Barely close enough to see or be seen and hands were zipping leather closer and higher and tighter, and then into hair, which was tousled to hide her face as she shoved her hands into tight pockets and hurried along the dimly lit street.
The world was a whole different place to inhabit by moonlight. Even as twilight set it, it was to the eye and all it had to behold, a landscape of trickery, amorphous and unpredictable, seething with violent colour, ready to strike and pour you in sepia hidden.
The woman continued to move quickly, as she acknowledged all around her, any movement. This act she was making was a secret thing for a secret lady, something for herself, something she would come to use in time. In the bones, like beltane fires, warming the blood, she knew this would be for a reason.
A flick of her head, she moved beneath branches of a low hanging tree, past the rope that hung sadly from a limb, its tire most unwinded, and ducked down further beneath clotheslines and past an abandoned marquee, and finally before the entrance to the Forge.
With the faintest tread, akin to the slither of petals shook from branches in winter (achingly still nights, so timid the wind and so fierce the lick of chill, one hurts), Lerida paced with the studied calm and fluid grace of her youth in Moscow; tightropes were not always in the air.
"Hello?"
A frail voice came out of nothing. It held hope. A heat to combat the less enchanting quality to a soundless evening. (This pain, this process, this time of revelations she was escaping and likely hunting, all the same, in her freehwheeling)
Her voice, ever warm, wanted one to answer hers in promise.
Yes, the blade is yours, dear lady! Take it, and in its glare make dim the hauntings of your life!
Uncoiled. Unwound. The threads of recent woe fell from her, as easy as a shawl, and she smiled and lifted her chin, and entered. Confidence as much a weapon itself (should she wish it so, need it here). If only for this moment, before she returned to the wrath and indecision within herself.
The world was a whole different place to inhabit by moonlight. Even as twilight set it, it was to the eye and all it had to behold, a landscape of trickery, amorphous and unpredictable, seething with violent colour, ready to strike and pour you in sepia hidden.
The woman continued to move quickly, as she acknowledged all around her, any movement. This act she was making was a secret thing for a secret lady, something for herself, something she would come to use in time. In the bones, like beltane fires, warming the blood, she knew this would be for a reason.
A flick of her head, she moved beneath branches of a low hanging tree, past the rope that hung sadly from a limb, its tire most unwinded, and ducked down further beneath clotheslines and past an abandoned marquee, and finally before the entrance to the Forge.
With the faintest tread, akin to the slither of petals shook from branches in winter (achingly still nights, so timid the wind and so fierce the lick of chill, one hurts), Lerida paced with the studied calm and fluid grace of her youth in Moscow; tightropes were not always in the air.
"Hello?"
A frail voice came out of nothing. It held hope. A heat to combat the less enchanting quality to a soundless evening. (This pain, this process, this time of revelations she was escaping and likely hunting, all the same, in her freehwheeling)
Her voice, ever warm, wanted one to answer hers in promise.
Yes, the blade is yours, dear lady! Take it, and in its glare make dim the hauntings of your life!
Uncoiled. Unwound. The threads of recent woe fell from her, as easy as a shawl, and she smiled and lifted her chin, and entered. Confidence as much a weapon itself (should she wish it so, need it here). If only for this moment, before she returned to the wrath and indecision within herself.