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Shck-.
Another snip. Tidy, meticulous.
The Scourger is obviously quite skilled at cutting things down.
With a duly cautious hand, Essek places the thought and the clipping beside the rest in the tall discard basket by his hip, picking this red-berry-full one free of leaves. Some several canes ago, he forwent his gifted rose gloves.
Too imprecise, they snag in the barbs far more than bare skin.
He and the taller of the two Scourgers occupy themselves tending to a thorny something. The eldest Clay, Corrin, she had called this a bramble, or- it is blackberry, this particular part of the patch. The latter designation certainly describes the deep color of its ready fruits, like minuscule and aggregate blackcurrant, sun-ripened clumps of night.
Also according to Corrin, this deeply-rooted thicket is extraordinarily well-behaved, so long as it is consistently guided and pruned.
Finer-boned, Essek has farther reach into the tangles, able to unweave them unscathed as they progress.
As such, the Scourger received the shears, razor edges shining occasionally in dappled light.
They work well enough within trim silence, he and the Scourger, following the thresholds Corrin laid out.
A tentative truce, to be fair, but Essek has worked far closer alongside those who have brought him to ruin, those against, even closer, who now bring him some form of slim safety.
An overripe, late-summer tang to the air, the quiet of unaffiliated birdsong and insect chirps breaks with another cut to vine.
“What do you think she thinks of yours?”
Shck-.
Ignoring the spindly creep down his spine at the phrasing, Essek glances a moment aside, but says nothing to the Scourger’s deliberate vagueness.
Brows loose, eyes dull, this likely isn’t another attempt at the same ineffectual flirtations of pause and poise he’s been casting about to certain members of the Nein.
Certainly not idle conversation, either; even brief acquaintance has informed Essek that this one is the more adept of the Scourger pair at masking assessment as unassuming buffoonery.
So, if the Scourger wants to try playing some game, he can show his hand first.
Essek’s own remain at his side, rearranging their trimmings away from himself, plucking free a few ripe fruits and depositing them into their allocated basket.
Eventually, show he does.
“The Matron.”
Essek smirks with the concession.
“And whom do you mean ‘mine’?”
He holds out an untrimmed vine.
“Those of your land.”
Shck-.
“What is land but a handful of soil.”
“It’s bled for.”
And what place has any nation’s propaganda and zealotry here, in this, the home of the Clays?
The overseer of the Empireside prior has already crashed, soon to burn, if estimation can hold a candle to the inferno of Beauregard’s righteous fury.
Tether-tied and old bind broken, surely this one, the Scourger, felt it to the bone.
Vine held, Essek watches his own fingertips between thorns.
“Perhaps you, friend, have been bleeding.”
“Need blood to bleed.”
The Scourger says it fast as flat fact, a broad-shouldered shrug turned to the shrub.
Shck-.
In these past two days, Essek has come to see Caleb Widogast within the Scourgers in all the ways the Scourgers are not: long-haired, wiry, less shackled, whimsical.
Adored without stipulation.
Much else is intriguingly alike.
But Essek has enough tact of tacit-tongued society not to ask about the forge that fired them. What currently courses through their veins.
He does, however, decide to tease the lede, if only to see just how far this one’s present leash stretches. Fjord with a sightline, Caduceus within earshot, Veth likely lurking about, he and the Scourger are not far enough up the garden path so as to be out of the Nein’s unsubtle observation.
He lets the air hold a beat longer, searching through the brambles for tricky pickings.
Maybe this bundle will do.
“Have been bled, pardon me.”
He’s met with jackal-grin silence, an impasse of convention as much as restraint.
Interesting. Essek still has his life for a reason, then.
He tugs at three snagged tendrils- thinner, intertwined, bearing many berries, though only a third look ready to eat.
Picking up the prior point, the Scourger skips over the closer tucked vines.
“Death is intended for all.”
Shck-.
One falls apart from two, and all three come free.
Hm. Now, this is more work.
Essek sets about removing blackberry after blackberry from the lone stem.
“Life of the party, aren’t you.”
The Scourger takes up his own two, delicately stripping them free of fruit and placing it in the berry basket between. Surely he can do better than that; the unripe all of them run red.
“I hate parties.”
And Essek almost sneers a laugh, but maintains a court-smooth smile in its stead.
“You’re not wrong. Though…”
He relocates the Scourger’s redder berries to the discard basket.
“What does this say about your goddess?”
The Scourger stares on, silent, still.
Surely the myths of the Matron, the Duskmaven, the Raven Queen herself, are not so disparate between neighboring lands. The overthrowing of Death prior, the mortal’s ascension and the subsumption of finality into a porcelain mask, a feathered cloak of ink-drop silence.
No, she and the Luxon go hand in hand as far as Essek’s own learnings go.
True death comes for all eventually.
‘Eventually’ is key.
“A mortal becomes deathless and enforces the ends of others.”
And Essek tugs a fruitless twist.
“Ironic, no?”
The Scourger’s eyes thin.
“I have enough comprehension to understand the divine have differing scopes than petty worldly matters.”
Shck-.
“And that is how you choose your path? Taking cues from powers you deem ranked higher?”
Essek indicates another protruding vine, barely needing to guide it out.
“Quite the opposite.”
And the Scourger snares a different snarl with a smirk.
“Even the loftiest figures can fall.”
Shck.
Well, isn’t this entertaining.
Dodging every barb with ease, Essek tucks the errant trimming away.
But the Scourger goes on.
“Though, it doesn’t matter much if she cannot walk amongst us again.”
He plucks a plump fruit straight from the plant, black beads near bursting with the slight squeeze. Another, red, he handles carefully, before turning their ends both to Essek.
Red empty, the black intact. The red one ends up in the berry basket.
“You know about these?”
And the Scourger raises the blackberry before popping it into his mouth, fingertips stained red.
“They keep their hearts when picked.”
Then, the red ones Essek had been tossing, they weren’t unripe at all, instead a different type altogether.
Eadwulf pulls a laden vine of red, hooked forward on a forefinger.
Far from an olive branch, but what is an extended truce if not some semblance of trust?
And what, exactly, has Essek to lose, if not his life?
So he reaches.
And he hisses as the briar shifts, pricks his finger deep.
A drop of crimson quickly wells.
He has half a mind to reveal the wound; it could be a taunting vulnerability, a smug show of security as though stabbing at a caged wolf.
Swallowing back scorn, the other half wins majority.
Best not; the impulse is rather cruel.
Surely even one such as this can be afforded a certain measure of grace, even following a deliberate unkindness. He is no worse than Essek himself, after all, and the Nein hand out their chances as if cut-rate candy instead of cutthroat persistence, as if fellow reprobates are mere strays.
Who is to say, then, if not them.
“It is fortunate for us.”
Voice merely a clipped chide, Essek squeezes his fingertip with a shake, lets the first drop scatter, catch scarlet in a sunbeam, and get drunk up by the Blooming Grove’s eager ground.
“Save but for them, this place is neither here, nor there.”
The Scourger simply tips his head, blinks like a curious pup.
“Ja, I suppose.”
No point in letting this fester.
With a sigh, Essek rises, stands, his boots impressed to the dirt.
Still kneeling low, a hand in the discard basket, Eadwulf lifts his chin.
An angle imploring, his rounded eyes imply down-soft worn wool.
So here it really is, the long game he’s been playing.
Too bad. Stomach soured, Essek’s never been of much a mood to indulge past pleasantries; he’s not about to stoop low enough to prove or correct his misgivings.
“I should go have this looked at.”
And the Scourger grins, blithe, wide, and wolfish.
“Watch your step.”
That’s another way the Scourgers and Caleb differ: there is little life to their eyes when they smile.
That same spark of pain glows steady, though.
Maybe both will change, given time.
Regardless, Eadwulf’s is good advice.
Every footprint leaves a path behind; Essek will indeed watch where his own goes.