It was a strange night, the day heralding a snow flurry, unsympathetic to the world. Akira could not help but think how strange the phenomenon, for even after the sun had long laid rest, and the clouds dispersed to reveal stars, the snow continued to fall. The blanket of white powder covered all things, even the people; frosting metal and leather and swords, making the Frozen Soldiers and the invaders all but indistinguishable from a distance.
The bright blue eyes of Akira of Dark penetrated the stark white and blackness around him, walking along the Frozen Citadel wall. His men had cut the ropes, the invaders falling into the darkness of the shadow of the Citadel, not even screaming, and not a sound as they landed below. No bodies were left at the bottom, only seeing them backing away into the Cold Forests, supposedly retreating. Their movements scattered, uncoordinated, and most were quickly limping. Akira doubted their retreat, noting that every warrior seemed to be looking over their shoulders as they ran, their eyes on him as he stood upon the wall watching them; their eyes reflecting the fire lights of Citadel wall, looking like a hundred tiny torches scattered among the falling snow. Soon, every one of those lights went out when the Invaders disappeared into the shadows, and even then, Akira could feel their presence like a weight upon his attention, knowing that they were very much still there.. and waiting. Thirty bowsmen had a bow notched and aiming in that direction. That was easy.. Akira’s eyes narrowed, and this is of course more than what it seems..
So curious of the nature of these supposed Glass Soldiers that he even had one easily captured from the rope climb and in one of the prison chambers now, bound to a chair. The man hardly coherent with no battle wounds to account for why, the man seemed void, wordless, and strange. As though a man asleep, but eyes gazing off some infinite distance and fighting a ghost… It was only when Akira himself walked into the room did the grungy bearded warrior meet eyes with anyone, the man’s bright brown eyes were oddly red, animalistic, the whites exposed to their fullest. And then, suddenly, the man did something Akira did not expect– the warrior growling and lunged for him, the tendons in his hand constricted as though ready to claw, but the leather belts that held him there stopped him. “–AKIRA–GIVE US DUU–GIVE US SSSKK–!” His words muffled, like an invisible hand was constraining his throat, the man went into a kind of fit to reach him, now only trying to claw at him through the restraints. The Prisoner’s gaze was unblinking and fixed, and mouth now silently screaming, now completely muffled. It was only when one of Akira’s warriors slugged the man across the face with his own metal gauntlet did the man go limp and fall into a stupor.
“Rabid dogs,” spat his man as he straightened his gauntlet on his fist, “Glass warriors– all of them.” Obviously with their record of Glass Prisoners this month, no man here was going to take a liking of them any time soon. He couldn’t blame them, really, though unlike their last prisoner only a block away, this one wasn’t even really rational.
Akira kept his attention on his new prisoner, taking in his features much more lucratively then his Frozen Citadel companion. “I have never seen any warrior, let alone man act like a sick animal, without any apparent physical sickness such as this.” He noted lightly, quieting the room of other warriors. “There is something strange happening here,” Akira, in all of his authority peered at the small group of Citadel captains and guards that had been awaiting his orders. Not coming to any conclusion to voice to his men, he instead gave a prudent order, “Keep this man in confinement, question him if you are able when he is awake. I want every available man on the walls. Whatever these invaders want, we, of the Frozen Citadel must be strong until we have answers. There will be no help from the outside for at least five more hours, when the sun rises. Any small quadrant would be fools to attack an intelligent base and think it is plausible, so be on your toes, there may be another side to this coin. These are no ordinary Glass Soldiers.”
And Akira turned his back to return to his post.
The scroll perhaps? One glass soldier wanted it, though why would he bring men to follow him if he were a spy? So many unanswered questions.. and even what his new prisoner said, disturbed him. Akira, much as he wanted to bite down this fear, couldn’t dismiss it completely.. Akira of dark, in all of his years in the Haven of Rain couldn’t help but think of how…inhumane these invaders seemed. The thought of the prisoner disturbed him, wondering if he was witness of some kind of change. The man, when speaking, sounded as though something from within was destroying the man’s ability to speak before he could finish the threat. Being consumed.
With this thought, Akira peered out into the darkness, eyes falling upon the stone block where his daughter and the other Glass Prisoner dwelled, feeling that his answers perhaps would lie there.. if it wasn’t all ready too late.
—–
Asher, once, would have been satisfied with that reaction.
Abruptly she had approached him, and he kept his gaze on the ceiling, feeling her shake beside him, feeling her eyes penetrate him, feeling her darkness claw up his arm and to his chest… His mockery could only go so far, for he did not will himself to look at her, feeling all oxygen leave him, all manner of reserves tapped. He did not have to look at her to know what she was feeling, in the distance, he heard the screams of a little girl.. to her, he appeared not to have changed at all.
Just as she played with the idea of losing control, Asher tempted the idea of death. What a dance they danced, those few seconds lasting lifetimes. He was not quiet sure his heart dared beat in the quiet of the in-between, but sure enough, she didn’t kill him. He allowed himself to look at her after it was over, Asher remembering little other than the washed-out color of her gaze and tiny pupils, her irises like icicles in the dark, disappearing into a flutter of hair as she turned her back on him. He did not even remember her scratching him until the chill she emitted finally dissipated the room, and he was left only with his burning skin.
Again, if she were someone else, if he was Asher at a different time, perhaps he would have been satisfied about finding that truth. He instead, felt stilled, letting his eyes rest on the door a moment, and then lazily raising upward to the ceramic ceiling. The quiet sat in and Asher, in reply, wished only to touch his face, but his restraints made it impossible. The blood on his face was frozen, his wounds licked with a searing cold. Asher laying his head to one side, he felt the breath leave him, and rush back in again, as though he had been holding his breath for awhile. The congealed blood on his face, like wax, would soon melt with time.
Asher, Dusk, whatever, was not satisfied for ridding himself of the girl. Though what he felt, he could not place.
A roaring filled her ears, trapping his words in her head. They echoed in her skull, getting louder with each bounce back. The words called up images of her life, all flashing before her eyes. Nereida had actually been happy once, long ago, or content at least. There never was a good moment, was there, after that day? After she was murdered. Nereida had nothing after that. Endless books and training, her father forcing her to go to school in a vain attempt for a normal life. Never allowing her outside the city. He didn’t want to lose her, too, but he kept her inside this box with no room to expand.
All of the fault belonged to him. The Dusk of the Red Army. Her mother had refused to turn traitor to her country by giving away precious information, and he murdered her for it.
With a scrape and clatter of wood that she didn’t hear, Nereida stood up abruptly, bent over the table with both palms flat. Glaring down at her trembling hands, she considered the sweet temptation of losing control. It probably wouldn’t be worth the punishment. And yet.
Decision made, Nereida crossed the distance between them quickly. She left him with four long scratches and a blooming bruise on his right cheek. The drops of blood on her fingertips quickly froze and fell off. Nereida knocked to be let out of the cell. The guards looked at her, startled and clearly scared. “Get. Out. Now.”
As records were broken to follow her command, Nereida sit against the wall, knees pressing on her chest, head cradled in her arms. Her black cat sat at the end of the hallway, indifferently watching the tears freeze off her face.
Ah there it was, that thing he had felt when they had first met. That oh so dreaded thing. That darkness that drove a nail a mile deep, and somehow, he had managed to touch it, managed to feel it – and he wasn’t even looking her in the eye. His stomach churned, but Asher swallowed all his repulsion, his face not giving him away.
Not unbearable, this was fine. If this wasn’t what it felt like to feel alive, he wasn’t sure what was. Their conversations like liquid fire in his veins, keeping him going – for no man could truly be alive without a war to remind him so. And she was it, his last great war.
Her voice was like a pulse in the room, the words sounding oh so dead, but something more sinister beneath them. Her calmness was feigned as well, but unlike him, Asher had a god forsaken emotion-meter hardwired into his skull, making him taste every bit of her facade, the bile of her emotions sticky in the back of his throat, and crushing his stomach. Why she effected him more than others, he couldn’t figure out, but Asher being himself also knew he couldn’t stop now.
Footsteps rumbled above and along the high windows of the cell, snow fluttering down from soldiers rampaging past. Asher watched it aloofly, not thinking much about it.
“I can tell, you have been here awhile, your father so high up – and you not allowed to leave, locked in your little life, forced to be here with me,” he said amusingly, watching her book as though watching her. “I guess I understand why he would do it, but hell, what do you have as events in your life? Training? School? Maybe a nice little boyfriend? Or no? Ah, really..” he floated on, his lips pulling back on the last word, emphasizing it mockingly.
“..really, you have it written all over you, your nice facade, or your cloak of insecurity behind your books, no, no, not just that – but just you. You are a tragedy. Your one little moment, the one thing that cracked your castle, you think about it all the time, I can tell. All the spectrum of emotion you have ever felt, you felt it once. You remember…”
He stared at the ceiling, here he was, really unsure of what she was, only throwing out what he knew. Throw grenades at a wall – blow out the structure, and then you find out what it’s made of. Her emotions cutting his breathe off short, he pushed his lungs further, willing him, he pulled the pin…
“Perhaps you should thank the man that killed your mother, for that’s all your life has ever amounted to. All your bitterness, all your hate, all your numbness, you can thank him for that, thank your one enemy, because those emotions are all you are. Nereida.”
You must never lose control, a voice from long ago whispered.
Pretentious. Arrogant. Asshole. If he was kind, she was celebrating her 50th birthday this week. And, one singular event? What the hell did that mean? She was way more than one singular event.
Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. In breath. Calm. In control. Why was she short-fused today? Out breath. She could feel her anger boiling beneath the surface, and some part of her didn’t care. In breath. Like a childhood imaginary friend, coming back to say hello. Out breath. Maybe stay for a while. But the not-caring was new. Screw the breathing, it never did anything to help anyway.
“And, pray tell, what event is this, that is the only interesting part of me?”
His eyes drew across the surface of her book, across the bindings and the elegant Rain-prominent lettering. He let himself savor a moment of glancing at her eyes, her dark eye lashes hiding any iris color that could have given her away. He noted, however, her eyes stopped moving in their sockets, no longer reading. A small victory, even if she did not look at him back. His gaze returned to the ceiling, his head rolling on a curtain of his messy, unkempt hair.
What was he? She asked. With a mild silence, he answered her.
Animal-like, a red tongue darted from his mouth, running over his cracked lower lip and ridding it of the blood that had dotted along a crack there. A smile-like residue was left upon the curvature of his mouth.
“I suppose I’ll be so kind as to not answer your question with another question,” he said oh so kindly, his voice an array of blacks and whites, sometimes angry and low, now, he seemed just shy of sincere.
“I am but a man.”
The smallest of heart beats to his minimalistic answer–
“..made of flesh and bone and perhaps goals and ideals, ha. Human like you, perhaps just like you, I am sure both of us will beg to differ, but if there is one thing I know, is that unlike you, everything that is interesting about me isn’t from one singular event.”
Something about this man just pissed her off. The way he interrupted whatever she was doing, spoke like he was so informed and in control, maybe it was just the way he seemed to look right through her even though he would never meet her eyes. Hell, maybe it was just the way he looked. It was as if the prisoner knew all of her buttons, and delighted in pressing them hard and repeatedly.
But she must show calm and control. She must be calm, and in control. That fascinating idea of losing control was not an option for her. In an effort to keep a smooth face, she turned another page. Telling him, nothing you say can trouble me. Though the jibe about guard duty bit deep. Had she not told the same thing to her father the night before?
“And it’s quite the life that you have. Laying on that cot day in and day out, barely able to feed yourself.” Ah, bitterness. There you are. “A question for a question, what are you?”
The leader was limping, hunched and strange in his movements. “Him” was a loose term for Akira, because in actuality the sex of the leader was not really distinguished, but the voice was deep and thick with a foreign accent, one he could not place first hand. Very southern, perhaps from the Volcanic Mountain ranges, Akira’s guess was somewhere in the Vicious Glass regions, or perhaps even as far as Wrathful Glass. Very dark skin, he noticed, scar covered, and a head completely covered in cloth, with orange, orange citrus colored eyes peering back at him. The voice, too, sounded strange and off, as though speaking in strange intervals. Ups and downs, with many pauses. Small details that any Master Water Haven Spy should gather, but sadly, so far, useless observations.
Only way to sum up the entire interaction was: “Out of character.” Fire Haven wasn’t this careless, and Akira thought perhaps this was a concentrated, stray group looking for this man of Smoke Glass. Akira, within minutes encrypted and sent out many messenger birds – to the Rain, to Cla’Dius and to the other intelligence base, Xasion Citadel. He hoped, at least in a few hours to get some answers of perhaps the political situation he might not be aware of, this however would not solve the immediate problem.
And he reminded his daughter, of course, that she of all people, would keep her duty, and Akira of Dark gathered troops, as the strange nature of the attack seemed more dangerous than most. All ready did the archers take out the front line of men in this group, but almost none of these ragged men fell upon being shot, as though dead men walking – without a care in the world. And any intelligent man of war knew that an enemy without a care for their own safety was the most dangerous enemy of all.
-
Asher smiled in the dark, basking in her silence. Thank the spirits for practically unremovable volcanic ash, that shit could stay on his eyelids forever despite the water and soap, the drugs and the head bandages. He was sure he looked like he had two very distinct black eyes by this point, the ash smudged all around his eyes – easily passed off as a symptom of over exposure to natural narcotics and unregulated sleep patterns. He didn’t need Water Haven intelligence gatherers figuring out what the hell the tattoos on his eyeballs meant, not sure if they could really be traced, but that little bit was unknown. He was still Asher of Smoke Glass, some unknown name in the eyes of the Water Haven.
He, of all people, knew how important it was that he kept this secret.
The power of a name, Asher noted with thought, was is important yet so pointless. Nereida Grey, her name, sounded so anticlimactic when it came down to it. The name he had been searching for years – that child’s name he had wanted so many years ago. Here she was, the master of his cage, as opposed to the other way around.
Asher’s smile grew slightly wider with this thought.
He sensed a shift in the atmosphere, even in the silence, as though he felt some heavy weight in the air. An unknown darkness growing, even with the wretch’s daughter’s bitterness lingering just as thickly in the air. This, however was foreign – far off, and unfamiliar. He let his mind wonder upon this feeling a moment, not sure what it was.
Asher, this time, made a point to be heard. He cleared his throat, and closed his eyes, shifting a bit in his chains to get more comfortable. “So, Ne-rei-da,” he said loudly, pronouncing each syllable with a distinctness, as though mocking her. “who… are you?” Best get this ball rolling, he guessed. He turned his head and looked at her, raising an eyebrow. The words as if greeting her with a hello.
At first they were all surprised at how the Fire Haven reacted to losing Asher of Smoke Glass. Just before dawn, an almost full quadrant of soldiers stood at the Citadel gates. It was rather bold, even for a nation so focused on war and the military. Nereida had watched Akira and the quadrant leader carefully; unless she was wrong, Akira suspected that this move was too bold. The men had a ragged look to them, with long, unkempt hair and beards, chipped and dirty armor. She couldn’t smell them, but she suspected they had not had baths in weeks.
The leader demanded that the prisoner be let go in the most peculiar way. He would not disclose the prisoner’s name, nor who he was to the soldiers. Nothing was even offered to barter with, money, secrets, war prisoners of their own. Nereida wondered if they expected Akira to just hand him over. I’m sorry; we didn’t realize he belongs to you-Oh! Forgot the bright red bow!
Akira could see it was going nowhere, so he cut off the negotiations as soon as was polite. There was grumbling among the soldiers as Akira walked back inside the gate. Then, as if by popular vote rather than a command from the leader, the entire quadrant rushed after Akira. The gate (more like a giant double-door in the walls around the city) closed just before they reached it. Enraged, the errant soldiers began attacking the Citadel in earnest.
They were just using hooks tied to rope in an attempt to get over the walls when Akira reminded Nereida of her guard duties. She did know better, but had still hoped that he would forget in all the excitement. So here she was, in the ceramic cell with the prisoner while everyone was outside fighting to retain him. Sulking never helped anybody, but she still wasn’t happy about it.
Occupied as she was, Nereida heard only the prisoner’s rough voice, muffled as if he were trying to speak underwater. Certain that her book was far more interesting than whatever he was saying, she made no effort to hear him and only turned the page again.
Drugs were an adequate thing to blame his slavery to this silence. Often in times of war, silence was a much appreciated mistress, giving him air enough to reassess and counter maneuver, the silence before a storm was a kind of bitter sweet peace that perhaps a more poetic individual would give attribute to, and of course the silence of another person. That sweet existence that meant no words were needed to said and perhaps, in the silence that was neither heavy nor awkward, things could be right in the world.
Asher could say none of these silences were like the one he felt now. The nature of whatever drugs he had been given (and were now slowly coming off of) made him antsy. Like a-hyper-paraplegic-in-need-to-go-run-outside-goddamnit kind of antsy.
Obviously his body was healing, but not as fast as he would like, and staring at bugs around torch light only did so much. So, he was able to sit up now, much to the dismay of the medical soldiers, who now felt him dangerous enough to strap him to the bed-cot-thing now and of course due to the nature of Asher’s mind games, and need to piss off and/or make people around him go off the deep end, he was forced to take a lovely mystery injection before every treatment that made him incoherent, unconscious, or just overall more enjoyable company whenever forced to be in the room with anybody aside from the Ms. Nereida Grey.
Asher found that he couldn’t just roll over and take the drugs oh-so-willingly for too long. It typically took a great deal of mental will power to bring him out of stupors that would all together make a normal 160 pound man go comatose. He found that ideas, of strategies, of ideas and of conversations typically brought his mind home. This was his fighting-back, and his will to get up in the morning. So long as his mind kept spinning, even the most potent narcotic could eventually ware off.
Today, he let a thought possess him and Asher was very much so awake underneath his closed eyelids.
Always drive forward, always think of a way around an obstacle, hurdles weren’t called hurdles for no reason – one did not just stare at them. And his only exit was being guarded by a lithe little thing with a leather bound book in the corner. Conversations existed in minute amounts and all Asher could do, perhaps in a slightly masochistic kind of way, was thirst for her venom. To the analytical and chaotic mind of the prisoner in the ceramic citadel prison, she was just another problem to solve, his counter manuever, his quiet before the storm.
And like all mornings (as he assumed it was morning, as now he caught onto the fact that she actually had a schedule of some kind, and it started before the sun rose) he was quiet at first. Eyes closed, his breathing not quite as deep as it should be for someone that should be sleeping. And so Asher listened. Endless listening.
Page turn.
Slow inhalation, exhalation of her breath.
And of course, that very hated thing:
Her bitterness.
And so it began, as much of these conversations usually did: with a comment. Loud in the quiet of the day’s beginnings.
“Tik tok, tik tok, still babysitting, and every second wasted watching someone else. What a life that must be to just read and take notes..”
He lay there, eyes still closed, expecting to hear her ignoring him, or something, but at very least a change in her breath..
