing this night I should not have expected beforehand."

"He thought he might have something else that erased it, but thinkin' back on it, the way that eagle fixed on him..." Mesteno?s mouth grew pensive as he carefully arranged the kindling to make sure there'd be enough air to the stack. The profile revealed when Lexius drew his hair back was one of a jaw set firm, of brow pinched to knotting above the pin straight line of his nose. He didn't look up from his task despite the unexpected contact, and fed in a few scraps of paper, making sure there was plenty for the flames to consume hungrily from the offset - torn up notes, music half written he'd become frustrated with.

"I guess you're right though, his involvement with Aiden probably displeased some of 'em, so it could just as easily have been a case of him being in the wrong place when the attack came... Shit, at this rate there's gonna be nowhere I can go without gettin' chased out or endangering someone."

More wood, larger pieces, all mounted up into a well-spaced pyramid over the original kindling, though nothing particularly heavy still. Enough to get the fire going, and so down came the matchbox, the faint sulphur stink and curl of smoke as he struck it, its illumination leaving angular features harshly limned before he tipped the little flame into the space he'd left. The paper caught, and the narrow, split sections of dry wood shortly after, and once the flames licking along the larger pieces had begun to catch, he added a few short-cut, sturdy sections of log before easing to sit back on his haunches.

It was then he tipped a look across at the Elf, his expression faintly resigned. "It's still so strong, that old need in you," he murmured. "I don't know why, it's not like I wasn't aware it hadn't been fixed, but I think it's the first time I've felt it churning in you while he's been around and it caught me off guard. I thought--," he caught himself, as if he were second guessing the wisdom of letting such things be spoken. He'd always been impulsive though, and he could only keep it contained for so long. "I thought after you felt it again, realised what it was to feel that way about someone, about him, you might think you were makin' a mistake takin' up with someone else. Don't misunderstand," he lifted a hand to caution him against speaking, "I don't expect much at this stage, it's early days, and I'm the last man in this city to rush things, but what you felt for him was very real. I wouldn't blame you."

Lexius couldn't deny a bite of frustration at seeing the resigned look, but he welcomed that emotion because he knew it was relevant, current, real. He allowed the silence to linger before he responded, gaze steady on Mesteno's face and the tie nudged open a little wider as if to better capture the man's feelings. He even allowed that expansion on his own end (no easy thing, purposefully doing so!) so the Sadist could be sure of the words he spoke next. The dissonance was quieter, but it was a constant thrum of discontent.

"What I felt for him was real decades ago." Decades for him at least! "What I feel for him today is not."

He stated it flatly, firmly, no matter the parts of him that recoiled for such an admission. Lexius endeavoured to ignore that and it was easier to do when not face to face with the man. Instead, he focused on that smaller part that cheered approval beneath the grumbling of the rest.

"That I have chosen to allow it to linger so long has only entrenched it deeper within me, but all of it is false. Such things no longer belong to him, Mesteno, and it is well past time I see about purging them." His resolve felt strong somewhere beneath the stab of pain he received for voicing the intention. Lexius tightened his eyes and bore it. "You will not be so easily rid of me." He'd said it before, but the Elf thought it worthy of repetition just then. A niggle of fear did accompany the words, though. The current proposed solution could well wipe out not only that flaw...but everything inside him. Lexius had somehow gotten to the point he wasn't sure he wanted to risk what was growing in him that he came to rely on more and more as being real. The Elf took a breath banished the the fear. First things first.

"Have you kept the stones on you?" A few days might not have been long enough, but it may well have to do. They really couldn't afford to linger much longer without attempting to identify and try to remove or mask that Titan's taint from inside Mesteno.

Mesteno wasn?t unwilling to hear reason, but that didn't mean those suspicions he had would be easily purged. He wanted them gone, wanted to accept all that he heard, especially when it was spoken so candidly, but pessimism had a foothold.

What if we rid you of it, and it comes back despite it, a natural want for him, something more than the programming? That would be the real test, facing the desert man and the Elf feeling his heart sit quiet and unstirred, to see him only as another man, another friend perhaps.

Of course that it was Koyan made everything so damn complicated. Mesteno might mock Koyan at any given opportunity in good natured banter, but he wasn't blind to the qualities which'd attracted Lexius, and Dair, Bjorn and Whisper. He could still remember how Dair had returned for him, the Scotsman?s misery in the wake of being spurned. And here was Lexius, their relationship a thing long past, still struggling. It would appear the Turk was not an easy man to get over, and Mesteno did not wish to resent somehow he thought so much of for being an obstacle.

Not oblivious to the train of Mesteno?s thoughts, Lexius shifted towards him. "These feelings I still hold, they are not for the man you know today. They are not for a man you have ever known. You remember my choices, yes?" He only paused a moment so Mesteno could recall that conversation they'd had months before. "One of them involved pursuing what is within me, in discovering if there is something there in who he is now that I could feel the same for. I did not choose that route, Mesteno, because I know there is not. We have both become different people. My only fear is that I might lose this thing between us in purging the rest."

Mesteno studied him as he spoke, and finally reached to touch a hand lightly to his thigh. "I'm selfishly pleased you want to," he told him, "but what your protectors suggested, we still don't know if it?s something I can do safely. I risk harming you, and you were so sure about not wanting to before..."

The Elf dropped his hand over the Sadist's, the skin to skin connection plucking the strings of that disharmony, but Lexius didn't allow the warped vibrations of it to deter him from trapping the man's hand in place so it could not easily be withdrawn.

Mesteno reached into the pocket of the muddy sweatpants he wore, and drew the stones out in his palm, still wrapped, and a little warm from the heat of his body. The fire was roaring by then, devouring the wood hungrily, and he shifted to rope his knees with both arms, leeching the heat shimmering outward and up in waves, "How long do you think I'll need to keep them with me before we try the damn table?"

"I would prefer you held them a month. But let us try within the next few days. If the tie is not strong enough, we can try to wait a little longer. The more I learn about this and you and the way your soul and energy are tied, the more I can learn if perhaps this method of helping me will be suitable." Lexius gave no ground, but remained close through his explanation, his thumb brushing along the back of Mesteno's knuckles as he spoke.

It wasn?t exactly comforting, knowing Lexius considered it so risky, but they?d little in the way of options. Mesteno hadn't once considered the potential for erasing more than the lingering programing, and there was a new sharpness to his eyes which was vastly different compared to the normal, predatory intensity lingering about them.

"It would be selfish of me to refuse what your protector's think we should try, simply 'cause I don't want to risk what we have," he admitted quietly, his voice almost lost beneath the low roar of the flames and the occasional, startling snap and pop within them. "When I suggested findin' a way to remedy your problems back then..." There had been Evander, and Lexius had been a friend, new and still someone to step lightly around as they learned one another. "...never would've thought it'd even be something that would need to be considered." He squeezed lightly over the flesh of Lexius' thigh. "S'for the greater good though. There's no contest if it means riddin' you of all that mental shit; the remnants of those things are gonna hold you back forever." Longer than Mesteno would be around at any rate.

"I'll keep the stones with me, and I'll come lie on your table whenever you want me to." There was a grave finality to his voice.

November 26th, 2015


A miniature sandstorm hissed across Sanctuary.

The grains rattled across frost hardened grass and lodged in the nooks and crannies of the silver trunked trees. It sent an offended white feline into the bushes to avoid getting pelted, and it found a necromancer, barefoot amongst the branches at the edge of the yard, dislodging some precariously hanging deadfall.

"Such a flair for drama!" came his commentary from up in the tree, as he observed the sandy eruption.

Lexius looked like he'd been buried in a sand dune. The transfer looked far smoother this time than it had the last. The Elf didn't stumble and the air hadn't warped and wavered before he appeared. He stood calmly at what had been the centre of the storm, the beads chortling merrily at his side, then canted a look up into the trees, his blue-violet eyes glittered with fading power.

"Is that a complaint?" The Elf knew it wasn't. Four days absence had been too long in some ways, and Lexius took his sweet time studying what he could see of the Sadist in a long, almost hungry stare. Which just made the beads snicker all the more. He ignored them, as usual.

"Not in the slightest. I might feel compelled to compose some rousing theme music though," Mesteno warned, countering one tease with another.

A faint smile ticked the Elf's lips for Mesteno's rejoinder, though his eyes did narrow a fraction at the mention of the music. He'd yet to sit and listen to Mesteno play, and intended to remedy that soon. "I shall have to hear it before you release it as my official anthem. Why are you in a tree?"

"I'll make sure you find it appropriately stirring," Mesteno assured, before answering question with action.

He braced one arm around a sturdy branch above his head, planted a heel against the severed tree limb with its withered leaves and crumbling bark, and kicked, tipping the balance to let gravity drag it to the ground. There had been some strong winds over the past few days, and whilst they hadn't been able to uproot those suspiciously mobile trees, they had ripped loose some branches here and there.

Mesteno seemed as confident in the trees as he did scaling cliff walls, and moments later, made it back to terra firma without incident (or splinters.)

His smile was sharp as a scalpel, arresting rather than handsome, and despite all its sharkish, predatory quality, there was a definite warmth there for the Elf. His hair was bound, drawn forward over one shoulder, secured with a scrappy little length of leather just below his clavicle, and he was clad in sturdy, brown leather pants and a simple oversized sweater in hunter green that seemed to have developed a few holes in the hem.

"You're 'bout as dusty as I've ever seen you. Been rolling in the sand?" he asked, coming near enough to sweep some off Lexius? shoulder.

Lexius tracked Mesteno all the way to the ground with only two brief darts of his gaze elsewhere. He picked out the place the branch fell, located the dogs (including the old Doberman sacked out on the porch) and extended a few carefully controlled threads of thought, as well, to inspect the grounds and cabin more closely even as he focused back on the Sadist keenly.

"I've been amongst the dunes." He admitted. He stepped in closer, to share the dust along with the grains that trickled along Mesteno's fingers for his bold touch. His own fingers were touching along the holes in the hem of Mesteno's sweater. "I found your hole in the sands."

"You found my what?" Mesteno asked, struggling to assert concentration when he was running on his usual one-track instincts. Give it a second and it'll-- there it is. "Oh! The one I fell down when I was communing with your protectors..." Statement, not question. He looked puzzled. Instead of reaching for Lexius, he reached for the beads, letting them nestle in one palm. They made no effort at all to avoid his reach, appearing nothing more than a string of old, worn beads. "You know for some reason I never actually figured that was a real place. I thought they were just nudging me along and fabricating something my mind could cope with. That the well at the bottom was just a metaphor rather than something I could physically visit."

He was jumping to conclusions, assuming he'd found the well down there, but how else might Lexius have determined it was his hole? And then... "Why is it mine? Did they never take you there? I thought you must have been shown it too."

Lexius sent a tendril of thought snaking into Mesteno's mind. He felt a twinge somewhere in his brain as he set up the mental link, but that was easily overwhelmed by the sense of ease that came with the establishment of that unseen tie. That Mesteno was currently radiating contentment and pleasure only heightened his own and had a certain sort of tension he always seemed to carry bleeding away into nothing. Better. Far better.

"The well is real." Lexius' voice was grave. "And it is yours because this one appeared for you. Where mine was no longer exists." His long fingers were still poking through holes in that sweater, rubbing slowly along the cloth that covered scarred skin and sleek muscle beneath. "When I was more dragon than Elf, yet during a time I was somewhat lucid, I went to the place my well existed and dismantled it. I made the table from the stones there."

Mesteno?s thumb rubbed back and forth over one of the discoloured beads as absently as Lexius was toying with the holes in his sweater. The news had succeeded in directing his mind from the simple pleasure of the Elf's company and had re-routed his thoughts as surely as had a roadblock been erected.

"So they're just dotted all over the desert? Or under the desert. How many though? And why were you able to locate mine?" There was a strange lilt to his voice when he called it that, as if he half wished it weren't because of whatever implications it might hold. "From me just tellin' you what happened?" He wasn't sure he'd described any part of that vision with particular clarity, and though Lexius had mapped the deserts extensively, he knew there must be locations spread over endless seeming miles that he might have had to explore.

The confession about the table Lexius had constructed was just as surprising, but it was a revelation to know of its origins, something that made sense to his sorry, human brain. "You relocated the stones?" He seemed to be asking for clarification. It seemed strangely coincidental that the well would've been sat there in the rear of the red dragon's lair. Far more likely the psion had used his considerable skills to teleport them from the well site to that place he'd chosen to make a refuge of. "And why dismantle the well? Did you seal it up? Why'd they even let you?" So many questions. Mesteno was never content with ignorance.

Lexius withdrew his fingers from their probing touch through the sweater and lifted them to carefully cup the side of Mesteno's neck, instead. A full, skin-on-skin touch that he didn't seem hesitant to make despite the slowness with which he accomplished the hold. His serious gaze studied the Sadist's face even as monitored the man's mind along that single strand that tied them together. His smooth, quiet voice matched his sombre expression.

"I do not believe there is ever more than one on any given world." That he had such an opinion certainly suggested he'd investigated the matter at some length. "And I was able to locate it from what you said, what you wrote and from the memories I studied in your mind. I know this desert quite well." He added that with a trace of amusement. He damned well better know it given the damn place had created him.

"As for the table, yes. I relocated the stones to create it. Doing so destroyed the location the well once rested. I believe I was allowed to do it because of the purpose I put them to, which was growing and preserving a new body in a somewhat accessible yet guarded location." He did not find Mesteno's questions tedious. Nor did he think the man in any way foolish. He knew there would be a flood of inquiries given he'd only explained the situation that led to his rebirth in the most basic way.

Mesteno let the beads swing loose again. Their lack of activity was intriguing, and he hadn't yet decided whether it was because those they played conduit to wished him to concentrate on the matter at hand, or because they were trying to avoid some sort of blame in case he became belligerent over their manipulations. When he finally looked up from the beads, it was to fix the Elf with another of those shrewdly golden stares. "You're taking me there, aren't you?"

"No." Lexius assured. "Not today. It will wait."

"I suppose it was worth finding, even if it did take you away a while. I'd offer to join you on your jaunts, if I didn't think I'd slow you down." And Mesteno knew he would, if not intentionally, then due to some mortal ineffectualness. "It's about time we sat down and talked about how this might work, and what precautions we should take to keep it from fucking up. I know it's not gonna require as much planning and precision as what you were doing before," there was no new body on the cards! "but the risks are still high, and I don't have a perfect track record when it comes to 'helping' people."

He didn't offer examples, but they were there in his head for the taking, flickers of memory; an ill lit place beneath the ground where he wrestled with a dark haired man and slew him with a wooden knife, an image all tangled up with Bjorn's voice accusing him of murder. Taneth ragdoll limp in his arms, wan and bleeding one moment, slashing wildly at him with a blade the next. More threatened, but he seemed to stem the unwelcome flow before his mood could foul too far, and he moved to slip an arm low behind the Elf's back to urge him towards the cabin. There was coffee there after all.

Lexius didn't comment on anything right away, especially those memories flicking through the Sadist's mind. It hadn't been his intention to have such a discussion just yet, but he didn't protest the suggestion out of hand even if it made him tighten up and tense in places that were just beginning to relax.

Easily guided, the Elf slid his palm to rest high along Mesteno spine but over the sweater now rather than directly touching skin. He hadn't had his fill of that, but there was no need to push the matter into dangerous territory. The Sadist had said and asked much that made Lexius ponder, but the offer to join him was the thing most prominently swimming around in his head. His brow furrowed a bit as he considered it, but his mouth didn't really wait for his brain to catch up!

"You're welcome to join me whenever you wish, though I did not think you would find any appeal in doing so." Lexius knew from what he'd been told Mesteno had made such jaunts before and he'd seen for himself the man was both familiar and adaptable to the ways of the sands. But when compared to his home, it seemed a poor substitute even considering all the dead leaves and branches!

The necromancer's arm tightened about his waist without warning. Levering the elf up against his side for a clumsy bump of bodies might have seemed pointless if not for the kiss he smeared against the side of his neck where once he'd fastened his teeth harshly enough to draw blood. Lexius was caught between a laugh and a snarl, and both amusement and arousal twisted intricately together, came glimmering along the tie.

"I like to explore," Mesteno told him simply, "Its only commitments here in the city that keep me from doing it as often as I'd like. Besides, I'd be lying if I said the opportunity to watch you in your... natural habitat was not appealing."

He let Lexius go so that they could head inside without tripping over one another, and made immediately for the kitchen where he set the water to heating without even pausing to ask whether he wanted coffee. Mesteno left the rest of the task to the Elf though, recalling well his ban on handling it. A perch on the opposite counter seemed to suffice for a place to observe from, as if he meant to learn so that one day he might be permitted to brew it for him.

"You were dead set against what your Guardian suggested when we spoke on this before," he remarked, absently plucking a few scraps of brittle leaf from his ragged sweater. "Not without good reason either. Those reasons no longer bother you?"

November 29th, 2015


The Red Dragon?s commons were a ghost town that afternoon, which was no deterrent to Mesteno. He?d chose a spot at one end of the bar where no other stools could crowd about him, and an open bottle of Grand Marnier, reliable old poison that it was, had begun the slow business of warming his hollow stomach.

Visiting the watering hole was a risky business lately, and he?d half expected trouble even though he?d arrived via less than conventional means, avoiding roads and alleys and open skies. He hadn?t expected the trouble he did get at all, though in the days that followed, given time for retrospect, he would concede that had been foolish.

Koyan had chosen the lesser known pathways through the city, short-cutting through alleys and behind businesses on his way through town. Several stops later, he arrived at the back door of the Inn, pausing there to stare at the handle with a pensive expression on his face.

This way, there be danger.

Fae wine sat hidden on a low shelf, a bottle he'd kept there for years. Regardless of his own misgivings about alcohol, he stepped inside, already digging a pack of cigarettes from his front pocket. He wore black jeans, buckskin boots, and a coat of buttery black leather. He hadn't even made the bar when he saw a body propped atop a stool. Koyan paused, dark eyes glittering. Glancing behind him, he considered going right back out the way he came.

Mesteno?s fingers stilled an inch from the throat of his bottle, the noise from the back door intrusive after so long spent in his own company. He was confident trouble wouldn't follow him inside the inn, at least not of the sort he'd been dealing with lately, but still he turned to tip his chin towards his shoulder, glimpsing the desert man in the process. Koyan's stillness was telling.

"You're all recovered," he noted, and for once the place was quiet enough even words soft-spoken as his own carried untroubled. He might have said more, but there was a measure of extra scrutiny to the wolf's gold eyes that suggested he was assessing the situation rather than assuming all was well between them.

The Turk?s stare was unkind at best. Hard. Cold. Propping a cigarette between his teeth, he went through the motions of lighting it and stuffing the pack, along with the lighter, back into his pocket. Drawing a deep lungful of smoke, he exhaled and looked over the interior of the Inn. He still seemed on the verge of simply walking out without replying. In fact, he said nothing in reply after all. Nor did he move from his frozen spot.

The silence was cutting. When Koyan made no move to reply, Mesteno turned on his stool to face him, one forearm propped along the edge of the bar.

"I've seen you harmed worse. You're not angry about getting fried," he remarked, ignoring the itch to reach out for the bottle again. "If I offended you in restraining your friend, my apologies. If it's about the Grecian issue, I know I was wrong to hold my damn tongue."

Koyan rolled his head left. Right. Around until he was staring at the ceiling instead of boring holes into Mesteno's face. One shoulder twitched. Glancing down at the cigarette he held between the knots of his knuckles, he cautioned himself over and over about his temper, about the consequences of his actions, his words. He found it difficult to speak. There was no good starting point.

When he did find words, he looked up, right at Mesteno's eyes. "How long?"

Mesteno hadn?t expected that. His expression became severe, as if he were surprised to find Koyan's temper riled over what he suspected, more than all else combined. The frown smoothed though, into something unrepentant, perhaps even curious.

"Two months? Less, in truth." He did reach for the bottle then, and uncivilised as ever he'd been, drank straight from its mouth. "Nothing you ever spoke of to me has been mentioned to him. And if you've still some... claim on him I should be concerned about, you should probably make it plain. I wasn't aware something so long past would trouble you."

Lexius. The discussion had been inevitable, but as he?d naively told the Elf, he hadn?t expected it to matter.

Instead, the second ?two months? hit the air, Koyan started shaking his head. Once more, he stared down at the cigarette in his fingers, watching ash curl away from the end. He spent long minutes just standing there, absorbing, dealing. Coping. Then, he laughed. It started as a deep rumble, raspy and bitter.

"No. No, Mesteno, I don't have a claim on anyone. But you should have ****told me." Koyan glanced at the door, the window, the bar top. His shoulders trembled with the need to expend violence.

Growling at one another from across the room didn't suit Mesteno. He was unsure whether anyone renting the rooms above might eavesdrop, and should anyone else wander in he didn't mean for it to end up gossip fodder. He left his seat behind and approached, despite the violence he sensed rippling just under the Turk's skin. He was ever unafraid, to the point of recklessness.

"You didn't care when I befriended Bjorn, or Dair-- granted I wasn't **** the latter, but you've never desired to know who I was bedding. I was supposed to make an exception for Lexius? The pair of you barely speak, and I'm supposed to divine... from what? That this is your business? You still care for him?" Bluntly asking whether he was stepping on toes.

"Don't." The warning in Koyan?s voice and eyes was clear. Don't come any closer. Lifting the cigarette, he drew deep--then spewed the smoke out when Bjorn's name hit the air. "Are you **** kidding me? Bjorn?" Obviously, he hadn't known.

And then, then he exploded.

He took a threatening step forward, using the hand he held the cigarette in to point at Mesteno. "If I had started up a relationship with any of your serious ex-lovers, Mesteno, I would have told you before two months was out. I just figured that was the right thing to do. Not only didn't you tell me, you're standing there acting like I don't have a right to be pissed. I thought we were **** friends. Friends tell friends things like this to avoid awkward circumstances. It's called respect goddamnit. Because if I'd have known? I wouldn't have let you call him to save my life. I wouldn't have allowed him to get involved at all. But you didn't give me that choice, did you? Don't ever do that again. I don't give a **** if I'm bleeding out on the lawn, do not ever call him to save me again."

Mesteno stopped, but it was not due to fear. Merely a respect for the distance the other man seemed to desire. And then he weathered the storm that was Koyan's temper, and stood there unmoving, immutable as a mountain until he paused long enough for him to reply. And it was honest, as always.

"Let me re-word that first part - Bjorn and I never... just fumbled around a bit a couple of times." He was perhaps doing Bjorn a disservice in making the man's intentions sound unserious, but he left the subject behind, eyeing the cigarette without caution despite it being jabbed his way. "And I speak the truth when I tell you I never thought you would have cared. The two of you seemed on good terms when he helped at Alvaka, and you'd clearly moved on several times since you and Lexius parted ways. I was supposed to come telling you about it when I thought you were still reeling over the one you lost in Madrid?" He spared him stating her name - he'd only known it because of Eden. "I won't call him again," he promised quietly, and there was no guile in his eyes when he added, "I misjudged, plainly. I-- I'm sorry Koyan but you were harmed and whether you like it or not, I panicked."

Very little panicked the necromancer. Apparently a dying Koyan did.

The cigarette burned all the way to Koyan?s knuckles. When the skin singed, he snapped the filter out into the room, careless where it landed.

"I don't give a rat's ass about Bjorn. That's an entirely different situation." Raking a hand back through his hair, he expelled a rush of air. "Yes. Yes, you were supposed to tell me. But I guess that's how I do things, and not how you do them. And yes, it's been a year since I lost my fiancee, a year this month since my family died. That notwithstanding, I really did believe you'd be the type to at least mention something I consider important to me. Because there's a lot of bitterness there on my part, and, like I said, I would have chosen a different path the day of the eagle." Some of the inner rage eased. Not all, but some. "I can't for the life of me figure out why you'd panic over me, but so we're clear--no more."

He took another step closer, like he might say something devastating and private. But he checked himself, checked the urge to tell a hard truth. He hadn't gotten the truth up front, after all. "Good luck with all that." Indifference entered his gaze after the rage had gone; the shutters came up, the coolness came back. Things had irrevocably changed between Koyan and Mesteno.

"You can't figure it out?? Mesteno asked, apparently not willing to let matters drop. ?Either you're assuming I think you're indestructible, or you have no **** idea of where you rank amongst those I call friend, in which case my past actions have never spoken clearly."

He wouldn't speak of them, but if the Turk's memory was still sharp and he cast his mind back, perhaps he'd pick over their lengthy acquaintance and realise how often the secretive bastard had offered his aid unconditionally. He wasn't sure what it was that went unspoken just then, but likely he mistook it for some violent whim taken back at the last moment rather than some hard truth.

"I knew it would be hard for him too, yet still I called him," he reminded darkly. Certainly he'd pleased no one that day! "Making sure you stayed alive was more important than the history between you, even if it meant you'd both be angry. I've upset you in a way I didn't know I would, and I'm not blind, I see what I've done." That change. There was a certain rawness to his voice now, a regret he couldn't hide, and he didn't look at Koyan then, because the indifference was worse than anything. "Your opinion of me is changed. At least know you remain in my affections whether you wish it or not." Stubborn.

"I could **** punch you a thousand times right now," Koyan snarled. "No, I don't know where I rank, Mesteno. But certainly higher than not telling me something like that. And of course it was hard for him--he's treated me like utter **** since I first saw him around again. He can't even be bothered to extend niceties to Eli, who happened to be there for Lex when Lex came back from the dead. Oh, I don't know, you'd think that would buy someone some kind of loyalty. But no. So I imagine he was far less than pleased when he realized you'd summoned him to save my sorry ass. If you just would have told me."

Once again, he raked a hand back through his hair. He really wanted a drink. Then he cut a hard look aside again when Mesteno talked about affections. "All I ever asked for was to be a respected friend. That's it. I've confessed so much **** to you, Mesteno, and yet I get hardly anything in return."

He waved a hand dismissively, unable to maintain his indifference and coolness in the face of their ongoing conversation. He dug out the pack of cigarettes again and lit up, dragging down a deep lungful of smoke. Koyan fell to silence then, toying with the lighter before pushing it and the pack into his pocket.

Mesteno knew better than to offer to let work off some of that violence. Better than to think he'd have the restraint himself not to retaliate! Koyan had his cigarettes, Mesteno had his drink. Just then he'd have given anything to slump into a pleasant, chemical stupor, the cowards' way out of things. Worse yet, that he couldn't even explain the reasons for Lexius' behaviour without spilling other people's secrets. So he said nothing of it, and made no apology in his absence, lifting his bottle to swallow and ease some of the tightness in his throat.

"I have a great deal of respect for you, Koyan. And perhaps I haven't been as open on some matters, much to my current regret, but I've never hurt you with intent. You know full well I'd do anything for you, you bastard, and you can't forgive me this one thing?"

Even as he asked, he suspected he knew what the response would be. At least he was braced for it.

December 5th, 2015

"Mesteno." A murmur, soft and low.

Lexius was haunting the doorway to Mesteno?s laboratory, poised on the threshold.

Had he a moment of indulgence to do so, he might have stood there for some time, simply contenting himself with watching as the man peered into the eyepiece of the microscope. After all, he?d been absent again, secluding himself to the desert sands and avoiding all contact save for brief exchanges at the Red Dragon.

Mesteno had known he was approaching though, simply aware of a change in the morgue?s stillness, and he?d turned about on his stool before his name had really even left the Elf?s mouth. The necromancer was about as ragged and ill-tempered as he could get, and the darkness about his eyes made the brilliant, wolf's gold of them seem fever bright in their intensity.

He did not ask why Lexius had stayed away, though it was not for lack of caring. His very nature decreed the question go unspoken. "Well there are no holes in you... I take it Sin behaved himself." One corner of his mouth twitched towards a smile.

"He asked of you first." Came the smooth, serene reply. Maybe too much serenity, there.

"He probably wanted to know whether I had any intention of hunting him down," Mesteno suggested simply. The Ravnos was a survivor, and didn't need a surly necromancer hounding him when he had superiors to answer to already.

Lexius had decided to try something new (a habit Mesteno kept driving him to). He came prowling into the lab without an invitation. No tendril of thought preceded him. Instead, physical touch came first. There was no haste in the way Lexius reached out to sink his fingers into the messy braid he wore his hair in, the way he leaned in to have his taste of the man's mouth.

Mesteno offered no obstacle. He could appreciate the novelty of Lexius instigating, and for now abandoned his work to hook an arm up about his shoulders, closing his fist around a handful of fabric and hair and fast forgetting the kindred for a long, indulgent moment.

Finally, Lexius pulled away several inches, breathing a little more swiftly and hand still buried in the man's hair. His smile was full and slid easily across his mouth. He was not yet willing to go back to the subject of the vampire. That Sin had asked about Mesteno first had irritated him. As if he had some right. In truth he expected Sinjin probably had far more rights than he did, which only made Lexius a little bit more annoyed.

"A worthwhile experiment." His gaze flicked down to the front of the hoodie Mesteno wore. "You have paw prints on your shirt."

"An experiment?" Mesteno?s tone suggested mock-disapproval (ill mastered as always). "I'm curious t'know what your hypothesis was.? He glanced down at the stained front of the garment without any concern for the mess. After a moment, his fingers released their possessive grasp, arm falling slack from Lexius' shoulders. Instead his hand resettled at his waist, a safe zone.

"So the two of you conversed like civilised men? You didn't chide him for putting holes in me?" It appeared Mesteno had no intention of letting him forget the subject.

The incident he referred to had been more than a month ago by then, a moment of blundering violence that had left Mesteno with a bloodied neck and the Elf harbouring the first unsettling suggestions of jealousy. He?d been of a mind to rip the vampire's fangs right out of his head at that point, though now he was mostly past that urge.

"I'd spoken with him not long after the incident happened,? Lexius admitted, ?and did not chide him then. We have always managed to be civilized. He mentioned something of secrets, asked after you. I told him you were stubborn, reckless and ill-tempered. That seemed to ease his mind."

"You make me sound like a keeper," Mesteno remarked wryly. He couldn't argue the points!

"He managed to bait me, however." Now the Elf's smile was gone, the frown entirely self-directed! "There was not much else of note beyond the fact he thinks himself human. And his interaction with your brother. He's quite fond of the youth." Lexius thought it too bad, really, that Sal was Mesteno's brother. Lexius couldn't really use him against Sin given that fact.

For Mesteno, it was nice to know some things never changed, and for Sin and his here again, gone again lifestyle, perhaps it was a comfort. Mesteno hadn't realised that Sin and Lexius had much of an association, but then he hadn't expected there to have been one with Gem, either. Civilised indeed... they could play at it, but he wasn't sure either of them fit the bill precisely.

"Sin has always been far removed from what you might expect of kindred. I don't know whether it's just because he's young so far as undead are concerned, or whether it's his mentality, but in many ways he still seems human. He's deadly, and he's not exactly the most grounded creature, but in his affections he's..." He sought for a word, and his smile skewed crooked, fond. "He doesn't do well alone, and my brother has been a refuge to him for a long time." No, killing or tormenting Sin would not settle well with Mesteno either! Too much history. "How'd he manage to bait you?"

Lexius sensed Mesteno?s amusement in that question, and bared his teeth. He got another tug to his hair, even if the Elf knew that was no sort of punishment at all. It might be he just wanted to hear the growl again.

"I did not know why he was asking me about you beyond having glimpsed us speaking. I'm fairly certain were I to chide him about putting holes in you, he would actively seek to do so at every opportunity because he will then know it bothers me." The explanation had eased his frown, putting something more wry in his expression as he continued. "He noticed from the first the distance I keep between myself and others and constantly pushes the boundary seeking a reaction. I should have continued to refuse to give one even when he came in too close, but I was...out of sorts." So Sin had gotten his reaction and won the round! ?He does seem more human around your brother." Lexius gaze shifted from Mesteno's face to watch his hand as he withdrew his fingers from the man's braid only to sink then into the mass in a different location. "He accused me of despising humanity." He murmured.

"Well perhaps if he knew your history of human... companions, he'd reconsider that," Mesteno remarked, reaching to claim Lexius? wrist and prevent any further tugging at his hair. "On the whole there's plenty of reasons to dislike us as a race though, so I wouldn't blame you if he were right. He likes to play games," he admitted, his tone warmed by his amusement. "Some of which're fucking ridiculous. But anyway... why were you out of sorts?"

The Elf?s hand stilled. A single, slanted brow twitched upward, but he allowed the man to do what he wished without resisting. "My dislike isn?t limited to humans." He was an equal opportunity bastard. "The less he knows about me the better. I do still wonder what he meant about secrets."

Lexius finally reached out with a thread of thought, snaking it into Mesteno's mind precisely to establish a link. The Sadist's amusement might have driven him to seek more information from whatever he could glean along that tie. He certainly had himself together well enough to give nothing beyond a certain sort of easing once the connection was made. Better. The unwinding of the tension might be what prompted his next words.

"Once I am recovered, I would seek to make this mental link more permanent. Do you oppose that?" He finally asked! Better to know now, though, if Mesteno was opposed.

With the tie rooted, and an immediate, impulsive nudge from Mesteno's end welcoming it, Mesteno finally let go of Lexius' hand. He was frowning though, at the mention of permanence. "What would it involve? Could it fuck my head up?" A rare moment of personal concern. He'd suffered too much damage over the years not to want to know of any risks.

Lexius brushed his palm over the Sadist's shoulder and down the outside of his arm before the touch vanished completely. He didn't step back, but he did fold his hands behind his back as he studied the man and pondered his reactions.

"It would be much like it is now, but always there and somewhat stronger. Distance thins the connection, but does not break it. I will be able to mute it at will, but I believe you could learn to do so, as well. That you know the moment I establish the link and can produce a mental nudge in response, however slight, shows the promise of that possibility." He paused, brow furrowing faintly, before addressing the second question. "I will not physically or mentally damage you." he wasn't quite sure what Mesteno constituted as 'fucking up'! "It can be dissolved without permanent damage, though it is best I be the one who does it rather than another or you will risk a backlash."

"The thought of it being more permanent doesn't scare me. I like having it there," Mesteno admitted candidly, adopting a slouch, weight on one elbow. "And if you say there won't be any mental damage as a result, I trust you." Why did it sound like there was a 'but' coming, though? "Will it mean you go deeper in than before? I know that if you really wanted to you could go roaming through it all anyway, and I don't for a minute think you'd deliberately go poking about up there just because you could. But there's some things I'd rather confess to in my own time. Some secrets I can't share, and I wouldn't risk them being stumbled across, either because I happened to dream them while we were linked," the way Aoife had seen things, "or because I didn't shut my thoughts down as effectively as I should.

"Any time I am in your mind, the potential for betraying your secrets exists." Lexius wasn't using that as a reassurance. "I have the ability to establish the connection as deeply or as shallowly as I wish. I would not tie it into your subconscious, but when you sleep any dreams do become the active part of your mind and I may well be able to view them." All of what he said certainly argued against the idea. And Lexius knew it. He hid any disappointment very well, indeed.

Mesteno nodded his understanding, but his own disappointment was less easily hidden. The mental tie had often proven a comfort, and yet somewhere in the back of his head he'd always known it had increased the risk of accidentally betraying someone, or many someones in fact, who'd confided things to him.

"Safer that we continue using it as we are now then," he suggested, his smile a trifle weak. "But I do intend to learn. Don't think I don't." Adamant. His determination was a vicious thing.

"Perhaps when you feel you have enough mental control of such things." The Elf allowed. "The meditation and the work we do with controlling your energy should help to establish how much control you will be able to enact and wield upon yourself." Thus Lexius shelved the idea for a later date.

He eyed Mesteno critically for a moment. "Did you tell your brother about us?"

Mesteno was faced with the unwelcome reality of the fact that he'd have to wait about ineffectually, and potentially watch Taneth further deteriorate. What if there had been some small window in time where he could've helped? What if opportunity had been missed? Too many possibilities. He wished he didn't resent her for having asked him to help in the first place, without fully explaining the risks.

"Gem was the same," he mumbled petulantly about those who'd died and returned. Bjorn had been different though. Taneth certainly was.

Lexius gave Mesteno a narrow look as he stepped closer to deliver a mug of coffee into the man's hand. He was trying to decide if the Sadist was trying to pick a fight with his petulance or if he was just being himself. The Elf decided it was the latter, though he was fairly sure Mesteno wouldn't have been opposed to a good physical altercation to work out some of his frustrations and banish a few ?what if?s. He was probably fairly used to a partner being able to give him that kind of release, one that fit in so well with his natural tendencies. Lexius knew he couldn't give the man that kind of outlet, though. Especially not now.

The entire concept of it all put the furrowed lines back into Lexius' brow. He did ponder a session with the sticks to help settle Mesteno's mind, but there was a part of him that thought it would be an extra challenge to see if the Sadist could achieve his meditative state still while his emotions and thoughts were in this much turmoil.

In truth, Mesteno was ashamed of how autumn was pulling him thin, making him act unduly. He recalled having growled sullenly at Lexius at the inn, and now stood frowning while the cat swatted at the hoodie strings Lexius had been absently playing with only minutes before, arms folded and jaw set. At least he understood why Lexius hadn't visited him that evening. He'd as good as chased him off.

"I was out of sorts because I chose not to come spend time with you while I knew you were in that mood." Lexius admitted. Instead, he'd chatted it up with a damn vampire. His tone mellowed a bit. "More often than not, I wish to spend time with you rather than alone." He murmured that admission.

"If I happen to be... 'ill-tempered' in the future and you desire my company," Mesteno was fairly sure that was the word he'd used, "rest assured I wouldn't remain that way long if you came along to distract me. You do a great deal t'put my mind at ease. You're good at reminding me when I'm being an idiot." A little late to tell him that now, but for future reference. And then.... "I've missed you." Perfectly simple.

Those all too simple words doused a lot of the heat coming out of the Elf's churning mind and rather than keep his distance, he stepped right into Mesteno's space, all but caging him against the counter.

Lexius nudged aside poor Kalari by shifting his coffee mug under her face. The scent of the spice seemed to have positively offended her, and she skulked away with a quick-blinking, narrow eyed glare. It left the Elf room to bend his head and turned his face into Mesteno's neck just there where the hood of the hoodie was bunching in folds over his shoulder. He didn't quite touch skin, but breathed in the scent of the man with his body mere inches away. There was a lot of calm to be found in that simple act and Lexius took it and sent it skating along the tie, directly in opposition to his idea of keep the Sadist somewhat riled!

"And I, you." Quiet enough to be a secret, those words. Mesteno knew them all. What was one more?

Placing his mug aside next to its twin, Mesteno slipped his arms around the Elf, palms settling over his shoulder blades before skimming down to latch loosely to either side of his waist. Harmless, and not intended to inflame, he was simply fulfilling a need to touch him, offering very positive reinforcement for every time Lexius chose to make an approach with physicality in mind.

"Autumn's almost done." He sounded as if it were something momentous, something he couldn't have arrive soon enough even if he would spent it shivering. "I promise I'll be less of a fuckwit come the new season. For now just know it's not my intention to be difficult deliberately. And that I appreciate you waiting it out instead of throwin' y'hands up and decidin' I'm not worth the effort."

His brow touched down briefly on Lexius' shoulder, the nearness of that sun darkened face beside his neck, and the calm he felt bleeding through the tie, all contributing to easing his mind. He'd need that if he was to have any hope of living up to his boasts and managing the meditation without needing a second shot at it. He was even reconsidering not drinking the coffee, knowing it would make his mind more alert, but the smell of the spice was too tempting, and he wouldn't waste something so valuable.

The Elf's muscles tightened and twitched and the discord did ripple somewhere distant in the tie (it was always there to some degree!), but none of it seemed to outweigh the peace Lexius found for himself in the touches Mesteno doled out so willingly and easily. He was training the Elf well!

Lexius kept one hand around his coffee mug on the counter, but he brushed the palm of the other along the Sadist's side as he breathed a quiet laugh against the man's neck. "Your words could be my own." He murmured with no little bit of knowing and a trace of amusement. That Mesteno chose to persevere through his own issues was a small miracle, especially for the fact continued contact with him risked further damaging a long term friendship. The anger still boiled inside the Elf, but the sparks of it shooting off inside him had calmed. It allowed Lexius to ask his next question more calmly.

"I wonder, though," he pulled his head back enough to glimpse Mesteno's face, "if you would be happier with someone to give you a fight."

Mesteno searched Lexius' face intently in the aftermath of that comment, leaving his coffee too cool, hands retreating to lace loosely as he propped an elbow against the counter.

"I'm going to take a shot in the dark here and guess you think I intend to make you mad sometimes so we got an excuse to throw punches at each other." And perhaps he wasn't entirely accurate, but he didn't think he was all that far off the mark, either. "Let me elucidate," he went on, without offering much of an opportunity to intervene with a response. "I don't think any problem ever got fixed between two people doin' what we're doin' by throwing fists or tryin' t'beat one another senseless. In fact if you took a swing at me for that kinda reason, I'd be reconsidering things between us." Mesteno's notion of a healthy relationship might not meet all the usual social standards, but in this he was remarkably level headed!

"Do I like to fight for fun though? Yes. Sparring matches, wrestling, for bragging rights. To decide who gets to have it their way when there's a potential for sex. Any and all of the above. But I won't engage in a fight with intent to do real harm with a lover. I save that for people I dislike, for the pits, for the alleyway shits who come at you in packs. Does all this make sense, or worry you further?"

Resting his palm around the sharp blade of a hip, Lexius rubbed the front of the bone with his thumb as he listened and studied Mesteno's face. It wasn't exactly what he had meant, but it was close and the answer the Sadist provided was illuminating. The Elf's nod was easy, almost absent. It was a good topic to further distract him from other things.

"I did not mean precisely that, but something close. Your explanation both clarifies and confirms." He had decided it was more Mesteno's nature rather than any real intent and what the Sadist had just said certainly confirmed that. "But you do favor the physical and it does help to clear your mind at times."

"I won't be offended if you're not interested in combat of a physical nature. You're under no obligation to play rough with me, Lexius - the sticks'd work just fine if I felt like letting off some steam." And they'd never had an issue with those, save for the occasion he'd been fighting to win his own set of sticks. Maybe the audience had played a part in it too; to lose without landing a single hit would've been utterly humiliating. The breaking bones though, had not been his intent, even if the predatory side of him had been immediately piqued by the sound of crumpling bone.

Lexius canted his head, lips curling in a half smile. "I considered leaving your mind in turmoil to present a greater challenge to calming it."

Mesteno laughed, a low-level rumble of a sound, and he angled a knee in to knock the Elf's in half-hearted reprimand. "You can try that another time. Though it's good to know you're so scared of me winning that you felt like you had to swing the odds unfairly in your favour." His brows arched challengingly, and the angle his chin tilted towards was mock-arrogant. Yes, he'd implied that Lexius was scared of losing.

Lexius snorted and scowled at the accusation, long fingers closing in a hard pinch against the man's side.

It resulted in another laugh from Mesteno, though this one was a bark of a sound, and came with an instinctive withdrawal. Lexius' pinch at his side had uncovered another weakness. Evidently he was ticklish. He shot him a half-amused warning scowl, and tucked his elbows close to his sides as if he feared a follow up. The arrogant posturing hadn't lasted long!

"You say those words, then raise your chin as if begging me to knock it down." Lexius was teasing! He did know how to do that on occasion, though he often missed the mark on it. It was the beads (they were still there, if mostly inactive) that slapped back at Mesteno's knee even as the Elf slid a little to the side and took up his neglected mug of coffee. His, at least, was still steaming.

"Not so. Only wanted to play pompous," Mesteno corrected, reaching for his coffee now that he'd decided the worst of the steam was gone. He watched the Elf over the lip of his mug as he did so, with eyes still flashing deviance. Maybe he was calculating payback.

"I had thought of the sticks." Lexius admitted, raising the drink to his lips. He might well be learning the Sadist just a little bit. He indulged in a long taste of the spiced brew, which seemed to further ease whatever other tensions still coiling inside him. No more sparks at all flickered along the tie. His anger was now at a low simmer somewhere way in the background, something he would pull out later and examine quite closely.

"Are you ready then?" He'd no intention of doing the test here. He'd be taking Mesteno to the mountain once he finished his own coffee and putting him on the table. What better way, really, to truly test the man? Of course, he didn't volunteer that information just yet.

Mesteno nodded on a swallow, oblivious to the plans for a relocation. "One hour. Hold an image of myself in my mind." Declaring the challenge so that Lexius couldn't go making any last minute amendments to it. "You're going to be sat there bored." Not for the first time, he sounded too damn sure of himself, despite the fact that on this occasion, it was something he knew himself to be inherently lacking in talent for. "Got the stones, ready when you are," he added, with a pat at his pocket and another gulp of spiced coffee.

Lexius narrowed his slated eyes into fine slits, but the smile still lingered on his mouth, half obscured by the steam and the mug. "Do you have any appointments tomorrow?" This could well take all night and there was just no telling what condition either one of them might be in afterward. "Will your friends be well left alone overnight?" He meant the dogs, of course, something Mesteno might get by the way his gaze flicked down to the paw prints on the front of his hoodie.

"I will not be bored." He assured as he raised his gaze back to the Sadist's, the blue in them glinting more brightly than the violet for a moment.

Fingers splayed and soaking up the heat from his mug, Mesteno arched a dark brow. Lexius' questions seemed to imply something more than an hour might be required. "Only work come the evening," a whole twenty-four hours away, so he wasn't concerned. "And the dogs are with my friend Iberus. I think it's safer they be with him for the present. Just in case Aiden's people somehow track me down to here in numbers enough to get past the wards." Or just burn everything from the sky with thunderbolts. Of course those weren't Aiden's people, but they were Greek, and that was what he'd intended to suggest. The cat was a law unto herself, and seemed to escape everything with greater talent than he or the dogs ever might. Trying to move her would've caused unnecessary chaos.

"You're making it sound like this is going to be more than expected. You planning on trying to distract me or something? Gonna sit there being rowdy?" Lexius, rowdy. Laughable!

Lexius flashed his teeth at Mesteno before he spoke, a slim glimpse of white past the steam rising from his mug. "I may well test the depth of your sensitivity." Yes, the Sadist really should have hidden that particular weakness a little longer!

"Should've known," Mesteno muttered, the untidy (particularly since Lexius had sunk his fingers in it) length of his braid snaking as he shook his head. "But it's fine, I take it as a compliment that you've such confidence in my abilities that you want t'cheat." He returned the flash of teeth, though his had an effortless sensuality despite all its sharpness, right along with that serving of killer-crazy that served to keep people at bay. Usually.

"It is not cheating to test you fully." Lexius advised Mesteno gravely. His own humor still lingered, which was proof enough to himself that he, too, was ready for the rest of the evening.

Tipping the mug, the Elf drained the last of his coffee from it while the beads snickered out their amusement at his side. He set the empty into the sink nearby, his expression more serene now. "I would like to bring you back to the caves once we are finished." And that was the truth, as well. Just not all of it.

Loath to waste his share of the brew, Mesteno tilted his mug to finish it off with a few impolite swallows. "Your overseers are in a fine mood today," he remarked for the snickering beads; sometimes they quietened when people paid them attention. He expected them to be contrary just to keep him guessing. "What've you got planned in the caves? Finally gonna finish showing me around?"

"My only plan for the caves is to have you with me until you must go." Lexius said that as he stepped in close again. Just as in the lab, he did something unexpected. The same something, in fact!

Lexius leaned to take Mesteno's mouth in a hard kiss, and teleported them, mid lip-lock, from the cabin the mountain.

"If they're inactive, and they're currently no threat, and they risk drawing the wrong sort of attention... Lexius you know the scar I was given was to hide the breaking of the seal the Russians found. Perhaps we shouldn't go prodding at these. I don't know whether the protection will be effective." Mesteno had too many questions. Maybe it would simply give that sentience more control.

Lexius finished his examination, and moved on to look for evidence of the broken seal. "I will not prod." An assurance. "I agree we should not tamper with them given your past experiences and the warning we just received, but those are no reason to not examine them. Given what your soul has said, they will be broken one day." When Mesteno was ready, whatever that entailed.

"I trust you to be delicate then," Mesteno agreed, permitting the examination rather than outright refusing him opportunity. "Maybe there's a way to thwart it, and stay as I am. Why is it that parts of you can exist in there?" he asked, gesturing towards the sandstorm grains. "Everything else I've ever consumed fades. Never lasts longer than a few days before it fails."

Lexius offered him a smile. "Because I am older." He was actually quite pleased to see those specks of himself littered about.

The broken seal was not difficult to find. The Russians had done something far cruder than prodding - they'd ripped it open with some metaphysical C4 and left the tattered remains there without a care for the evidence left behind. It was located a few inches south of the hollow of his throat, beneath the violently torn clavicle. The energy flowed through this breach no differently than it did anywhere else, but it was a dead end, a place it had once been tethered, forced into slumber.

All too strange. The seal was a thing of ancient magic, somehow encoded into his genetics. The other seals were a product of the same processes, though that the Russians hadn't done anything to them suggested they were either content with sabotaging only one, or that their demolition expert hadn't been able to identify them and pry them open.

There was some vague amusement as the Elf concluded his scrutiny and straightened. "No." He murmured, answering Mesteno's futile hope with blunt honesty! "You will not remain as you are. Whatever is happening to you will continue to happen so long as you possess that soul. But we may be able to temper it. I'm quite sure however it wants you to develop can be improved upon in your favour. We'll be working on that, you and I, starting with your mental skills."

"If those seals remain untouched, it can't make the changes it wants,? Mesteno argued obdurately. ?Last time it took a specialist to break one. I don't intend to let anyone else open the others." He was refusing outright to accept the Fate lined up for him, even if Lexius seemed adamant it would happen whether he liked it or not. "The mental skills might just help me to keep things in stasis if I can learn them soon enough." He was willing even if he did hate meditation.

With the Elf?s assurance that the need for further meditation that day was over, all efforts to maintain it ceased. Mesteno willed himself out of it with commendable speed, and woke back in his flesh, sprawled supine on the warmed, sandstone table, with the stones slithering off him to bounce irreverently about on the granite floor of Lexius? cave.

The Elf was leaning over him, palm still smoothed across his brow. That string of beads was snaking lazily around the displaced stones across the man's stomach and chest. "Do not rush." Lexius advised, stroking his hand back from the Sadist's brow to the crown of his head.

Mesteno?s breathing was rapid, as if he'd been running one of his arduous circuits about Rhy'Din's city limits. Mental exercises were far more taxing than anything his well-trained body might face, so perhaps it was little wonder. In time, with enough of the Elf's tutelage in such exercises, he might wake in less of a sweat. And with less of a scowl.

"My head feels fit to come apart," he complained, his brow wrinkling under the light touch of Lexius hand. Yet he did not mean it to insinuate that he had a migraine. On the contrary, it felt opened up in ways it hadn't before. Unsure whether it was good or bad, only that currently he was uncomfortable with it, with the divine influence and the autumn buzz leaving him particularly charged, he desired to be off the table without delay.

He reached up with an arm so he could loop it around Lexius' shoulders and levered himself up. More stones went rolling, some landing between his legs, and the one in his hair tumbling through the tangles to click off the table. "Let me rush this once, I need to feel my limbs 'n know I still have them," he murmured, doing his best to slither off the table in a distinctly uncoordinated manner. Feeling his own flesh again was a comfort, and in his haste, his usual self-consciousness over his nudity was forgotten.

"It will ease." Too much humour in the Elf?s tone. He caught the beads when Mesteno stood then slid the hand they were tangled around down a sleek, scarred flank. The other provided support at the back of his neck. The dissonance gave a vague mutter, but it was buried distantly and responding sluggishly. "You did rather well, especially for what happened. I did not think it would want to talk."

Mesteno kept that arm hooked about Lexius' shoulders, one hand pressed lightly to his chest with fingers bent ever so slightly to hook nails into the scaled fabric of his shirt. There was no dignity in it, and an utter lack of attempt to entice. It was a few moments more before he opened his eyes again, and stared at Lexius until he was sure of himself. Sure it was the Elf and not another conjured mental image.

"Believe the term is to be 'thrown in at the deep end'," he suggested, loosening the arm he had about his shoulders, steadier now. "Deep end of a fucking mire, in this case." Wryly.

Lexius lifted his head to meet the man's look and rumbled some kind of quiet sound that might have been a chuckle. It infested his words as he answered. "It was not nearly so bad. It was, in fact, a good thing to have direct communication with that part of you. We've learned what it can and will do and, in a vague way, what it has planned for the future."

"It knows things I don't. How can it have knowledge? How can it know something I haven't discovered myself? Surely all its experiences are limited to what it's seen and heard through me." Mesteno made a logical argument, and the obvious answers were far from pleasant. "If I knew how, I'd speak with it again without risking it coming to the fore. Without risking the breaching of any seals. I need to learn how to do that." He suspected if it was going to be possible, it would be as a result of their lessons, but just like the damned physics subject, he didn't think it would be anything he would master easily. Not like the study of weaponry, or necromancy. He also suspected poor Lexius might lose patience with him as a student.

"It is you, but it is itself, as well. And it has a sense of age to it,? Lexius explained, and continued with a certain sombre gravity in his voice. "I think you might well have been made for it. And now it is making you unto its purpose." Guesses, of course, but ones he now had more knowledge in making them.

After a time, Mesteno eased back, and the rear of his thighs came up against the edge of the table again, with the predictable discomfort of contact. He hadn't realised they were still so close. "I'd better get dressed."

"As you will." The Elf knew he would find a certain comfort in dressing, so didn't discourage it. He pulled his touch again, the beads the last to leave the Sadist?s skin as they unwound from his leg. "Dress and we will return to the desert." He kept an eye on him, but moved to start collecting the scattered stones to place back into the pouch.

Mesteno found his way back into his clothes clumsily without proving a spectacle, but his thoughts ticked on, troubled. He only paused to grasp his ruined braid and pull it from beneath the neckline of his hoody.

"So what am I then? Is my personality just some... inconvenient side effect? Is my mind just a necessary conductor for the flesh so that what's in me can evolve at its own rate and make its debut when I'm 'tempered'? Age you say. Is that why the woman called me a 'Relic'?"

It was troubling to think he was harbouring something, but it made sense, given things he'd heard spoken before. Rather than let Lexius answer his increasingly pessimistic questions though, he shook his head, and waved a hand as if to dismiss all his own questions. He didn't want to spend all night wondering over the answers. Better to get it all written down when he'd recovered, then re-read it until he could make some sense of the mess.

"Never mind, the answers can wait. At least we have some knowledge of the taint now, and know that perhaps what's in my head can be reasoned with rationally to help us in the plan your guardian suggests."

"How rational it will be is debateable." Lexius stepped toward him, handing over the pouch and guiding him toward the doorway that would take them out of the cave and back into the hall leading toward the vast cavern the red dragon had once used for its hoard.

"It didn't feel like some rabid animal," Mesteno murmured. "Not the way it gets when it's starving, or it can feel I'm furious and intend someone harm." But more than that he couldn't say. He only knew it hadn't felt wrong, and that if that were the case, he might be subjected to whatever changes it intended without even realising he was undergoing them. "It was interested in its own survival though, and to that end I think it can be reasoned with, so long as it thinks there will be worthwhile reward."

Lexius reached again to coil his hand over a shoulder and give him some warning. "Close your eyes. I will teleport us to the desert."

Both hands fastened over Lexius' hips, Mesteno obliged and offered the subtlest of nods. Within moments, the cool air of the mountain cavern was replaced by the skin-prickling dryness of the desert, and the Elf Lexius kept Mesteno still and steady until they were ready to move again, through the lab and library, and toward the front room. It was there he responded to Mesteno's comments.

"I do not disagree with you. If it can make a meal of whatever is flawed in me, it may well be enough incentive for it to cooperate." He glanced back to give the Sadist a sharp grin. "Though I am quite sure it would prefer to make a meal of me in whole." He didn't seem offended or particularly worried about the possibility of it happening that way. Whatever he'd learned that night seemed to have settled him somewhat in his decision regarding the cleansing.

"What I am concerned for now is your ability to control it should it want to come to the forefront again. We will need to work on your training up your mid and Will to prevent it taking over without your permission the way it did this night. I believe you have quite enough talent to do that. You will never be a psion, but the uniqueness of your energy will allow to learn to protect yourself." He sounded confident.

"It never wanted to come out before," Mesteno pointed out, as if he was beginning to think the risks of a recurrence were small. "I always thought it operated on a more basic level. Like an animal, y'know? Not reasonable like a person." It had often been the driving force in his more reckless moments, the impulse, rather than the logic and sound thought. "Maybe I'm only at risk of it trying to take over if I spend too long meditating and prodding at it."

The idea of it wanting to devour Lexius whole made him uncomfortable though, and that nagging doubt that something might go wrong rose to haunt him. How often had his attempts to aid people gone awry, after all?

January 2nd, 2016

Side by side, with an overgrown bear of a mutt flanking them as escort, Lexius and Mesteno put the Red Dragon behind them and moved deeper into the city.

Mid-winter, and the cold had taken to gnawing at the necromancer?s bones, but it wasn?t the throbbing discomfort that had fouled his mood. Nor was it the cause for Lexius? prolonged silence. Weeks of smooth sailing, of study and planning and progress, had met a bump in the road by the name of Sinjin Fai.

They were well away from the inn when Lexius spoke at last, having chosen not to cheat in returning them directly to Mesteno?s home. "Is he going to ask your permission?" His serenity was disturbed by a sliver of something else, but only in his tone. The tie between their minds remained frustratingly tranquil.

Mesteno's breath was cool enough it barely seemed to scrim the air. "Ask permission to have you?" he asked, his eyebrows shooting up sharply. "Why would he do that? He's no notion of what we're up to. I imagine if he wants you, he'll come to you himself."

And he?d come to the conclusion that the kindred did. It was not the first time he?d suspected it, but their most recent encounter had only affirmed, and the unease it left him with was an ugly thing.

Lexius was silent again for the span of several minutes. The city passed by, unremarked upon. "What did he want from you?" He finally asked, being specific this time. He'd spent some time weighing if it was any of his business before asking again. Apparently, he'd decided it either was or he didn't care if he overstepped some line between the pair.

Despite the mental cloak along the tie, the remoteness of his outward demeanour, the Elf not only matched Mesteno's pace, but kept very little distance between them. Shoulders brushed from time to time and the beads were taking a lot of joy in slapping lightly at Mesteno's leg. That trace of disgust hadn't come again, but it was a close thing and not altogether the fault of the flaw.

Mesteno was as content with the slapping of the beads as he was of the Elf's company, of those small, unobtrusive moments of contact that came of simply walking side by side. Less content with that lengthy silence, which made him wonder what Lexius' intent was. The disgust he knew was genuine, but he'd said nothing of any desire not to be hounded by the vampire, and he'd seen him loiter once already for chance to square up. The fact that Lexius was collecting bits of him to study left him questioning all the more.

Or put bluntly, he was a little jealous. Koyan made him apprehensive, but Sinjin evoked jealousy.

"Honestly I have no idea. He said he wanted my ear, so potentially it's something to do with my brother or things of an undead nature. He'll call me, anyway, or shoot me a text message." He hadn't invited him over. He simply hadn't liked the idea of Sin bumping into the Elf there.

Lexius was studying him sidelong, breaking the passiveness of his expression with a faint furrowing of his smooth brow beneath the dusty hang of his hair.

"Perhaps you will let me know after you speak with him." Bad enough that Sinjin had given them a distinctly shrewd look before he'd left. Lexius wasn't sure he could keep his liaison with the Sadist a secret from the vampire for too much longer and that would turn into something he was certain would be used to try and get a reaction out of him.

"If it's anything he doesn't swear me to secrecy over. I'll always share with you as much as I can without fucking up my integrity." Mesteno placed a great deal of importance in that. Scruples again, so inconvenient. "If it's anything to do with his personal troubles, he already knows I won't help him. I told him when he came back a year ago that I couldn't anymore. Definitely more likely to do with Sal."

"What did Jason say?" Lexius asked, changing the subject.

His not-so-young-anymore prot?g? had cornered Mesteno the night prior, along with Lan, who?d been unable to keep his intrigue over the change in their relationship from showing. Neither had seen the Elf in days thanks to his repeated trips to the sands to recover, and so the necromancer had been their port of call for updates. Something he?d found Lexius was none too pleased about.

For the moment, Mesteno let Sin lapse to background thoughts and glanced across at his company. "He said that he and Lan hadn't heard from you, and asked me to get you to contact them when I next spoke with you." A task he'd already obliged them in. "He also said that there were developments in the Temple District. Word has it that the Temple of Janus is going to be opening its doors soon in celebration of more than just the New Year. What's the betting we get swept up in their bullshit somehow?"

Lexius evidenced no displeasure or revulsion as he identified and dissected Mesteno?s jealousy. Instead, it seemed to surprise and confound him just a little bit. The flickers of feeling were fleeting, but some of his serenity bled away in the wake of it all and the Elf unwound enough to pull a hand from behind his back to slide his palm up the length of Mesteno's spine. Light, that touch, and further muffled by layers of clothing, but it lingered high up between the Sadist's shoulder blades and caused the beads to chortle madly.

"I will speak with them soon." But he didn't seem inclined to do so right then. "I suppose it is news worth of being mentioned sooner rather than later." And he didn't disagree with Mesteno's prediction. "Given that," among other things he left unsaid, "we should see to our trip sooner to the Well."

"It'd be wise," Mesteno agreed. "We're considering questioning the sacerdos if we can discover who it is, and maybe infiltrating the temple if it can be arranged. Been a while since I've engaged in any tactical espionage." And probably best he didn't, since the Temple would doubtless be being watched.

A subtle pressure from the Elf's hand turned the Sadist with him off the street they were walking onto a crossing road. They'd bypassed the market district and were skirting the perimeter of it headed east. The area was mostly commercial and given the time of day (with the last bits of sunlight fading out of the sky) many of the businesses were either closing down or shifting personnel is preparation for the evening shifts. As usual, most passer-by?s tended to ignore them, as if the pair didn't really exist, moving around them automatically. There were others Lexius' little mind trick couldn't so easily fool, but none of them seemed too interested in the pair, either.

Guided easily by the pressure at his back, Mesteno finally succumbed to a temptation of his own, and reached around the psion's waist to latch his fingers loosely across his far hip. He was curious to see how long he'd put up with it.

"Lan has never known me to be with anyone." He confided after a time. "It is, I suppose, to be expected he would allow the novelty of it to outstrip his sense. He is still very young and learned socialization at the hands of wolves." Lexius didn't bother to explain that enigmatic statement! "Jason, on the other hand, has known them all. But he also knows, in part, why I have not indulged since he brought me back."

Sometime during their talk, they'd crossed over into Jason?s territory. There were no markers, no obvious visible changes to denote the transition, but Lexius allowed himself to relax another notch even when he turned them again and the surroundings slowly transitioned toward a more industrial feel. In true RhyDin style, technology blended with magic here, old and new merged together sometimes seamlessly and sometimes jarring.

"Don't be angry with Jason,? Mesteno persuaded. ?He did everything he could to stop Lan badgering with questions barring actually gagging him. He seemed to be considering it when they took off," he added with an ephemeral, half-born smile. It faded fast, as if yet too shy to become something whole. Mesteno's mind was so busy with thought that amusement had faded fast. "I understand why you haven't told them," he told the Elf as their path segued smoothly from one district to the next, "the privacy to pursue things in your own time, and to make sure it's sustainable before anyone goes getting... excited about the whole business." He wasn't sure his choice of wording was the best, but he could come up with nothing else, unprepared. "But just so you know, I don't mind if people know, so if for any reason you've kept it to yourself for my sake, don't concern yourself with that anymore."

"It is that," he agreed with the reason Mesteno stated, "and the wish that we not be hounded about it." And Lan would hound them! "Do not say I did not warn you." He said that with a quick, sidelong look and a twist of lips that suggested a smirk. That faded quickly enough when he thought of Sin. "Sinjin will use it against me." He added that with more grimness. Mesteno surely knew it, but he thought it worth mentioning anyway. And it led into his next question concerning that matter. "Why are you jealous?" He didn't sound disapproving, but honestly curious as to the reason. He couldn't see one, himself.

Lexius turned them again, this time down a street that ended in a massive warehouse flanked by a parking lot on one side and a stable on the other. There were stores that provided a buffer between the lots and the street that had turned off of, but the main attraction seemed to be the warehouse itself even though there was no marquee to proclaim what it was about.

"It's too late to hide it from them. If I'm to be hounded, it's already happening. You should have covered your throat." That last he added drolly, as if he were passing on all the blame, though the tie suggested he found the fact that he hadn't humorous rather than something to chastise him for.

The matter of Sin was entirely different. He still had a very real fondness for him, and as yet unsure how deep the animosity, or perhaps just curiosity, ran between the pair, he couldn't decide whether to simply stand back and watch the fallout, or to intervene, to demand boundaries of them both. Really though he didn't think either of them had enough control, currently, to be able to abide by rules. Sin made a game of everything, and the Elf had old grievances with blood drinkers and chaos. Keeping order seemed hopeless.

"Like it or not, Sin isn't just another vampire you can discount as vile and then forget. Instead of walking away from him, you allow him to engage you in conversation. I think he interests you. You keep his blood. You keep his...whatever that stuff was he burst into today. You want to study him. Given time he'll show you what it is that keeps my brother so attached, what made me love him as a friend and a brother and permitted me to allow a link born of blood between us. You'll see what I saw, and wanted to protect, when I confronted his elder in a hive of kindred. You'll see past the jester's grin and all the glamour and want to know him, and then maybe the disgust won't be disgust anymore. A great many people find him attractive despite his nature."

And he wouldn't blame him, but he'd definitely be jealous. And he wouldn't expect to win if it Lexius found himself torn between choices.

Lexius? confusion gave way to thoughtfulness which slowly bled into something far more troubled. The history he'd revealed to the Sadist would certainly explain how the man could come to such an opinion on how things might proceed between himself and the vampire, and hearing Mesteno say it out loud and follow that line of logic put him in mind of when it had happened before.

The difference of the details was incidental, even if one of them (Sin being a vampire) was a major one. It didn't matter. The possibility Mesteno described had played itself out in the not too distant past and others had paid the price for his indiscretions. Mesteno had every right to be cautious and even jealous and now Lexius understood all too well the reason behind it. He was, in fact, cursing himself for not seeing it before that very moment.

The grim remoteness he'd been wrapped in earlier returned and the serenity once again became a wall between them along the link, though the Elf didn't disconnect them as he should have. He still had trouble giving that up. Too selfish.

"This way." It was no answer to anything Mesteno had said, just a guidance past the main entrance of the warehouse and across the parking lot on one side to what appeared to be a security gate. No time for talk then, for there were guards on the other side in a narrow, sheltered alley once the Elf got them through the barrier. They seemed to know Lexius on sight and didn't challenge his passing, though they kept an eye on both men and spoke quietly into unseen microphones to pass on the word of their presence. An employee entrance, without a doubt, but a well-guarded one. Lexius led Mesteno to a side door that took them into the warehouse.

January 8th, 2016

Wolf-song and tripped wards; Sanctuary had been invaded.

The trespassers joined their voices in solemn chorus, abandoning stealth for careless incursion. The pack was a dozen strong, overgrown and broadly spread along the property line for nearly a quarter mile. Across the snow smothered stubble of cropped kweneskat grasses, they approached the treeline of the woodland wrapping the necromancer?s rundown bolthole. Never so far from one another as to lose sight, and with all the confidence that might be expected of such a great advantage in numbers.

Wolves. They knocked with their teeth.

Mesteno went out to meet them, barefoot and stripped to the waist, morgue chic in gory war-paint. He?d paused only to collect his scimitar, leaving the man he?d been systematically reducing to pink, anonymous meat in his underground morgue to wallow in miserable reprieve. Whomever the pack belonged to, he hadn?t invited them, and while it might have been wiser to lock himself behind steel lined doors or even take flight, he was itching for violence, and had been ever since he?d parted ways with Lexius.

The trees made a path for him, filled the air with the low and alien groaning of displaced earth and abruptly mobile timber. Moss-strewn branches laboriously twisted into arches, and he prowled through the canopied promenade, an eyeful of hideous scars and barbaric intent.

Two of the wolves had been ensnared, not cautious enough to avoid the barbed roots surfacing to entwine them. More were engaged in a ferocious game of tag with one of Sanctuary?s guardians. The intrusion had not triggered any of the pack with the nightmare curses he?d seeded into the grounds though, which implied to the viciously inclined necromancer that they hadn?t come with intent to harm. At least not yet.

Somewhere near the centre of that spread of wanton wildness stood a perfectly normal looking man, dressed in tattered jeans and an untucked, checked flannel shirt in red and black. He stood six and a half feet tall, built rangy, eyes dark blue and short black hair shot through with grey. His grin was unmistakably wild, a match for the wolves, and he lifted one hand to wave at the savage emerging from the sentient trees.

"Mon ami!" Jack called, as if his visit was expected and they were old friends "Y'got quite d'place here."

Mesteno?s scimitar was free of its sheath, ready to swing, a line of pale runes gleaming along the notched steel, and the hard edges of his teeth beginning to show in a ready snarl. It failed, lapsed into surprise, bewilderment, then undisguised anger when he recognised Jack.

Mon ami. There had been a time they'd been anything but. There had also been a time Jack had stitched him up patiently, tending wounds the necromancer hadn?t deserved any pity for.

"Good t'see you're not head-fucked and pissin' on Sin?s hearse anymore," he replied, eyeing him suspiciously.

Jack rolled broad shoulders in a shrug. "Me, I got plenty other t'ings t'be pissin' on dese days." Unbeknownst to Mesteno, Sin?s name was the very reason Jack had turned up on his doorstep, and why the Cajun was laughing under his breath. He eyed Mesteno over. Breathed him in, nostrils flaring. "Y'got some time f'me? Or are y'too busy entertainin'?"

Mesteno turned to glance across the cropped acres fronting the woods, watching the pack with the overgrown displacer beast in hot pursuit, and decided not to bother calling the animal off while things were still more or less under control.

"I was finished," he told their Alpha, feeling the blood growing tacky and tight across exposed skin. He wished he'd thought to throw on a shirt before he came out, but then he hadn?t been expecting to leave witnesses.

Moving away a short distance, he parked his backside on the jutting, buttress-like root of a looming tree. It was notably free of thorns, this spot, and the branches low enough with their webbing of moss to play prop to his ring-laden spine. He had no intention of inviting the big bad wolf further in until he knew why he?d come.

"What can I do for you, Jack?"

The Cajun didn?t seem offended by the lack of hospitality. Instead, he offered a wry sort of smile and stepped nimbly to find himself an amenable root on which to perch. Settled with one boot propped to the wood, he wound his arms around a bent knee. He watched Mesteno steadily, but there was no challenge in his gaze.

"M'boy's worried an' ain?t sure what t'do, so he asked if I'd come'n help. Ain?t sure what kinda help I can be, me, but seein' as I owe a debt'r two, figured it wouldn't be no skin off m'nose to have a chat." He flicked a look toward his trapped wolves. "Maybe y'can coax dem trees inta lettin' dem go, too, oui?"

The necromancer tipped his head in mute inquiry, though the cogs of his mind whirred reliably, already trying to fathom an answer to that little mystery of just who ?m?boy? might be where Jack was concerned. He could think of one youngster right off the bat, and given the association both shared with Lexius...

Lan. The youngster had sought him out again only a few nights prior at a town council meeting, begging him to persist with Lexius, rather than assume the worst based on a poor track record. Mesteno had wanted to hurt him purely because he was the Elf?s creature, though inebriation might have played a significant role, too.

"What is this?? he asked irritably, ?Mediation? Counselling?" He slanted a look away towards the trapped wolves, and whatever it was he did, something unseen, it had the roots unravelling with a great groaning and cracking cacophony, freeing the captives to limp off to the inevitable mockery of the rest of their pack.

"S'just a chat," Jack laughed, watching the captive wolves scurry from sight.

Mesteno turned back to him, sliding his scimitar away into its curving scabbard to rest it in a cradling web of vine. "You can be damn sure there'd be a pissed off Elf, if he knew you were out here right now. He's made his thoughts clear. You can't mean t'tell me I should ignore him when he warns me off."

It had been a very explicit warning, too. You should cease now. Look elsewhere. There are far better choices.

Everything he said was valid, and it made the Cajun shake his head, as if he knew any discussion was probably futile. He was going to have it anyway.

"Y'got some points." He admitted, shifting a bit on his root, blatantly more comfortable with the scimitar sheathed. A subtle readiness in his frame finally eased. Given their prior relationship and the lengthy stretch of his absence, there'd been no certain outcome to this meeting, but Jack was glad it hadn't dissolved into violence. Glad and a little surprised, truth be told. Not that he said that out loud. He contemplated the comments and shook his head again, not in denial of the logic, only as an indication it wasn't where he wanted to start.

"Ain?t gonna lie," he finally went on, "when I heard y'two had taken up t'gether, I was some bit surprised." Floored. "Him, he ain?t really had a student since Wings and didn't seem much inclined to take one f'anyt'ing, d'boy not included." Though Lan was something of a special circumstance. "Den t'hear it was y'self?" Jack rolled out another, eloquent sort of shrug. What could he say? "From d'way Lan tells it, y'all've gotten real close, oui?" To his credit, Jack didn't express any incredulity or disgust at the idea. He didn't seem about to ask Mesteno why, even if he was studying him closely. Maybe he was looking for a sticker than listen Mesteno's appealing qualities. "Closer'n he's been t'anybody in a damn long time."

Mesteno wasn't sure why he was entertaining the discussion, beyond the fact that they'd some history, and insight into Lexius was still something he'd snap up with appetite despite the sting it caused to think of him. He rationalised instead, that if he didn?t hear the old wolf out, he might well have to suffer more visits from Lan.

"Don't think you're the only one who was surprised by the news," he admitted wryly - and then, perhaps because he was accustomed to being looked at the way Jack was looking at him then, as if he'd the word 'why?' stencilled across his forehead, he added, "He has a 'type'. I guess I ticked enough of the boxes. Throw in some mutual peril and allow to percolate over enough time..." He trailed off, shrugged. Mesteno was forever batting out of his league. "Of course I can't rule out my roguish charm," he added, to finely season it all with sarcasm and a show of teeth that never even approached the smile it was intended to be.

Jack had heard plenty about Mesteno from Drew, having been the kid's bodyguard during a portion of the time they'd been together. Coupled with his own brief experiences with the Sadist and it was no wonder he looked doubtful. But that had been years ago and the Cajun knew how much he had changed in that time and he could all but taste the differences in Mesteno.

"Y'do got a certain dark charm." He was more serious in the opinion than Mesteno had been and still wore a smile as he considered it all.

The necromancer leaned back further into the shadows cast by the forest, where instead of being cooler, the temperature seemed distinctly more clement. "It didn't feel like he was settling. We were connected up here," a finger tapped to his own tawny temple, "enough f'me to know it wasn't just some half-assed interest. He's no masochist, he wouldn't have suffered all that unrest in his head for nothing. And we were close, yes," he allowed finally. "He was trying hard, making it work against all the odds. But the thing is, it wasn't that vast struggle he has to deal with all the damn time that made him tell me I'd be better off without him. It was just that he couldn't see himself avoiding temptation. Even made it sound likely. Why would I sit around waiting for that to come, letting myself get tangled in him a little more every day if all that's ahead of me is disappointment?"

January 9th, 2016

Mid-afternoon of the following day, and the crystal Lexius had given to Mesteno early in their acquaintance flared to life. It had been some time since Lexius had needed to use it to communicate, as frequently as they were linked mind to mind, but Mesteno had been sat with it curled in his palm expectantly anyway.

Contact had been rudely brief.

Come. The Elf’s voice instructed, and perhaps he would have said more, but the mental touch, just this side of wild, was too much for the crystal. It cracked, coming apart in shards that bit into Mesteno's palm. Not a good omen and it only grew worse once he’d made the trip from his morgue, to Lexius’ laboratory. It was Lan who met him there, and the youth looked unusually grave.

"He wants me to fly you. I think he doesn't trust his teleportation on another, especially you."

And a short time later they’d been airborne. The young dragon angled himself toward the sinking sun and flew a straight and steady course. The trip took a solid two hours with nothing below them but endless dunes only occasionally dotted with tiny oasis. Mesteno could've done with a set of goggles for the flight, and had to make do with ducking down as best he could behind Lan’s neck ridges to keep his face protected from the worst of the wind, squinting his eyes to near slits. Thankfully twilight sharpened his eyesight, and when he glimpsed mountains looming to the East identical to those he’d witnessed in his vision, he knew they were on the final leg of the journey. He grasped tight to the sides of the dragon’s neck with his knees so he could rise up, the better to see beyond his outstretched neck.

At long last, Lan began to bank and circle. There was nothing obviously different about the dunes below. No palm tree to mark a spot, no gaping hole in the ground, no flicker of firelight to give an Elf away. But Lexius was there, standing in the lee of a towering wall of sand as he watched them descend. He blended right into the backdrop in his drab clothing and sand dusted skin and hair, but once they were seconds away from alighting, Mesteno caught the glint of his colourful eyes.

The dragon landed gracefully, with minimal impact, stirring up clouds of sands that were just as quick to fall away once he neatly folded his wings. Mesteno wasted no time in loosening the ropes he'd secured himself with, and slid down onto the sand, hair wildly tangled, cheeks wind chaffed and a borrowed, bronze, lizard-skin coat fastened high about his throat.

Lan craned his head around to eye the Sadist and dared a whisper to the man. "You have to both come back." It was a solemn demand.

Mesteno’s glower smoothed out, ebbed completely with a sigh. "I'm gonna do my best. We both will." But more than that he couldn't offer, and he strode on towards Lexius without risking a look back.

Lexius waited until the dragon was gone, his gaze fixed first on the pair of them, then on Mesteno alone as he came closer. The serenity was thick about him, a nearly tangible second-skin of calm he wore close and tight. His eyes were too bright, still, speaking of the wildness of the power held in check behind them, but so far the Elf seemed to have any surges of it well in hand.

"Do you like the desert, Mesteno?" Hardly a traditional greeting, and the beads thought so, too, for they snickered out quiet notes of sound directly in the wake of Lexius' question. To his credit, the Elf didn't scowl at them. He seemed far more interested in hearing the answer, only somewhat distracted with the task of wrangling errant threads of thought.

Mesteno kept a safe distance between them. A good six feet seemed reasonable enough, though he didn't doubt that the dissonance would rather it be six miles. He studied the Elf carefully. Now more than ever, Lexius seemed a construct of the sands. It infested his clothing and hair and clung to the skin of his hands and neck as tenaciously as any leech. Only his face was clear of stray grains, perhaps too angled and sharp to allow more than dust any purchase. Still a little too thin, a touch worn and, of course, that damnable tranquillity persisted.

"It's a little like the sea," Mesteno told him, once he'd pondered his question sufficiently. "Vast and jaw-dropping. You see them and realise how small you are, how puny. Both are treacherous for the things they hide, and both are beautiful for the same reasons." He slipped a look lower at the snickering beads, and his mouth twitched in faint amusement. "I've a great respect for the desert. I'm not sure whether I like it yet though."

It had taken things from him. It might do so again.

Lexius did nothing to bridge the gap between them, though his hands did curl inward at his sides, making loose fists from long fingers. Mesteno's answer seemed to trouble him. "As you say." He murmured.

Mesteno saw as much as sensed that his words had troubled Lexius, and regretted he couldn't have offered something more reassuring. The dissonance was going to love it. Koyan was a creature of the desert after all - how much more appropriate he'd been.

The beads wriggled where they hung from the Elf's belt, reaching out to slap at Mesteno as Lexius turned to look out toward the sea of dunes. They fell short due to the distance between them. "Come. We've some distance to travel yet. I did not wish Lan's presence to disturb the area." The dragon had a wealth of magic in him and Lexius didn't want to risk that interfering with what they were about. Looking back to the Sadist, the Elf produced a skin of water from the satchel at his side and offered it over.

"Telling me off before we even get started?" Mesteno asked the beads. He did not obstruct their slap, but reached instead for the water skin for a long pull of the contents before offering it back. "The kid's worried. He's informed me we 'have' to come back."

The beads arced out again, this time connecting with Mesteno’s hip. "Do not encourage them." Lexius chided absently, watching as Mesteno drank. He raised a hand, indicating he should keep the skin and turned to parallel the dune until it began to slope toward at a more reasonable angle. Only then did he begin to climb, speaking over his shoulder as he went.

"He wishes me to save him from Jason, who has promised to bind him in dragon form and pluck all his scales from his body." Apparently, the news was out about Lan's meddling. Lexius confirmed it a second later. "How is Jack?"

In pursuit of Lexius, and setting foot where he'd already proven safe with his own tread, the necromancer laughed wryly. "He seemed more cheerful than I remember him. But it's been years. He said good things about you," he felt the need to add as they walked. The meddling had been to good effect.

The tightness around the Elf's eyes, in the set of his shoulders, was deepening, but he hadn't allowed whatever games the discord was playing inside his head to reach beyond the brightness of his eyes. Out there in the deep desert, it was easier to maintain some measure restraint on his eroding control. The movement helped, and Lexius moved across the dune with no difficulty at all and set a pace sure to warm even Mesteno's body rather quickly with exertion.

The sky was crisply clear overhead, without a cloud anywhere in sight for miles. Stars burned by the millions, twinkling testaments of the countless worlds to which RhyDin was connected. The dryness of the air prickled the skin and carried a sharp chill to it that was a little more biting once they reached the top of the dune. Lexius headed straight on, winding from dune to dune, still headed east, and leaving room for Mesteno to keep abreast of him.

"He only says as much when I am not present." There was no grimness or ire in his tone, just the smooth calm. "The responsibilities of the Pack have grounded him well." He offered Mesteno a ghostly, sidelong smile.

"Well I'm sure you're as careful to keep your praise of him f'when he's not around, too,” Mesteno remarked. “Wouldn't do to go giving him an ego, right?"

Lexius made a rather obvious attempt to change the subject. "I can sense the area we need to be, but I believe only you will be able to see the effects of its presence. When it existed before, each person who wished to access the home of the well were required to go through certain rituals. Most of it was ceremony alone, but the end effect allowed the petitioner to be attuned."

"He said more'n good things.” Mesteno was unwilling to let the subjects he and Jack had discussed drop. “Something you 'n I forgot about. Carried weight with me," he admitted, skirting a lumpy patch in the sand that might've just been buried rocks but might as easily have been lurking snakes. "He reminded me that y'not the same Lexius who was resurrected from those stones. Y'not what the dissonance would have you believe you are. If you can be so different to the old you, who's to say you can't be different in other aspects of your life?" He wasn't going to spell it out for him. Lexius was smart enough he didn't need it spoon feeding to him.

Lexius' smile vanished, and though he didn’t scowl, he grimaced. The expression was as fleeting. "Your point is clear." He assured, no inflection in his tone. "And I had considered the idea." He admitted. But it was difficult, as evidenced right then by the way he winced. Apparently, the discord didn't approve.

I wish you'd pointed it out to me, Mesteno almost said, wide-eyed in the aftermath of that little revelation. He was left wondering why Lexius had allowed paranoia to leave him despairing, instead of offering that scrap of an idea to him for something to cling to.

Dry air, already static laden, crackled with a whole new kind of charge. The Elf had fallen silent and redoubled his efforts to maintaining his mastery of self. Calm sands, still pools, clear skies. He bit his tongue lest he find himself arguing the same point all over again. After a time, things did calm enough for him to speak. By then, he'd come up with a different way to attack it.

"You've no reason to be jealous of Sin. And you may question me on anyone you wish in the future." One eye flinched a little when he spoke of the future, but the Elf set his jaw against not only the lash it earned him, but for the idea itself. He would not give it up again.

Mesteno let the distance between them widen a fraction for safety's sake, suspecting even if he'd no tie to betray it, that Lexius' was under phenomenal strain simply to be anywhere near him.

"Saying things like that, you'll start me thinkin' you're an optimist," he warned, making light of what had set his jaw to clenching, rather than offering anything hopeful to churn at the flaws. He turned at last to the mention of the well and how he'd be alone in seeing its effects. "You have any hints for me? Anything I should do since I haven't got the same rigmarole to go through?"

This time, it was the Elf that refused the bait of a new topic.

"Why does that surprise you?" He inquired, brushing aside the question with a brief wave of one hand. They'd get to that. There was time. Their pace was steady and ground eating and they would reach their destination sooner rather than later, but Lexius was willing to halt their forward progress altogether to understand a little better how Mesteno's mind worked.

Mesteno slanted a look his way, and a wry smile flashed fleetingly across his mouth. Tempting though it was to sidestep the question, he couldn't keep him in the dark when he seemed so earnest about discovering the twisted turns of his mind.

"When we were under the club, you seemed dead set on reminding me there was every chance you'd be repeating history, and that I'd be better off looking elsewhere. It felt like you were writing us off, that you were absolutely convinced of making the same mistakes again despite not wanting to." And he didn't need to give voice to how that'd made him feel. Not merely a blow to the ego - those he could cope with - but being relegated to the same heap as the exes before they'd even reached that point? Crippling. "Now here you're telling me you'd already considered that the intrinsic changes you've undergone since your resurrection might extend to your capacity to stay interested, stay faithful."

His shoulders hitched a shrug, a small, uncharacteristically vulnerable gesture as if he were worried Lexius would choose to undo Jack's lifeline with some cold logic he'd not considered.

Lexius processed the answer with quiet gravity, his brow furrowing deeply. The smile, the shrug, what the Sadist hadn't said, hidden somewhere in what he had. While the Elf was glad the man chose to answer rather than avoid the question and was just a bit surprised by what he said, he was also wondering about the unspoken words. Usually, he was very good a figuring that out. With Mesteno, not so much.

"At that moment," he confessed, "I was sure of it. Not with Sin, of course, but someone else down the line." It didn't sound as if he was arguing against it. "At that moment, it seemed best to give you the freedom to find someone more suited and less...risky." His hands had curled into fists again, keeping him from grabbing at the Sadist. "Later, I considered the alternatives and how this flaw may have twisted my perceptions." He growled a little and shook his head, sparks snapping to life in the air around his hands. Calm sands! "I have been bound to the vision of one particular future and subject to the follies of my past for so long, it is difficult for me to see anything else."

Is this you?

It was a familiar voice, though not entirely comforting. It blended every voice he'd ever heard together into one. It came from everywhere and seemed to startle the cradle of darkness he’d fallen into as much as the necromancer himself.

Yet it was not unexpected. He let his mind calm before he replied, eyes still closed and body sedate. "It..." Was it him? The darkness that had swallowed him. Yes, it felt intimately familiar. "I suppose it must be."

There was the sense of something like amusement, but it was for too vast and complex a thing to truly comprehend or define with such a simple word.

You are learning. Fondly, as if from a doting parent.

"Not so quickly as I'd like," Mesteno confessed. He seemed undaunted by holding a conversation with the voice, but offered it no challenge. Whilst the divinity could easily destroy him, he knew they were of a mind to achieve the same thing, tentative allies.

The voice spoke again, more sternly. Is this all of you?

The darkness itself seemed to take offense to that question. There was a dissatisfied awareness over the interrogation, with the challenge to its authority and supremacy. It roiled, clotting together like curdled blood, and Mesteno's thoughts surged with an invasive violence, a rage not his own.

Three spots flared into brilliant life amidst the darkness along the Sadist's body. Two of them matched the seals Lexius had identified whilst studying him on the table, glowing in strange patterns, and the third matched the brand he'd been given in the fever dream after the psionic eruption. A familiar sign hovered above the other two, at times the familiar yin-yang symbol Mesteno had seen picked out by the beads more than once, at others times a different pattern altogether.

"I can't say for sure. I've never seen what was sealed up behind them." His confession came strained as he fought to brush aside the intrusive thoughts, and he raised a finger to point towards the illuminated seals. "There might be worse than this."

Mesteno's soul continued to thrash outside of him, resisting... something. He knew intuitively that it wanted to eat its way back inside where it belonged. He attempted to examine its response clinically, trying to find a connection to its behaviour and what he sensed of it when it was contained within. It occurred to him that it was enormous, that he could not see past it, and that his frail, human form was ill-made to contain such a thing. No wonder it'd said he needed tempering. No wonder there were seals, to compress and restrict.

It resented the inspection, that much he knew, but instead of letting the violence of its nature flood him and dictate his responses, he took hold of it the way he did when he was keeping it from outright devouring something (or one), wrestling with it for control. Instead of trying to draw it back into him where it wished to be, sheltered and sullen, he pressed it outward, unfurled like a sail so that all its ugly corners were exposed, save for those small places where it was anchored in him, and whatever remained sealed.

The being behind the voice observed his struggle with keen scrutiny, on every level, then kicked up a wind to billow out and broaden what the Sadist had finally forced into submitting to his will, stretching it tighter yet. One by one, the seals winked brighter.

We could open these. It sounded almost thoughtful. The observation then, was more of a question, a test.

The suggestion received an abrupt, and very firm response. "No. That would be a bad idea. I've little enough control as it is, as you can see. Open those and any chance we have of helping Lexius is fucked."

The darkness remained malignant, a creature that habitually lurked beneath a rock forced out into the sun for some cruel child to poke at with a stick. It was almost as sullen as his waking mind when he got into a foul mood. How different were they? One lurked and fed and killed, the other lived, and experienced, and loved at times, yet still followed those same impulses, violent and hedonistic. Perhaps it was best to view them as twins, one locked away and given no chance to develop beyond what its primordial origins, the other managing some semblance of a life, but only able to describe to its twin the things it felt and saw. Things it would never understand. Things it didn't want to.

Again came that sense of amusement.

How interesting. The voice murmured, though it was a mystery if it meant Mesteno's answer or whatever it saw in the inspection of that churlish blackness. The ever changing symbol that represented that divinity suddenly broke apart, sundering into three identical images of itself that drifted down, down, down. Are you willing? The voice asked then without giving any specifics at all.

"What'll they do to me?"

The triad of symbols paused, one hovering above each seal and the third over the place where one had once existed. They still changed shapes and patterns, never truly settling on one thing. Not yet. That voice was still amused.

What do you wish? It asked instead of answered.

For a moment Mesteno clenched his teeth together, bit back a frustrated growl. "I want to help Lexius," and then a little over-bold, "you know this."

The voice had asked these questions countless times across the eons and received a variety of answers in turn. There was no telling what it might choose to do or what those symbols truly meant, no real indication what motivated it to do anything at all. There in the darkness stretched taut and sullen around Mesteno, time had no meaning at all and the vastness behind the thing that enquired after Mesteno's motivations was muted and subdued. Patient. Eternal. Inquisitive.

They will help you help him. The voice assured, quite grave now.

Mesteno knew of course that he would emerge irrevocably changed, and that knowledge did not come without fear. He did not think it would cast him out physically changed as Lexius had been, but internally? Not everyone who'd gone in had come out. The Elf had told him that. For a brief, sharp moment the stood on an unseen, mental precipice, preparing himself for a potential end...

"Very well. I'm willing." The symbols would do whatever they would. Cowardice never did live long in his heart.

The voice did not speak again.

Once Mesteno matched will to intent, gave it voice, there came a single moment of breathlessness where the universe itself seemed to pause. Even the quivering in that stretched part of the man's soul went still. Then came something like a whisper, unintelligible and brief. The sound was white noise, music, the rush of wind across the sands, the roar of a fire, and the lapping ripples in a pond. It stroked its way across through the unfurled darkness and through, lighting up parts of him that hadn't seemed to exist before that moment.

As the same time, the lights came crashing down. They glowed white hot and blinding, a branding iron fresh from the coals, merging the symbol Mesteno had once worn on his chest across the two active seals and the empty space of the third. There was, after all, power in the number three.

It seemed to last an eternity, the binding, and in that span of centuries, Mesteno came to know what pain truly was. Whatever he might have called it before was paltry in comparison, a gnat's bite compared to frenzied ravaging of a shark.

He howled, a wretched, plaintive sound, inhuman and swelling, throbbing louder until the pain stole his voice and left his throat dry and open and convulsing. It went on inexorably, excruciating, nothing like the catharsis he knew and associated with pain.

In the end, broken, he suffered unmoving as it pulled him open. He felt things inside burned away; everything false, and everything that had been pinning his battered body together melted down, every scrap of metal penetrating the housing of his flesh torn loose. Little pieces were sliced away, things beyond the physical that he’d never given notice to, and purged flesh and bone moulded itself back around the seals like armour. The light from the sigils spread out along nerves and flashed through every synapse of Mesteno's mind as he was made whole again.

And yet his scars remained; his need for them had been recognised as intrinsic, their significance had value.

At some point his mind had escaped, as minds under great trauma are want to when they've no other option. He'd stepped through some door, out of the way of encroaching madness, compartmentalising for the sake of survival. Throughout it all his energy remained silent, shrunken, a still thing intent on not drawing notice.

Exhausted in ways he'd never known he was capable of being exhausted, nothing could have woken him until he was entirely ready; ready did not come quickly. Ready needed to be long enough that his mind could recover, and his mind was no mighty psion's tool. A miracle then that he recovered at all, and perhaps he'd have to owe that to what lived inside him, rather than pride himself on stubborn survivability. It needed him, and so it armoured his Id as the flesh they shared had sheltered it, until at last he woke in the well.

He was neck deep in swirling water. Or was it sand? For a moment, flames danced about him, hot yet unburning. Then a swirling wind swept them away leaving behind a rippling pond of light.

Who and what he was were a blank in those first few moments. He was ignorant to everything he'd ever done, seen or experienced. Even his own identity remained a mystery. His eyes chased the rippling colours with vapid, animal fascination.

There was something wrapped around his neck. Heavy links of a silvery chain that reached out into the centre of the pool where they tangled with a simple looking string of sandalwood beads. Lexius sat across from him, knees folded and eyes closed.

Now. Said the voice, calm and sure. And when it spoke the image of the Elf cracked open like an egg, revealing the tattered, bloodied insides of a splintered crystal crazed with cracks and misshapen shards. Light filtered fitfully throughout, flicking lighter here, darker there, sparking with power and ripe with a scent only Mesteno's hungry soul might detect.

Mesteno’s fingers skimmed along the chain without comprehension, until at last they touched upon the sandalwood beads. How innocuous they looked. And yet they triggered the rebirth of his memories, a violently staggering experience which almost saw him struggle out of the well as if he could physically outrun them. Thankfully the memories brought with them the personality those experiences had forged, and he remained leaning hard against the side of the well, panting and wild eyed, adjusting to his whereabouts.

He'd only then, in that moment, spotted Lexius. The Elf looked peaceful, composed sat there, and his first instinct was to wade across and nudge him from the meditative state he seemed to be in. The splintering came too quickly for such things, and the abstract horror of witnessing him come apart kept him on the far side of the well. Just an image.

Not real. Just an image. This was what he told himself, to intercept the panic before it could rise.

Opportunity had come. The very reason they'd travelled out there loomed impossibly over him, and yet his soul knew what to do even without him bidding it to.

He felt it beginning to bleed out, skimming across chains and beads towards that flickering core, gorily wrapped. The power was irresistible, unguarded, and yet so recently fed, his soul did not approach with intent to gorge voraciously. Instead it wrapped itself about the power the way a languid lover might, locking snug about it in the cool, drowning-deep that lived in the taste of his blood, his mouth. At last, Mesteno engaged rather than sitting a spectator to the feeding, and he fixed all his focus on the task, monitoring as it drew on the splintered crystal, draining light, bleeding the power away. He felt it enter him, a rush he could grow dangerously addicted to.

The interwoven strings of beads and chain remained a steady bridge, connecting him to the crystalized image of the Elf and providing a path for the Sadist's soul to travel. Stretched long across that highway, every part of the hungry sentience that moved in and began to feast was touched by the beads. They seemed to infest the blackness of the soul with the energy of the pool, feeding the myriad of mixed colours into the darkness, seeding it with stars.

Lexius’ form began to crumble, the cracked and deteriorating crystalline structure of it disintegrating into smaller pieces that eventually became nothing more than grains of sand showering down through the darkness like cosmic dust.

Mesteno didn't hesitate to uncork and hand over the flask when Lexius demanded it, too busy commenting on the physical changes he’d noted to care about a strange crooning sound, above and beyond their position, but not too terribly far away.

"Wait." Lexius commanded, and the sound cut off dutifully. "How do you feel?" Intent, the question, asking more than just his general welfare, his gaze intent.

"There was a lot of pulling things apart and putting them back together," the necromancer confided, as if he suspected Lexius knew precisely what he meant. No need to detail that the process had been far from painless, that it had not been quick, and that enduring it was something he was not eager to repeat.

His attempts to explain the experience did not do it justice. It had been entirely too surreal, and without the Elf’s vast knowledge of such workings, he felt like a child attempting to describe a complex chemical reaction.

There had been moments, after he’d watched him crumble into something with a parity to cosmic dust, that he’d sensed two very separate presences; that of the Elf and the scaled monster he’d been bold enough to challenge so many years ago. He’d witnessed the very moment the merge had taken place, glimpsed the fire born between its teeth, watched it all like a voyeur beside an anonymous Elf, albino pale as Lexius had once been. And then it had all been wrung from him, neatly ordered, each personality cleanly divided, with Lexius finally free of the corruption and the faultiness erased.

"I'll write it all down at some point 'n you can read it." He decided once he’d explained it to the best of his ability, for he was undeniably more eloquent when he put quill to paper, and it would give him time to make more observations, to theorise. "Any dissonance? Any at all?" he asked finally.

Lexius rested his hands upon his knees, and darkened eyes slid closed again. He was silent for several moments, surveying inside once more. Things were settling. "No." He slit his gaze to stare at the Sadist once again. "But we will test it more fully later."

"Yeah, not exactly the right spot to be poking the bear," Mesteno agreed, casting a glance around the bowl they'd tumbled into.

"Will you go reassure Lan we are well? I have clothing." Lexius reached for the strap of his satchel to pull it free of the dune.

"He's probably gonna be so overjoyed to see you he gets dragon drool all over you," Mesteno remarked, rising (with none of the old clunks and cracks - a novelty) to do as the Elf asked of him. "Definitely put the clothes on before he sees you unless you wanna take a bath when you get back."

The Elf had paused, brow furrowing. "My thanks, Mesteno." He offered that gravely. Sincerely.

Mesteno answered it with nothing more than a gentle touch of fingers to his shoulder as he moved past him to find the anxious young dragon. He knew the Elf was grateful. He didn't need telling.

Lexius sat statue still as Mesteno passed, his skin twitching anew for the fleeting touch to his shoulder. He waited until he was over the dune, and only then did he give himself a more thorough investigation, palms sliding over skin and the muscle it sheathed, feeling out the bones beneath, brushing through shortened hair and across the metal-infused tip of one ear.

Up above, Lan was quivering in place and barely waited for Mesteno to get any closer before a deluge of questions, and an accompanying nudge of his snout had the necromancer cracking a broad smile, and palming his nose aside lazily.

"It's been three days!" Lan informed him.

"Three days? It felt like longer," Mesteno admitted with a grimace. "I'm sorry we worried you. It's over now, yes. And I think it was successful, but we're gonna have to do some tests to make sure, so don't be too impatient with him when he can't provide you with all the answers, okay?"

Lan unfurled one wing to fold it around Mesteno and his own head, sheltering them both in a deeper darkness. "It glows." He whispered loudly, suddenly intent on the chain hanging askew around the human’s throat.

The chain wasn't glowing, as it happened. At least, not to the normal eye. The dragon didn't exactly have normal vision, though.

Pulling his head back, he gave the Sadist another toothy grin. "Like the beads!" He lowered his voice then, speaking with a certain reverence. "It touched you."

"It does no--," Mesteno began to protest, fingers automatically reaching for the length of metal to draw it out from his chest and into view. His smile faded entirely, replaced by a look distinctly troubled. He wasn’t pleased about being touched by divinity, nor potentially wearing an equivalent to Lexius' beads though. "Shit," he murmured darkly.

Sweeping his wing back suddenly, Lan surged up onto his haunches as if to free his front claws and grasp him. Thankfully, it was at that moment Lexius pullrf himself up over the side of the dune, fully clothed. "Stop torturing Mesteno," the Elf chided.

It aborted Lan's reach. The dragon tucked his front claws inward and tried to look innocent. "I wasn't!"

Mesteno let the chain thump back against his collar bone. He couldn't help wondering whether Lexius had known about it and not mentioned it for some reason. "The kid's just happy to see people." He took Lan's side simply for the sake of being contrary. "You should give him a hug."

Lexius treated Mesteno to a long, level look, his dark eyes clouded with shadow. Lan, caught between a snicker and a gasp, chose to bury his snout in the sand. "Is that you saying you wish to walk back?" He moved with slow seriousness, closing in on the pair. Lan snorted sand into the air then went quiet again. The Elf was holding his abandoned jacket in one fist, the satchel in the other as he stalked Mesteno down.

Lan's behaviour was so child-like that Mesteno couldn't keep from rolling his eyes heaven-ward, and he turned his back on the dragon's theatrics to watch Lexius approach instead. While the Elf might have had intimidation in mind, Mesteno was too busy observing his movements. He wanted to be sure he functioned, wasn't so weak he'd fall from Lan's back.

"That is me saying you should be grateful he cares," he responded matter-of-factly, though once he'd finished his inspection, he did lift his eyes, newly lit with amusement and relief. "You function. He won't have to carry you back in his talons like some princess from a castle."

More sand spurted into the air around the dragon's snout, a directly response to the Sadist's comment.

The Elf paused, standing steady on his feet, and canted his head a little to one side as if to better process Mesteno's words, his meaning, the emotion behind them. Fully revealed as it was, his face looked sharper, the angles more cutting and alien. There was no obscuring the hard line of his jaw or the occasional quiver of tendons along his neck and no hiding the fact he was decidedly elven. The colour of his eyes might be different, more uniform, and he might not have displayed a lick of mental power yet, but there was still some strange energy in the coiling shadows deep inside that amethyst hue.

When Lexius moved again, it was much more quickly. Testing himself, perhaps. Three steps and he was in the Sadist's space. He shoved his jacket (and fist) into Mesteno's chest hard enough to push him back into the steely shoulder of the dragon. Lan went very still and the Elf closed in, leaning into the Sadist with a sharp smile that hinted at the teeth behind it. "He knows I am grateful. And I am functioning quite well." He assured with quiet, well controlled ferocity.

"That fact hadn't escaped me," Mesteno admitted, sounding rather grave... But it was only an act, for a moment later he had the Elf by the throat, not viciously, but plainly intent on keeping him right there for the kiss he smeared clumsily against his mouth.

Lexius was unsurprised. He pressed in all the more closely to pin him against smooth scales without a care for the way the dragon twisted its neck about to stare at them with astonishment, then fascination. It wasn't that Lan had never seen humanoids kiss before. He'd just never seen Lexius kiss anybody. Maybe he'd never imagined the Elf knew how.

Lexius knew how, without a doubt.

He didn't hesitate, didn't toe the water in search of some hidden riptide of discord that might drag him under. Instead, Lexius plunged headfirst right into the water and answered the kiss hungrily, his satchel thumping into the ground by Mesteno's boots. Long fingers went twisting into Mesteno's hair, pulling his head back much just as possessively as he was held by throat. Sloppy was a fine beginning, but the Elf refined it into something more intent and devouring. All without a flinch or a twist or a hiss to betray he was paying for it somewhere inside his head.

Mesteno didn’t cut Lexius' efforts short once they'd begun, pliant in the kiss’ infancy, before responding with a consumptive desire that was nothing short of viciously demanding, a dark sensuality emphasised by the keen edges of teeth that seemed to have been remade subtly sharper. Somewhere in his gutter-slumped mind, he was fully aware of the fact that Lexius wasn't pulling away from him, didn't seem to be struggling in the least, and perhaps that was why he didn't hold back, why he committed to it without reserve.

Lexius was already plastering himself into place, the jacket and his hand moved aside so he could mould them together from chest to knees. The way his hand clamped into place at the Sadist's hip ensured they wouldn't soon part anywhere along that line. It was far, far too much. Another overload of sensation when the last flooding release of it had just settled down. Lexius didn't seem to care.

Lan reminded them they had an audience by snapping his jaws together, pointedly clearing his throat. "Hello!" He called, concerned by how protracted the moment had become.

The necromancer was caught short of an ass-grab, and his eyes snapped open, tongue in a curling retreat behind the shield of his teeth. Tempting though it was to slant a vicious look aside at the young dragon, he refrained. The interruption had been a necessary one.

"You want me to bite him, since you're here to watch?" he asked, an unsubtle reminder of the evening Lan had been so bold as to ask about the marks he’d left upon Lexius’ neck not so very long ago.

The swamp of sensation had left Lexius a little light headed, and so he didn't immediately push away, instead dipping his head down a bit beside Mesteno's. That question even turned his growl into something of a laugh.
The beads slung through the Elf's belt slapped at Mesteno's knee at the same time Lan said, "No!" and Lexius barked another brief laugh into the Sadist's ear.

"Probably wise." He murmured as he let go. He supposed he'd proven his functionality enough for now, though that didn't stop him from swiping his thumb across Mesteno's lips as he pulled his hand back, licking the pad of it himself as he stepped away, widening the distance between them. No, there were no signs at all of any sort of dissonance and the Elf was a little giddy from the lack. "Will you take us back, Lan?" He asked the dragon formally, though he never quite took his gaze off Mesteno.

The dragon heaved a gusty sigh and nodded his horned head. Before long, the trio were airborne, flight sans joyous acrobatics at the necromancer’s insistence. It was getting back into the sand pit back at the caves that proved something of a challenge, but Lan put his tail and exceptional hovering ability to use to lower them far enough for a drop that didn't threaten to break any bones.

With Lan gone, it was inevitable really that Mesteno reach for Lexius again, claiming his hand in one of his own, not to drag him close and pick up where they'd been interrupted, but simply out of a need to touch. The novelty of being able to without repercussions wouldn't wear off anytime soon.

"Right now. Nothing?" He was selfishly re-establishing that it really had worked. That there were no sparks of rejection to be mindful of.

The Elf had been rubbing one pointed ear, gaze canted up toward the sky where the dragon no long hovered. The contact appeared to startle him, fingers twitching once before he tightened them around Mesteno's. Novelty, indeed, for more than just the obvious reason. He monitored himself for several seconds before he answered, sorting through the tangle of feelings prompted by the simple intimacy of the contact.

"No. Not nothing." He finally replied, a ghostly smile touching his lips. He didn't let the man's worry get too far before he clarified. "But no discord.”

And that was quite enough for Mesteno.