Bloodfire

Chapter 1

Cruel, clawed crescent fingers of flame; flailing forth from their cinder-tomb. Feeble was the forge's light, its glow a piteous thing guttering and waning, weeping out thin fibrils of spun-silk smoke: ghostly gossamer whose pall did nothing at all to hide what cowered behind.

Easily, before a bare hand's pale spider, did this frail curtain part; shivering sick-songbird piteous around those bent fingers' blades. Low and resonant came a voice: thunder rough and jagged, crumbling down from on high.

"Awake O' weary sleeper." Lower crept those pallid crescents; lunar nails scything into the ashes, sifting and shifting as if numb to their flesh-rending heat.

"Wake." Gaunt was the figure kneeling above these guttering coals; his frame withered and weak, its angles steel-stark, hard beneath the broken wings of his slack cloak.

Please. This word, he did not speak; only its shape, only the raw, fractured suggestion of it slipping spectral between his parted lips.

But it did not cry out in return. Its ethereal hands did not grasp his own, nor did the plaintive susurrus of its whispers, wane. Instead, the fire remained as ever it had: dregs huddled death-cold around his quaking hands.

"Did not I tell you many, many times before?" Soft was the newcomer's voice; its edge ragged, its planes shallow. In the moments when the supplicant's awareness waned, another figure had stooped beneath the low door's arch; entered the foul, night-drenched chamber; his form angular where the other's was gaunt; his eyes two points of emerald fire flashing within the persistent smog. "The fire is nearly so deaf as I am."

The other grunted, shifting where he knelt. "Aye, you have."

"So know you well, then, just how impossible receiving a reply is; yet you do, in such pursuits persist because ...?"

Bowed the younger, ghoul-gaunt figure was and bowed he remained; his voice a low hiss thrumming from heavy lungs as he exhaled a sullen reply. "The masters of old could."

"Well, neither old nor master are you." The elder grimaced, his face lost in shadow, yet hiding not a shade of his regret. For this was, in the shape of his voice alone, betrayed. "I am both, and the Flame does not speak to me."

Another grunt: acknowledgment deep in bitterness steeped.

"There are men upon this world to whom it hearkens still. Can not the Briarbound, with it, commune?"

"So much they do claim," the elder grimaced, lean muscles hardening beneath his pale skin; etching dark ridges upon the iron blade of his jaw.

"But to believe without question, the words of men such as they-" He shrugged, strong shoulders fissuring with muscle-strands, standing stark beneath his tatter-some cloak. "Such is far from wise."

The other exhaled softly; his breath a spectre frayed and frail unfurling from his lips like a many-fingered hand, quiver-some in dire supplication curled.

"Old and deaf you may be, but wisdom too, do you possess."

"My thanks?" Mirth burned hearthbright, dancing light as a songbird's melody along the warp of his words. Bright was its flame; shimmering, but not stalwart; shining, but not strong. It died mere moments thereafter.

The other raised his head at last, eyes twin blades of pewter piercing the flesh of everlasting night. He studied his elder, but did not speak. Perhaps his question cried out too loudly, strained too hard against its bony cage, for though he breathed not a wisp of it, his master responded all the same.