So he will more useful than Flint presently is, stuck on the back of a griffon with a hand axe in his belt and and unsheathed short sword. He longs for a crossbow. But there's nothing for it. He will just have to find some other way of utilizing his arm.
"Hold until I tell you which," is barked against the wind, the stomach plummeting sensation of leaving the ground, and the muscular working of wings and expanding lungs that sees Monster from the street.
In short order, they have pinwheeled above the thickest of the black smoke, and above the dying fires, and Kirkwall recedes into balls of lamplight and the pale spiderweb of paved streets reflected in either them or the ragged moonlight. Here and there: bright flashes of arcane energies, and the surging shapes of figures in the dark. Ahead of them, there is a dark scour of shadow splitting the city's wall, and in the rubble a fight is mounting.
The motion of the griffon is too extreme for a a spyglass to be worthwhile even if he'd a hand not occupied by either the tether or the sword. But from even this distance, he can mark a scattering of figures—a glint of gleaming red lyrium light, or the crackle of some arcane casting maybe; and a throng of the same wyverns they'd faced in Lowtown and along the harbor front. Though here is a brilliant flare of neon green Rift-light, and a matching flare of elemental fire. Marcus is hardly the only capable member of Riftwatch.
The arduous work of Monster's wings evens out into a glide as they circle ride around where the fighting has thickened at those crumbled walls. One might have expected an army, maybe, but there is no marching force making good use of the fallen wall.
A fight, nevertheless. Runic flashes and contained blasts of fire and Fade-green. It's spilled into the city like an injection of venom, but Riftwatch and anyone brave enough to lend their arm has done something to stop it from flooding much further than the now shattered market square that's turned battlefield.
"See that?" Marcus shouts back, and points.
Past the main scuffle, which is a clash of Venatori currently dammed up in a wide thoroughfare by Riftwatch and anyone brave enough to lend an arm. Back, towards the wider open space, where morning would have seen the square lined with merchant wagons and fishmongers. Now, a circle of figures, and little more detail than this, until the glow of runic patterns begins to light the cobbled stone beneath their fit, concentric pulsing circles of queer blood red glow and rippling shadow.
Up here, there's no chance of hearing whatever they might be saying or, more likely, chanting, and perhaps it wouldn't be useful to them if they could. When Marcus tilts in his saddle, as if straining to hear, it likely has nothing to do with anything that the traditional senses can pick up on.
There is no second set of stirrups on the griffon's tack, otherwise he might make some absentminded effort to rise in them (as if an additional two inches would really make any difference, given they already have such a favorable vantage to observe the chaotic tableau laid out under Monster's shadow). Instead, Flint wraps the secondary tether once more about his forearm to steady himself—an equally reflexive motion in answer to the thrill of adrenaline that rises unbidden in answer to the pulsing red glow emanating from the ring of figures.
There are six of them there. It's not so great a number, save that they must all be mages. But their pointed lack of interest in the fighting among the rubble and on the streets beyond suggests some focus is required for the work in which they're engaged.
"Take us in. Low." His grip, adjusting in the sword. "We'll rake them as we go."
That circle beats, a sickly red pulse then shivers outward—light stretching its fingers in fits and starts along adjacent pathways like water creeping up and errant hem.
"Aye Commander," maybe goes unheard when Marcus doesn't shout this back, instinctively unwilling to draw focus, but it hardly matters when Flint can feel the bucking of movement beneath, the coiling in the shoulder as reins are adjusted. Answer enough.
All three might well be of a mind, predatory adrenaline surging, bracing. Marcus frees a hand on the side opposite to Flint's sword, held out and aside in preparation to draw magic from beyond the Veil, a pulse of rippled heat emanating from open palm, and the smell of smoke. Both of these things, easily cast aside by the rush of cold wind as he kicks Monster into her dive. Marcus hunkers down, tight into the saddle, as cognizant of Flint behind him as he is focused on the six robed figures below.
Something strange, in that split second. Marcus can feel it as an invisible rending in the Veil—expected for a summoning of this power, its lines spiderwebbing out through streets as though they were imprinting one massive rune upon the city for Maker knows what purpose. But Flint (and Monster) can detect the other thing too—the unlikely and unmistakable smell of blood, thick and coppery in the air. Tainted, repulsive of an animal level.
But they slice down like a swinging axe, Marcus flinging flash-fire and Monster giving a piercing hawk's shriek.
They only need to draw attention for a moment. Then the others fighting up and over the shattered rubble of the wall will be through it—if not all, then a half dozen at least. They only need to complicate the question as to where the assault is coming from; the rest of Riftwatch on the ground will make ample use of the distraction. Mages or no, the number of Venatori there in that stinking arrangement are hardly so many as all that. And as with all mages, they must be dealt with quickly and decisively or risk accomplishing nothing at all.
The ground rises rapidly to meet them, briefly more brilliant and red than the fire Marcus throws down before them. The heat is sharp and instant, and the sensation of the air splitting around it or buckling at the behest of the Venatori's work tangible even against Flint's own senses. There is a feeling when magic is at work—the hind brain shivering, a ripple of goosebumps breaking across the skin, the stomach rising toward the throat without any assistance from the griffon's dive.
They're among the circle in an instant. With the kind of unlikely precision that only an absurd moment of adrenaline can grant, the point of Flint's sword drives directly down into the shape of a shrouded figure as the griffon falls out of the sky amidst the lick of fire. And then a wing beat and the sword is wrenched from his hand and they are shrieking out of the embers and away from the too bright glare of the Venatori's blood soaked work.
Three seconds, he thinks. Then a volley will follow them.
This has been done many times before, in the past—a swooping down, the frantic lift. Monster barely needs to be told via reins or stirrups what to do, screeching as they tear through the circle. Well used to the flaring of fire as Marcus casts a broad wall of it beside her, a couple of feathers curling and singeing but only that. She swings back up towards the sky as if on a pendulum, already on an ascent before she needs to flap her wings.
That she has wriggling prey in her talons doesn't slow her, snatching up a robed figure only to let them be thrown loose of her claws, the impact too great for the cultist to even make a sound save for when they hit the ground.
Three seconds. Maybe less. The air is cold, and still strangely tainted with organic copperiness in scent.
A lurch. With the ascent, it's natural to sit in the saddle (or behind it) in such a way to counterbalance the tilt, but as Monster suddenly dips, Flint may find himself jarred forwards into Marcus' back, and hear the grunt of irritation-surprise from the other man as instinct has him setting his heels in his stirrup as Monster moves against instruction. A swerve aside, a wild turn, Marcus barking a vowel sound in an attempt to corral her.
And only then that might feel it, an odd psychic prickle at the backs of their minds. A moment of disassociation, confusion, anger. A more immediate and violent effect on the mind of a less intelligent predator, maybe.
It's paired with a weightless belly sick moment as the griffon moves one way and the momentum threatens to carry him another, little more than the dig of his heel and that tethering of the narrow cable lashed about the arm to drag him along. Later, he will mark the bruising about his forearm and it will be the least of his concerns but the part of this most easily criticized. He has worked with lines all his life, and should know better than to be foolish with them.
But in the moment—
A hot flare of animal fear and impatience both. A demanding constant growl as his hands scrabble for purchase at the saddle's cantle. The griffon veers still further. Bucks and squirms sideways in some unlikely aerial acrobatic effort. It's coincidence, he thinks (if that's the word for it) not intent, that sees the violent burst of some arcane bolt go searing just shy of their port side: a bright white flash of magic ripping across the dark, burning away the impression of stars above them and the glow of the fire below.
It should be enough, that warning shot. Enough for him to instinctively reach for shielding magics and abjure the inevitable second volley. But under his hands, Monster twists and fights her bridle as if in pain, briefly dropping out of flight entirely as her wings lose air and grace before ingrained instinct does something to override whatever torments are trying to tear at them, and her wings flare out once more.
Which isn't nothing, because they're not dropping out of the sky like a boulder. But she still shrieks her confusion, showing her broadside, and arcane energy streaks up them again.
And hits. Magic isn't quite like an arrow or even the natural elements it resembles. It cleaves and burns and impacts and stings and numbs all at the same time when sculpted well, and the slice of it rakes over all three in a flash of blinding white. The tether winding around Flint's arm lays deep another series of bruising that might circle the joints as well.
But magic slices easily through the harness at Marcus' hip which feels like a minor detail compared to the way it hits the rest of him, repelled directly off the saddle in enough of a shock of force that his hands go loose off the reins. That the other fastening simply snaps loose can be a conversation had later with whoever saddled the griffon up back in the Gallows.
There's no sound. All the air has left his lungs in that same moment when he is knocked cleanly off his seat and there is nothing to grab onto but the Veil as he goes plummeting.
He is gone before the shock of it registers. While Flint's jaw is still locked from the liquid and tearing sensation of the mage bolt, and every muscle is seized tight either in the desperate effort to cling in place or by the snarl of heat and not-heat sizzling through him. One moment, Marcus is there. The next, the night is sickeningly bright and cutting and yanked senseless and taut, Marcus is devoured by it.
Flint lunges after the harness strap in the numb aftermath anyway. By some unlikely miracle, it whips neatly into his hand and is seized by fingers ready to haul in and grasp after weight that should be there but isn't. Instead the snapped end strikes angrily up after him, lashing hopelessly as the griffon lays squealing and twisting over.
(And then he is lucky to have two points of connection to the tack, though the concept of fortunate bounces hard off him as Monster veers and jags further, releasing a piercing shriek of frustration or confusion or fear or pain. It's senseless and automatic: clawing forward into the empty saddle; scrabbling for the flagging reins, hauling and kicking at the frenzied griffon to, what? Demand her attention? To just wrench at something for the sake of wrenching?)
And then they've strayed far from the courtyard, and the circle of Venatori mages, and the confused flashing of arcane light, and from where Marcus would have fallen, and the city itself has fallen from under them in favor of flying over the dark water of the harbor. Monster sways even. The tenor of her pulling turns shivering and panting. There is wind and a higher buzzing of blood in his ears, and a mumbled squawking of crystal chatter. It's possible that it's his imagination that the saddle is still warm from where Marcus had ridden in it, or that the pitched cry the griffon spits out into the dark is despairing.
It takes a long time to go looking for him.
It's the nature of the thing with the city wracked with the effects of the mages' work, and the need to scrape together a counterattack, and the cold logic that creeps in at the back of the mind that insists he has seen what happens when men fall to the deck from the upper yardarms. Ordering another griffon rider to sweep the area for any sign of Marcus is stupid when there are Venatori in the streets of Kirkwall and when Flint barely known where he fell, but he does it anyway and is frustrated by the inevitability and the waste when a preliminary search at the height of the chaos turns up nothing.
But when the worst of it is finished, he takes Marcus' griffon low through the darkened city in the direction his instincts suggest is more likely. She has better senses than he does in the dark, and maybe she will know her companion in any state.
The city isn't quiet by any means, but this sloped part of it that had seen the worst is as close to abandoned as any district of Kirkwall will ever get. Some small mobs of bodies and some individuals, some opportunists and others limping out the way they came. No active fires guide the eye, and the smattering of lanterns here and flames corralled into braziers still burning away obliviously offer little angles of illumination.
Beneath the saddle, Monster is tired. Unlike the trot of a horse, the labour of flying necessitates good form and disguises the fatigue, but she offers soft complaining croaks here and there between attending to direction. Griffons seem to act either as smart as loyal dogs or cunning felines, but perhaps both creatures have the kind of intuition Flint is calling on. And now the air smells a little less like smoke.
Whether it's that or luck or something else, inevitably there's a site of wreckage.
A small storehouse, not so far flung from where Monster had begun her wild jagged flight at that crucial moment, has been the victim of some strange damaging force. The roof's partial inwards is the first sign, but there at the corner, debris spills where the south-west corner is, well, gone. Once sturdy wood has not merely been burned, but reduced to white ash in some sudden flash of immense heat. Glass melted, stone shattered and scorched, an unnatural sundering of raw material and the faint taste of Fade in the air.
The man half-hidden by the collapse of debris is unmoving but, once one attains the right angle, apparently whole.
Flint marks this unnatural shattering from the air with a critical assessing eye that has decided (some seconds or minutes or hours ago, when he didn't wrench Monster around to search immediately and instead had forced her back into the fight) he will not find Marcus Rowntree alive. It is a matter of mechanics, and he has already done what feels like overly optimistic math. The dark smudge of a body half buried in ash only looks whole from a generous distance. When they land—
It will be something else. This is just true. So why even come looking?
Monster lands heavily in the cramped, debris shocked yard. Ash swirls from the force of her backwing and shattered bits of stone turned gravel crunch and scatter. It takes some time for Flint to unwind from the rack and slip out of the saddle, though she makes it easy to do having already lowered her belly to the cool earth.
Flint picks his way to the battered shed, clearing back some shattered fragments of wood that had once been a portion of the outer wall before being shredded by this last spectacular burst of Marcus' power. He'd seen him from the air and so the shock of the man up close should amount to nothing. But he stops, a hand on the splintered edge of the scorched wall, and regards Marcus in the rubble with a welling pressure between the ears.
Some hours ago, he'd fallen for seconds. Just enough time for a kind of magic that operates on the level of nerve-response and adrenaline first, thought second, the sort of thing that draws a hand away from a hot surface before a decision to do so can be made. That he is unconscious now is as much a product of magical over-spend as it is the impact. Maybe more so.
Hard to tell from where Flint is standing. The ash that had been kicked into the air on impact has had time to settle in a whisper-soft layer of grey and it certainly makes a convincing corpse of anyone. But there is something in the way he lays that is not completely that of a man who died when hitting the earth, not awkward and broken enough for that. There is evidence of having moved just a little, where blood has dried to paste at the mouth and down the throat, darkly visible beneath powdery ash.
(Some thirty-odd years of demons whispering at the edges of his dreams means that, when the entropic thing in him stirs at the sense of living bodies near by and it brings murmured, formless offers through the cracks of his consciousness, it takes no effort at all to silence them. Fuck off.)
But it means Marcus draws in a deeper breath than the shallow intakes he's been living off of until now. Chokes immediately on the particulates in the air, lungs spasming to expel them again in a cough.
For a split second, he is stood in the soft shallow banking of ash and splintered wood without comprehending the source and fit of the sound. Just that it is noise where there shouldn't be any, and a blank shock that might become horror given any measure of latitude.
Before it does, he is yanking away fragments of debris and wading through the shattered remains of the structure. It's possible it only takes a few seconds to do. Or it's minutes, sweat abruptly thick on the back of his neck and the punctured sensation in his side made by exertion when he succeeds in uncovering Marcus to the degree necessary to make any kind of assessment of his current state. To reach for his face and neck, roughly smearing back grey ash with his own dirty hands.
"Marcus," a hand moving to tangle in the grey shoulder of the man's clothes. "I have you."
It's a stupid thing to say from his knee in the wreckage beside a man too insensate to hear to. A moment later, Flint is fishing after his crystal. Nevermind the pounding in his head; one of Riftwatch's healers will be only short minutes away.
There'd been no time to don a scrap of armor at the start of the thing, and so there's an out of placeness to a nice coat under Flint's hand when, in far less violent circumstances, he'd find stiff leather and rough fur lining, the edge of a metal breastplate, buckles. That they are both still dressed for a dinner out, Marcus sporting some brocade along with plainer linen for lighter layers, makes assessment easier. There is some injury around the side that has flooded blood under his waistcoat, fabric torn. The blow that knocked him loose, maybe.
Beyond that, a lack, where there should be plenty.
Marcus' head tips back under Flint's hand, loose on the hinge of his neck. Beneath the thick layer of fog from which he is attempting to emerge, he has the sense of fingers, palm, somehow more acute to him the way they rough against his cheek and throat than the deep pulse of pain that spears up where bones had broken and mended in the same second.
Another wheezing breath, and a protesting knitting of tension at his brow. A complaining sound rough across the next breath out, eyes cracking open. Hand wandering inwards.
It is possible to do two things at once. For example: he can hear himself give brusque direction over the crystal, rationalizing roughly the correct direction and distance someone might need to travel at the same time that his spare hand (what spare hand? He should be doing five things with it) shifts to brace at Marcus' shoulder. Stop moving, it says, harshly rational, as he scans ruined clothes and the lay of Marcus' body and that narrow flexing of muscle that signals something like sluggish consciousness.
And then the crystal is set aside into the ash. He has two hands again, and they both turn restless and grasping without the distraction of common sense. At Marcus' face, and after his hand, as that thick knotted sensation in the back of his head aches like a blow.
—is on a decently significant delay. First, fingers curling in a twitched response to contact, and then the series of further dry coughs which liven up the senses with the way they lash against bruised ribs and tender muscle from within. Then, some seconds spend repeating back to himself the thing Flint has said, absorbing and parsing.
Alright, brittle and graveled, and the slowly sharpening point of his focus swims to snare into eye contact. In one sense, he is aware of time having passed. Fragments of consciousness, blood in his mouth, silence, disorientation, alone. In another, it seems as though they were sat together on Monster's back a moment ago. Or ten hours ago, given how sluggishly overslept the feels.
His hand pulses again, a brief but firm grasp. Stay, it requests.
It's a disorienting question. Marcus is just meant to know about the strike, and the fall, and how long it has been since, and the fragmented chaos that had ripped through Lowtown and cut up through the city. There are dead. Some of them are Riftwatch. Marcus will be among strange outlier of assumed casualties snatched back from the edge.
(He tightens his grip, cinching secure at Marcus's wrist.)
"You fell," he says, and for an instant that drawn taut buzzing sensation swells thick across the senses. He has been very careful to ignore it, to make a void for it to fill, and he can sense now that it has reached the lip of the vessel "It's been some hours since then. The Venatori made a bid for the city and were repelled. A healer is on the way and will put you to rights."
Soon. Maybe.
There is blood at Marcus' mouth.
"There are easier ways to cut short a meeting in a bar."
You fell. Burning lungs, the world spinning, and then—
Some hours. That feels both true and disorienting. It will be some hours more that he starts making a true and proper picture of things, ordering all the pieces together, a timeline, the knowledge that Flint had waited, had come back, had—
Marcus roughs out some sound in reply to this last thing. More intentional than only throat clearing, like a scoff, and the grip of his hand is a signal to them both that he's listening, the sharpening of his focus which had wandered off to the sky up past Flint's head. Everything aches. The scuff of his heel drags a knee up by an inch or so, just to check that he can, and the movement invites some physiological response that knocks his focus back to a blur for a second.
Forces himself to relax his grip which had likely twinged some bruising he doesn't know about. A breath later, and he says, "Night's still young," and a flash of teeth. It is not.
Things that are stupid: looking for him (though that has been rewarded with finding Marcus alive), this conversation (which is absurd), and this—
He bends, hand catching at Marcus' neck or jaw or chin. He stops shy of actually cramming his mouth across Marcus', because maybe the sting will sting. But the closeness matters. The measure of distance narrowed. The urgency to
Tighten his grip instead. Thumb pressing at the sinew and bone of Marcus' wrist.
"You're fine," he tells him like an oath to be sworn to.
Beside the lay of Flint's hand, the subtle shift of a hard swallow that tastes coppery, sour, hot. A determined pulse. Sweat, ash, and an impulse that doesn't make it to manifesting where Marcus would like to turn into that hand, and follow the familiar pathways of pulling himself to Flint or Flint to him.
Well, he can do some of that. Tips his chin a little against that catch to his jaw, lets his other hand find a place against the crook of Flint's bent elbow. Finds a grip of the fabric bunched there. He's fine.
"Are you?"
The question is accompanied by some serious amount of study of the other man, eyeline flicking over his face in evaluation.
He is whole, and well. He has only spent the last hours being required to be rational, and it hasn't mattered. He has not thought of the empty saddle, of the broken line snapping free in his fist, or of Monster's high pitched shriek shattered across the black water of the harbor.
His fingers arrest at Marcus' collar. The linen is soft; it isn't meant for this kind of place, the lining gentle under the pad of his thumb.
Yes, he thinks. Or says. A soft huff of breath. And then he does press his mouth across Marcus', the shape of his hand first fierce and then gentling.
Edited (Consider: more specificity ) 2023-10-29 08:12 (UTC)
Relief, first. Relief he didn't have to struggle to lift his head to do the same or to try to pull Flint in, when that close answering breath out had been felt in the narrowed space between them and Marcus had only wanted to close the distance in return.
And then his heart is knotting back up beneath battered ribs, and a tremor runs up from wrist to elbow where his hand grasps sleeve tighter. Inwards, some sense of filling up, overflowing. Outward, just the answering lift to his chin and the shape of a kiss returned.
He moves his hand from elbow to shoulder, shoulder to neck and jaw, leaving behind grey fingerprints. Again, is the clear direction, when the kiss seems close to ending.
Sometimes, Flint allows himself to be biddable with a certain low look in the eye and a twist of the mouth which says, Only because it amuses me.
Likely they are too close already and the hurts of the evening too sharp to identify or appreciate that here, under the urging of Marcus' sooty fingers, he answers that direction plainly. Kisses him again, his own hands closing about the shape of Marcus' face. Leaving smeared tracks of ash from the sweep of his thumb against his cheeks, and the kiss tasting of bitter grit and coppery blood. The warmth of having breathed heavily for too long a duration.
It punctures that pressed tight sensation living at the back of his head, the base of his neck. That coil of tension produced from hours spent rejecting thinking of Marcus' body broken on some stretch of Kirkwall cobblestone or shattered on a rooftop because there was nothing to be done for it now comes unwound. That flatly postponed dread and the relief from it comes forward all at once and in equal measure, profoundly tangled. Spills into the shape of his hands, and the too quick rabbiting of his pulse. A sharp pant of breath, the pull stinging in his side. How gentle the third kiss he sets to Marcus' mouth is when he should be telling him to lay quiet and still.
The easy way Flint's mouth is coaxed back against his is, true, lost a little beneath all else. There may be time for marking it later. For now—
Something else. Abstracted, unarticulated, the belief that perhaps he'd imagined convincing Flint out of this affection, insisting on it with hands and words and the anticipating some satisfaction of prying it loose. Abstracted, unarticulated, the warmth that floods through him when Flint presses that third kiss so gently against his mouth, as remarkable as the first. (He'd hardly flung himself out of Monster's saddle, anyway.)
He'd closed his eyes, so he opens them in the moment after. Blurry, but it doesn't matter. Flint has said he's fine, will be put to rights. His fingers curl, setting against the back of his neck though there's no strength to it.
"Stay," is a question without the uptick. "When they come."
There is so much work to be done here in the city tonight, and in the Gallows. There are other places he should be at this very moment even; a runner should be attending to the office of the Viscount as they speak. When the healer arrives, it will be most sensible to peel himself away and see to the long list of decisions stacking up lest he find himself still drowning under them in an hour, in three.
There is ash all over his palms and fingers. Speckling his dark coat. Powdering the neck of his shirt collar. Marcus' hand is not, strictly speaking, particularly warm where it lays against his neck.
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"Hold until I tell you which," is barked against the wind, the stomach plummeting sensation of leaving the ground, and the muscular working of wings and expanding lungs that sees Monster from the street.
In short order, they have pinwheeled above the thickest of the black smoke, and above the dying fires, and Kirkwall recedes into balls of lamplight and the pale spiderweb of paved streets reflected in either them or the ragged moonlight. Here and there: bright flashes of arcane energies, and the surging shapes of figures in the dark. Ahead of them, there is a dark scour of shadow splitting the city's wall, and in the rubble a fight is mounting.
The motion of the griffon is too extreme for a a spyglass to be worthwhile even if he'd a hand not occupied by either the tether or the sword. But from even this distance, he can mark a scattering of figures—a glint of gleaming red lyrium light, or the crackle of some arcane casting maybe; and a throng of the same wyverns they'd faced in Lowtown and along the harbor front. Though here is a brilliant flare of neon green Rift-light, and a matching flare of elemental fire. Marcus is hardly the only capable member of Riftwatch.
no subject
A fight, nevertheless. Runic flashes and contained blasts of fire and Fade-green. It's spilled into the city like an injection of venom, but Riftwatch and anyone brave enough to lend their arm has done something to stop it from flooding much further than the now shattered market square that's turned battlefield.
"See that?" Marcus shouts back, and points.
Past the main scuffle, which is a clash of Venatori currently dammed up in a wide thoroughfare by Riftwatch and anyone brave enough to lend an arm. Back, towards the wider open space, where morning would have seen the square lined with merchant wagons and fishmongers. Now, a circle of figures, and little more detail than this, until the glow of runic patterns begins to light the cobbled stone beneath their fit, concentric pulsing circles of queer blood red glow and rippling shadow.
Up here, there's no chance of hearing whatever they might be saying or, more likely, chanting, and perhaps it wouldn't be useful to them if they could. When Marcus tilts in his saddle, as if straining to hear, it likely has nothing to do with anything that the traditional senses can pick up on.
no subject
There are six of them there. It's not so great a number, save that they must all be mages. But their pointed lack of interest in the fighting among the rubble and on the streets beyond suggests some focus is required for the work in which they're engaged.
"Take us in. Low." His grip, adjusting in the sword. "We'll rake them as we go."
That circle beats, a sickly red pulse then shivers outward—light stretching its fingers in fits and starts along adjacent pathways like water creeping up and errant hem.
no subject
All three might well be of a mind, predatory adrenaline surging, bracing. Marcus frees a hand on the side opposite to Flint's sword, held out and aside in preparation to draw magic from beyond the Veil, a pulse of rippled heat emanating from open palm, and the smell of smoke. Both of these things, easily cast aside by the rush of cold wind as he kicks Monster into her dive. Marcus hunkers down, tight into the saddle, as cognizant of Flint behind him as he is focused on the six robed figures below.
Something strange, in that split second. Marcus can feel it as an invisible rending in the Veil—expected for a summoning of this power, its lines spiderwebbing out through streets as though they were imprinting one massive rune upon the city for Maker knows what purpose. But Flint (and Monster) can detect the other thing too—the unlikely and unmistakable smell of blood, thick and coppery in the air. Tainted, repulsive of an animal level.
But they slice down like a swinging axe, Marcus flinging flash-fire and Monster giving a piercing hawk's shriek.
no subject
The ground rises rapidly to meet them, briefly more brilliant and red than the fire Marcus throws down before them. The heat is sharp and instant, and the sensation of the air splitting around it or buckling at the behest of the Venatori's work tangible even against Flint's own senses. There is a feeling when magic is at work—the hind brain shivering, a ripple of goosebumps breaking across the skin, the stomach rising toward the throat without any assistance from the griffon's dive.
They're among the circle in an instant. With the kind of unlikely precision that only an absurd moment of adrenaline can grant, the point of Flint's sword drives directly down into the shape of a shrouded figure as the griffon falls out of the sky amidst the lick of fire. And then a wing beat and the sword is wrenched from his hand and they are shrieking out of the embers and away from the too bright glare of the Venatori's blood soaked work.
Three seconds, he thinks. Then a volley will follow them.
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That she has wriggling prey in her talons doesn't slow her, snatching up a robed figure only to let them be thrown loose of her claws, the impact too great for the cultist to even make a sound save for when they hit the ground.
Three seconds. Maybe less. The air is cold, and still strangely tainted with organic copperiness in scent.
A lurch. With the ascent, it's natural to sit in the saddle (or behind it) in such a way to counterbalance the tilt, but as Monster suddenly dips, Flint may find himself jarred forwards into Marcus' back, and hear the grunt of irritation-surprise from the other man as instinct has him setting his heels in his stirrup as Monster moves against instruction. A swerve aside, a wild turn, Marcus barking a vowel sound in an attempt to corral her.
And only then that might feel it, an odd psychic prickle at the backs of their minds. A moment of disassociation, confusion, anger. A more immediate and violent effect on the mind of a less intelligent predator, maybe.
#rememberwhen
But in the moment—
A hot flare of animal fear and impatience both. A demanding constant growl as his hands scrabble for purchase at the saddle's cantle. The griffon veers still further. Bucks and squirms sideways in some unlikely aerial acrobatic effort. It's coincidence, he thinks (if that's the word for it) not intent, that sees the violent burst of some arcane bolt go searing just shy of their port side: a bright white flash of magic ripping across the dark, burning away the impression of stars above them and the glow of the fire below.
sweeps responsibilities off desk
Which isn't nothing, because they're not dropping out of the sky like a boulder. But she still shrieks her confusion, showing her broadside, and arcane energy streaks up them again.
And hits. Magic isn't quite like an arrow or even the natural elements it resembles. It cleaves and burns and impacts and stings and numbs all at the same time when sculpted well, and the slice of it rakes over all three in a flash of blinding white. The tether winding around Flint's arm lays deep another series of bruising that might circle the joints as well.
But magic slices easily through the harness at Marcus' hip which feels like a minor detail compared to the way it hits the rest of him, repelled directly off the saddle in enough of a shock of force that his hands go loose off the reins. That the other fastening simply snaps loose can be a conversation had later with whoever saddled the griffon up back in the Gallows.
There's no sound. All the air has left his lungs in that same moment when he is knocked cleanly off his seat and there is nothing to grab onto but the Veil as he goes plummeting.
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Flint lunges after the harness strap in the numb aftermath anyway. By some unlikely miracle, it whips neatly into his hand and is seized by fingers ready to haul in and grasp after weight that should be there but isn't. Instead the snapped end strikes angrily up after him, lashing hopelessly as the griffon lays squealing and twisting over.
(And then he is lucky to have two points of connection to the tack, though the concept of fortunate bounces hard off him as Monster veers and jags further, releasing a piercing shriek of frustration or confusion or fear or pain. It's senseless and automatic: clawing forward into the empty saddle; scrabbling for the flagging reins, hauling and kicking at the frenzied griffon to, what? Demand her attention? To just wrench at something for the sake of wrenching?)
And then they've strayed far from the courtyard, and the circle of Venatori mages, and the confused flashing of arcane light, and from where Marcus would have fallen, and the city itself has fallen from under them in favor of flying over the dark water of the harbor. Monster sways even. The tenor of her pulling turns shivering and panting. There is wind and a higher buzzing of blood in his ears, and a mumbled squawking of crystal chatter. It's possible that it's his imagination that the saddle is still warm from where Marcus had ridden in it, or that the pitched cry the griffon spits out into the dark is despairing.
It takes a long time to go looking for him.
It's the nature of the thing with the city wracked with the effects of the mages' work, and the need to scrape together a counterattack, and the cold logic that creeps in at the back of the mind that insists he has seen what happens when men fall to the deck from the upper yardarms. Ordering another griffon rider to sweep the area for any sign of Marcus is stupid when there are Venatori in the streets of Kirkwall and when Flint barely known where he fell, but he does it anyway and is frustrated by the inevitability and the waste when a preliminary search at the height of the chaos turns up nothing.
But when the worst of it is finished, he takes Marcus' griffon low through the darkened city in the direction his instincts suggest is more likely. She has better senses than he does in the dark, and maybe she will know her companion in any state.
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Beneath the saddle, Monster is tired. Unlike the trot of a horse, the labour of flying necessitates good form and disguises the fatigue, but she offers soft complaining croaks here and there between attending to direction. Griffons seem to act either as smart as loyal dogs or cunning felines, but perhaps both creatures have the kind of intuition Flint is calling on. And now the air smells a little less like smoke.
Whether it's that or luck or something else, inevitably there's a site of wreckage.
A small storehouse, not so far flung from where Monster had begun her wild jagged flight at that crucial moment, has been the victim of some strange damaging force. The roof's partial inwards is the first sign, but there at the corner, debris spills where the south-west corner is, well, gone. Once sturdy wood has not merely been burned, but reduced to white ash in some sudden flash of immense heat. Glass melted, stone shattered and scorched, an unnatural sundering of raw material and the faint taste of Fade in the air.
The man half-hidden by the collapse of debris is unmoving but, once one attains the right angle, apparently whole.
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It will be something else. This is just true. So why even come looking?
Monster lands heavily in the cramped, debris shocked yard. Ash swirls from the force of her backwing and shattered bits of stone turned gravel crunch and scatter. It takes some time for Flint to unwind from the rack and slip out of the saddle, though she makes it easy to do having already lowered her belly to the cool earth.
Flint picks his way to the battered shed, clearing back some shattered fragments of wood that had once been a portion of the outer wall before being shredded by this last spectacular burst of Marcus' power. He'd seen him from the air and so the shock of the man up close should amount to nothing. But he stops, a hand on the splintered edge of the scorched wall, and regards Marcus in the rubble with a welling pressure between the ears.
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Hard to tell from where Flint is standing. The ash that had been kicked into the air on impact has had time to settle in a whisper-soft layer of grey and it certainly makes a convincing corpse of anyone. But there is something in the way he lays that is not completely that of a man who died when hitting the earth, not awkward and broken enough for that. There is evidence of having moved just a little, where blood has dried to paste at the mouth and down the throat, darkly visible beneath powdery ash.
(Some thirty-odd years of demons whispering at the edges of his dreams means that, when the entropic thing in him stirs at the sense of living bodies near by and it brings murmured, formless offers through the cracks of his consciousness, it takes no effort at all to silence them. Fuck off.)
But it means Marcus draws in a deeper breath than the shallow intakes he's been living off of until now. Chokes immediately on the particulates in the air, lungs spasming to expel them again in a cough.
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Before it does, he is yanking away fragments of debris and wading through the shattered remains of the structure. It's possible it only takes a few seconds to do. Or it's minutes, sweat abruptly thick on the back of his neck and the punctured sensation in his side made by exertion when he succeeds in uncovering Marcus to the degree necessary to make any kind of assessment of his current state. To reach for his face and neck, roughly smearing back grey ash with his own dirty hands.
"Marcus," a hand moving to tangle in the grey shoulder of the man's clothes. "I have you."
It's a stupid thing to say from his knee in the wreckage beside a man too insensate to hear to. A moment later, Flint is fishing after his crystal. Nevermind the pounding in his head; one of Riftwatch's healers will be only short minutes away.
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Beyond that, a lack, where there should be plenty.
Marcus' head tips back under Flint's hand, loose on the hinge of his neck. Beneath the thick layer of fog from which he is attempting to emerge, he has the sense of fingers, palm, somehow more acute to him the way they rough against his cheek and throat than the deep pulse of pain that spears up where bones had broken and mended in the same second.
Another wheezing breath, and a protesting knitting of tension at his brow. A complaining sound rough across the next breath out, eyes cracking open. Hand wandering inwards.
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And then the crystal is set aside into the ash. He has two hands again, and they both turn restless and grasping without the distraction of common sense. At Marcus' face, and after his hand, as that thick knotted sensation in the back of his head aches like a blow.
"Stay as you are. I'll see you out of this."
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—is on a decently significant delay. First, fingers curling in a twitched response to contact, and then the series of further dry coughs which liven up the senses with the way they lash against bruised ribs and tender muscle from within. Then, some seconds spend repeating back to himself the thing Flint has said, absorbing and parsing.
Alright, brittle and graveled, and the slowly sharpening point of his focus swims to snare into eye contact. In one sense, he is aware of time having passed. Fragments of consciousness, blood in his mouth, silence, disorientation, alone. In another, it seems as though they were sat together on Monster's back a moment ago. Or ten hours ago, given how sluggishly overslept the feels.
His hand pulses again, a brief but firm grasp. Stay, it requests.
"What happened."
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(He tightens his grip, cinching secure at Marcus's wrist.)
"You fell," he says, and for an instant that drawn taut buzzing sensation swells thick across the senses. He has been very careful to ignore it, to make a void for it to fill, and he can sense now that it has reached the lip of the vessel "It's been some hours since then. The Venatori made a bid for the city and were repelled. A healer is on the way and will put you to rights."
Soon. Maybe.
There is blood at Marcus' mouth.
"There are easier ways to cut short a meeting in a bar."
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Some hours. That feels both true and disorienting. It will be some hours more that he starts making a true and proper picture of things, ordering all the pieces together, a timeline, the knowledge that Flint had waited, had come back, had—
Marcus roughs out some sound in reply to this last thing. More intentional than only throat clearing, like a scoff, and the grip of his hand is a signal to them both that he's listening, the sharpening of his focus which had wandered off to the sky up past Flint's head. Everything aches. The scuff of his heel drags a knee up by an inch or so, just to check that he can, and the movement invites some physiological response that knocks his focus back to a blur for a second.
Forces himself to relax his grip which had likely twinged some bruising he doesn't know about. A breath later, and he says, "Night's still young," and a flash of teeth. It is not.
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He bends, hand catching at Marcus' neck or jaw or chin. He stops shy of actually cramming his mouth across Marcus', because maybe the sting will sting. But the closeness matters. The measure of distance narrowed. The urgency to
Tighten his grip instead. Thumb pressing at the sinew and bone of Marcus' wrist.
"You're fine," he tells him like an oath to be sworn to.
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Well, he can do some of that. Tips his chin a little against that catch to his jaw, lets his other hand find a place against the crook of Flint's bent elbow. Finds a grip of the fabric bunched there. He's fine.
"Are you?"
The question is accompanied by some serious amount of study of the other man, eyeline flicking over his face in evaluation.
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He is whole, and well. He has only spent the last hours being required to be rational, and it hasn't mattered. He has not thought of the empty saddle, of the broken line snapping free in his fist, or of Monster's high pitched shriek shattered across the black water of the harbor.
His fingers arrest at Marcus' collar. The linen is soft; it isn't meant for this kind of place, the lining gentle under the pad of his thumb.
Yes, he thinks. Or says. A soft huff of breath. And then he does press his mouth across Marcus', the shape of his hand first fierce and then gentling.
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And then his heart is knotting back up beneath battered ribs, and a tremor runs up from wrist to elbow where his hand grasps sleeve tighter. Inwards, some sense of filling up, overflowing. Outward, just the answering lift to his chin and the shape of a kiss returned.
He moves his hand from elbow to shoulder, shoulder to neck and jaw, leaving behind grey fingerprints. Again, is the clear direction, when the kiss seems close to ending.
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Likely they are too close already and the hurts of the evening too sharp to identify or appreciate that here, under the urging of Marcus' sooty fingers, he answers that direction plainly. Kisses him again, his own hands closing about the shape of Marcus' face. Leaving smeared tracks of ash from the sweep of his thumb against his cheeks, and the kiss tasting of bitter grit and coppery blood. The warmth of having breathed heavily for too long a duration.
It punctures that pressed tight sensation living at the back of his head, the base of his neck. That coil of tension produced from hours spent rejecting thinking of Marcus' body broken on some stretch of Kirkwall cobblestone or shattered on a rooftop because there was nothing to be done for it now comes unwound. That flatly postponed dread and the relief from it comes forward all at once and in equal measure, profoundly tangled. Spills into the shape of his hands, and the too quick rabbiting of his pulse. A sharp pant of breath, the pull stinging in his side. How gentle the third kiss he sets to Marcus' mouth is when he should be telling him to lay quiet and still.
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Something else. Abstracted, unarticulated, the belief that perhaps he'd imagined convincing Flint out of this affection, insisting on it with hands and words and the anticipating some satisfaction of prying it loose. Abstracted, unarticulated, the warmth that floods through him when Flint presses that third kiss so gently against his mouth, as remarkable as the first. (He'd hardly flung himself out of Monster's saddle, anyway.)
He'd closed his eyes, so he opens them in the moment after. Blurry, but it doesn't matter. Flint has said he's fine, will be put to rights. His fingers curl, setting against the back of his neck though there's no strength to it.
"Stay," is a question without the uptick. "When they come."
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There is ash all over his palms and fingers. Speckling his dark coat. Powdering the neck of his shirt collar. Marcus' hand is not, strictly speaking, particularly warm where it lays against his neck.
"I will," seems obvious.
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