Auereliano paused at dawn, when the malfeasance of the sun’s slumber gave way to a singular yellow eye, and the horizon screamed with color. He let cracked amber eyes slip shut; his face drawn still and peaceful with the streaming life of early morning, and a smile quickened the haggard corners of his mouth. He was three days into a beard, mossy pitch that blended into unkempt locks, framing his face in lascivious shadows. Auere wore his piecemeal cloak over a bare chest; fresh washed corduroys made his legs bake over monk’s sandals, strips of leather over his dark feet. Auereliano listened to the far away song of morning doves over the din of vendor catcalls; he smelled lily bloom and the arid scent of horseflesh over the heavy sweetness of batter frying and fresh ground coffee. Auereliano stood among the foot traffic through Lomedor square, feeling squires bump past him, rushing to tend to the morning chores. He watched an old woman pour a basin of soapy water into the gutters, stray dogs lapping tepid water before following the scents of the city for their breakfast. Every passing person held a world of concerns in their minds; they forgot their worries in their routine and waxed poetic with those precious little secrets that molded their souls. Auereliano found himself out in the streets more mornings than not and used the private passing of life as his alter to the void. He scavenged for truths and lies in the quirks of foreign brows; the tremble of a bottom lip on a child being dragged to school, the rolling eyes of parting lovers within the darkness of hidden thresholds. Castigated by the fragility of the morning, Auereliano sat heavily on the edge of a sputtering fountain, rubbing the bridge of his nose and sighing thickly.

Auereliano had his head down for but a moment, the tap on his shoulder made him look up, wincing into the sharpness of the morning sun. Trifecta stood balanced on one foot, a cup of coffee in his hands, his head tilted with ferret curiosity. Auereliano let his plasticized smile turn chalky and fade, taking the coffee without his usual flare for abuse. Trifecta kept his demeanor curiously touching, heavy with sleepy eye shine and mussed in collected disarray. The mute thief joined his patron, rolling the remaining fingers on his left hand to get the demon’s attention. Auereliano turned his head, hair like a black cascade, brushing the lip of his untouched cup. He watched and listened, letting Trifecta’s form of language take up his attention; when the demon wanted to, they could almost have a conversation.

“Hard morning, boss?” Understanding was scrying in a pool of quicksilver and reading hieroglyphics with the pads of numbed fingers. Auereliano took a sip, fresh beans finding the corrugated edge of his exhaustion and tearing it away.

“’Fect, look at these people.” Auereliano waved his free hand at a passing gaggle of people, lost in the murmur of their conversations. “They babble and commune with nothing more than blood, offal and lies to tie them together. I can sell them dreams and you can steal them away, we are cogs in the machine.”

Trifecta gave a trumpeting snort and snapped to his feet. He jerked his only thumb at the passersby and his stump at Auere; waddling around the fountain with a faux gut. He stopped in front of Auereliano with a huff and rolled his eyes. The Rauko’s smile returned, getting the message clearly enough.

“No, Fect, I don’t want to be like them.” Auereliano drained his cup, setting the wooden mug against the fountain and standing. “I will not grow fat on their trappings; I’d rather them on a spit and grow fat on the crackle of their flesh.” He sucked his teeth hard and Trifecta jumped, drawing green at the gills. Auereliano’s penchant for human flesh made the silent pickpocket nervous; the demon wouldn’t eat the gamy street urchin if he was sautéed in black truffles and red wine. Even he had his standards.

Auereliano walked in the wake of a thousand days, he sauntered in and out of the murmur of dreams, waking terrors, living pestilence as simple as the grimy grimace of a hateful boss. Trifecta passed through the crowd like sand through a sieve, his diminutive hands taking what he willed, unmilled coin and the strips of shaved gold. Auereliano tucked his thumbs into his pockets and lost Trifecta in the crowd, thankful for the privacy in the maelstrom. He passed a brothel in its final throws, the bouncers discarding last nights patrons with both pockets and loins empty. Auereliano slowed to watch one man, his clothing gathered up in his arms, naked as the day is long, begging with a young prostitute at the door.

“I love you,” he simpered, his eyes welling with tears aghast. The people passed with litmus reactions, growing red around the edges while their attention was purposefully directed away from the show.

“I know, darlin’,” she purred, her droll act fading with the bulk of her trick’s money tucked away. She wore lace and black silk, her hair layers of auburn over slight pale shoulders; she switched her hips away from her customer’s reaching hand and he cried out as if struck. “But you need to get yourself home to your missus. Go on.” And a bouncer, watching with detached interest, took his cue and roughly pushed the man down the street. The large man looked almost embarrassed for the patron, using only the curve of his palm to shove him along the street as the naked man regaled him of his adoration for the young redhead in black. Auereliano leaned against the wrought iron gate and smiled thinly to the young woman, who primped her hair as she casually leaned against a stone sundial.

“What lust perchance to possess you both in moonlight and sun, dear bird of paradise,” Auereliano mused. The young woman took a few steps closer, keeping the gate between them, and passing a finger between the bare muscles of his chest.

“Poet,” she asked, amused.

“Demon,” Auereliano replied, touching the brim of an imaginary hat.

“Hmm, I’ve had both,” she cooed, turning away with a dip of her hips and reentering the brothel. Auereliano gave a hearty laugh and continued a few paces before Trifecta slammed into him. He tapped his forearm with his stump three times hard, two softly and smiled with off white teeth.

“Really, Fect, fifty today.” Auereliano nodded, impressed at the thief’s early morning haul. “I must say, I am quite pro…”

The thief pushed something into Auereliano’s hands, his face almost shy, the innocent boy of once long ago returning in the rose colored hue of his cheeks. Auereliano looked at the thief squarely, taking the wrapped item without opening it.

“I won’t take it if it’s stolen, Fect.”

The mute pickpocket growled, palming his stump and flicking the nail of his thumb against his two front teeth. “I bought it,” it meant…without the underlying vulgarity.

Auereliano smiled softly, nodding as he removed the filthy rag from his impromptu gift, the bone handle of the dagger catching the sun like a milky prism. Trifecta’s face had returned to his stoic grimace, eyes already catching the crowd, no thanks asked for or needed. A gift from a thief, Auereliano huffed a half hearted laugh and attached the blade to his hip. They twisted their way in huge circles around the square, content to be the ghosts of the morning.

The morning coughed the familiarity of routine as thumbs rubbed away the night’s sand from sleepy green eyes. Seyatte rested under a somber umbra in the slums of Lomedor, shaded by the palling slime of sewer water and crumbling keystones. She hid mostly, worrying about the city guards that strutted the streets like stray dogs, her poison latent at the birth of a new day. The thief kept their eyes at bay by being good at what she did; by choosing marks that wouldn’t find out their purse strings were cut until they went to barter for breakfast. Still, when they chased her (and they did chase her), they would find the alleys hollow and they would return to their posts only to receive stern warnings from their superiors. Seyatte allowed herself to smile from the shroud of shadows, weedy and bent from inside urban cubbyholes, curdling with cruel levity.

She took more than she needed to survive; borrowed gold could last for a week but was spent or lost as soon as it entered her hands. The thief wore calluses into her small hands from her compulsions and made no effort to suppress her fixation for the games she played. Here, there was no need for luck; chance was stripped away by years of practice and the wagers were trite and materialistic. Though the stink of the pits was still upon her, Seyatte took solace in the freedom of Arda’s lush suburbia. She was a foal fresh from a womb of fire and brimstone, able to trot about on sturdy legs as she forgets the strangling depths of the lonely black void. She took what she wanted and did so without the moral trappings of corporeal remorse, happy with the surreal assumptions of grandeur and ill repute.

This dawn, like all the others, blossomed gray and balmy. Ribbons of gay lavender were shot with feathers of flamingo pink and the sun, barely able to piece the early mists, cast mottled streaks of pale amber across the horizon. Seyatte plodded down the wide streets with her hands in the pockets of her tawny trousers, chin lifted as she basked in the scents of the mundane. Sweet cakes and mocha, fish scales and chamber pots: the gutters were as thick with life as the main avenues. But the thief did not stop to fill her belly or to ogle the painted baubles and handmade trinkets. She paced the filthy paths, weaving her way by memory to the town square, grinning at the men that were awake with the same purpose as she.

The territory that dominated the thieving of Lomedor Square was cutthroat and well established. Seyatte was not given any slack for her race, nor was she given the opportunity to find allies amongst the jealous rogues. More than once, the demon was accosted by brave men who sought to push her away from their acre of prime real-estate. Upon the refusal of their terms, the scene turned ugly, and Seyatte was elbow deep in the guts of the local guild master before he had a chance to recant and renegotiate. She was no stranger to the blade, but restraint was a fickle slice of her pride and she had no qualms about staking claims that did not belong to her. At the very worst, a blade slipped into her spine would send her back to the pits where she could plot revenge. But her actions had caused the thieves of Lomedor Square to reconsider their welcome policies towards outsiders and they left the demon alone as long as she didn’t step on too many toes. Such a feat was wholly impossible but none of them wished for the same fate that was offered to their master.

It was the foot traffic that made the square such a valuable asset. From sunup to sundown, pedestrians mulled around like cud-chewing cattle. Seyatte did not study their faces or move to spark up folksy conversations, but she certainly watched them with her keenly trained eyes. As she cased her marks she pretended to be making her morning rounds, ambling off to some menial job, tired from the ritual labors of a launderer. Very realistic dark circles formed bruised crescents beneath both of her sloppy green eyes and the morning sun caused the rosy undertones of her flesh to breech along the ridges of her freckled cheekbones. She held about her an air of youthful exuberance, yet the flecks of pure gold in her verdant irises shone angry and diligent when she spotted the focus of her delight.

Seyatte knew the ruddy thief. The men of the guild had called him Trifecta and made snide gestures behind his back to mimic the disfiguring qualities he possessed. Around the fountain of the Square, the mutilated man seemed adamant about expressing himself despite the nub of a tongue. Seyatte had made guesses to his past but knew him only from his fecal odor and mewing countenance. Once, she had chosen the same mark as Trifecta and Seyatte had lost the battle after he began waving his stump around to cause a distraction. Revenge now, so many weeks after, would be unexpected and oh so sweet. Seyatte’s mouth literally watered as she walked casually through the rose garden and through the rows of wilting spring crocus.

She stayed far behind, giving Trifecta the benefit of the doubt, hoping she would be lost to the crowd. She followed him through the red light district, pulling her naturally-hued threadbare cloak taut around her broad shoulders. She turned her head and perused a bushel of green apples when Trifecta paused to speak with a dark skinned man. Catching the glint of steel in her peripheral, Seyatte smiled, and secretly palmed an apple without the vendor noticing. She waited, ever moving but seemingly still, for Trifecta to dart back into the throng of passersby. As soon as he did, Seyatte began her ‘stroll’.

Her pace was hurried and she glued a beautiful impression of a stern sneer upon her thin lips. She gauged the tempo, swiveling her hips to glide through oncoming traffic, snagging the crowd’s flow without effort. When the street swarmed to three abreast, Seyatte purposely dragged her bare feet and stumbled, gracefully, into the dark man that Trifecta had left behind. It was a tickle more than a bump and the girl’s careful hand slipped beneath the folds of his cloak, careful not to indulge herself in his smooth skin. She said nothing to him as she pressed the bone hilted dagger against her forearm, passing back into the crowd as if simply perturbed with its sluggish pace. Seyatte caught the breath of the dragon upon him, the heady musk of wormwood and jasmine, and she nearly turned her head to see his face. But she held to her disciplines, ruefully, and threaded the dagger through the belt loops of her pants, hiding it beneath the shadows of her cloak. She wasted no time as she dove into the melee of faces; she needed to be just another head of cud-chewing cattle before the man noticed something missing on his person.

The bells signaled sanctuary as morning mass opened the doors of the high walled cathedral. Seyatte casually bit into her stolen green apple as she saw the sun slither up the wrought iron and stained glass windows. She felt no wards or seals as she passed beneath the monolithic lintel, but she did not pause to dip her impish fingers in the basin of holy water beside the doors. Instead, she found a pew near the back of the church and sat without passing her gaze to the smoky altar, crunching the last of her apple.

“I swear I recognize your breath, memories, like fingerprints, are slowly raising.”

Ambrosia. It started in a sultry whisper that darted like fireflies in his peripheral, a scent that mimicked sound, the moans of exhausted lovers. Sunrise past in warm sheets but Auereliano sweltered as the pilot to a long exhausted furnace rushed to life. Ambrosia, he couldn’t be fooled, and it curved eternal like the horizon of a dream. The scent tickled the back of his throat, the feathery jubilation that comes in a pleating storm, when raindrops make the world disappear. The enthralled Rauko watched the people fade to nothing, hollow cutouts that ambled on preconceived rails, their voices a peppering of hums and warbles. He let the fitted blinders mask flesh and blood and he was, if anything, a chip of mica at the base of a mountain. Ambrosia; and Auereliano fell in love.

The tugging on his arm threatened to shave away the details of his rapture, it insisted on his attention and slowly, Lomedor Square returned in vivid colors. Auereliano stood like a marionette on broken strings, body swaying with the pulp resonance of a long lost feeling. With dreamy eyes, he looked at Trifecta, whose wide eyed expression was balmy with concern. The texture of his skin had grown alive with goose pimples and the silvery tendrils of his bedazzlement moved like a foreign aura over his body. Vision focused, he let his mind sharpen against an uninvited file, and watched the silent thief’s manipulation of his remaining body. He caught the message after the third repetition.

“You just got robbed.”

Auereliano moved, sluggish through the weight of mucilage, and his hand found the empty space where his newly obtained dagger had hung just a moment before. Teeth pulling back from dark lips, he growled like a world of rabid dogs and watched Trifecta’s face draw and pull, wan against his birdlike bone structure. Auereliano caught himself, the fallow caverns of the void resisted flesh and blood; in anger, it pulsed like some dark wicked heart. The demon forgot the fangs of his world left behind, it resided in his eyes, in his marrow. The duality of conflicting emotions made his mouth dry and his hands tremble, he settled a hand on Trifecta’s shoulder and grimaced when the thief bleated a whimper.

“Easy,” Auereliano’s voice brayed like the cracking of a tomb. “Did you see (her) who did it?”

Trifecta nodded once, the ichor of his terror like sugar on Auere’s palette. “Did you see where she went?” The demon attempted to remove the venom from his baritone: it could have frozen blood. Trifecta shook his head and began to weep. Auereliano let his terrified assistant mew pathetically as he let his eyes pass the crowd. Nothing could have disheartened him more than the casual passing of bystanders, there were no tells to lead him to his quarry, no breadcrumbs to follow. There was only the sour persimmon of a lost trail and…

Ambrosia.

“Trifecta,” Auereliano began, his words came with calcified calm. “Go and get something to eat.” He pressed a warm gold coin into the thief’s only hand, met with a look of wild bewilderment. The Rauko managed a smile. “Easy won, easy lost. I will see you later.” The thief took a few steps back, his eyes darting along every expression on Auereliano’s face, desperate for some explanation. Yet finally, content he would not be responsible for the brunt of his master’s anger, he darted away, lost to the crowd. Auereliano ran his hands through his hair with a long exhale, gathering it up and tying it tautly at the crown of his head with a leather thong. Then, letting his feet direct him, he let bloodhound revelations direct his path, the scent coming to him in shades of marigold and like a hot poultice of mint and juniper. All roads converged to one; that which was touched with (her) his pickpocket’s presence. It slipped him into a gaudy fugue state which fell away like dunes of eroding sand when he stood in front of the massive cathedral doors.

Ambrosia.

Auereliano pressed his hand against a stone column, wincing as smoke began to rise from the ends of his fingers. But the reaction was small, this church was a shell of faith, no worship within could banish him. Yet behind the doors was something more dangerous than he could imagine, it threatened to obliterate his calm, the poker face that he carries throughout his day. Auereliano closed his cloak around him, tending to the buttons at his throat and fixing the collar tightly. He removed three rolling papers from his pocket and folded them once, slipping them between the tight collar and his throat. An impromptu priest; he gave a wide smile to the doors as he threw them open.

He was met with a sea of pious faces, they sat in rows of pews, looking daringly at his face and letting their eyes dart away. Auereliano purposefully kept his eyes to the altar, walking with intention, letting his peripheral tell him if there was motion. If his quarry was here, she…

…in the darkness, breathe, I speak and you see me sweltering under the heat of the very flame I was borne from and I scream, because you are gone…

If his quarry was here, she would not take this moment to run. He would need to draw her out, and as he reached the head of the church, he smirked. Auereliano drew holy water, which burned like quickening acid, from the fount into the palm of his hand and liberally splashed it on the parishioners seated in the front. They tittered like geese, eyes wide and perilously terrible as Auereliano stepped up the maroon carpeted steps and stood behind the pulpit. He let his hands grip the sides, even as a thin cloud of steam rose from his fingers; he saw an older woman faint into the aisle. They knew what he was and he smiled.

“My children,” a palpable moan from a young man in the front, “I speak to you with love. In this house of worship, I come to you as a claxon of faith. To join with you in the glory of…” Auereliano paused, eyes narrowing as he looked around the church, “whichever god it is you fools worship.”

Someone stood to remove him from his place, one hard look drew enough fear from him to crack his will and bend his knees. He sat down hard and Auereliano cleared his throat to continue. “My sheep, my bleating masses, raise up your hearts so that those beings that roost in the mountains of the sky may feast on your fealty. Feed the gods with your faith, and when you are exhausted, unlatch your doors so that my ilk and I may feed on the flesh of your children.” Real screams now and a stain glass window depicting some awkward memory of faith shattered. Auereliano would continue the blasphemy until the very walls crumbled around them, watching the frozen masses for movement; for any inkling of his pursuit….and waiting for the scent of his beloved ambrosia.

A daydream of screams shatters not like shards of glass. But it was torn, tangled into knots from words that purred from the demon’s lips; it shone ugly when mixed with piousness and confusion. Sheer terror pressed repose and poised itself on the chins of the flock like teardrops, the men shouted but the women cried. The children, bless them, had no idea what stood behind the singeing pulpit, but Seyatte did: Her mark.

His eyes held a smirk that put the morning sunlight to shame, but the missing buttons on his pilgrim’s cloak shone the vagabond detail that a smile couldn’t hide. He thought he was enjoying himself more than the thief; a sunspot of humor brought the honey from mahogany color cheeks, but hers remained simply rosy. She listened to the blasphemous sermon, her stolen apple transcending into a cynical Eucharist, and realized all she had to do was wait. The fervor was found in the appropriation of a misnomer and the flavor of hypocrisy. Seyatte would have added words if the situation had called for it. She had her own arsenal of choice complaints waiting to be slung into the faces of the faithful, like handfuls of horse manure, but she was no back alley philosopher. She surmised her mark must have failed at etiquette: the tumble of the tools to his finishing process was slow and hedonistic. Seyatte may have feigned nobility in another life, but the dogma remained intact. She understood faith, and even the patronization of faith, yet she was far too amused when the masses were forced to sleep in the beds they made for themselves. Pointing out flaws held little majesty, reveling in the mistakes was the manna of a pro.

But her mark’s zeal was not for the message he delivered. He did not prattle on and on because he was dishing litanies for the dark or the promoting the deliverance of the holy, his qualms were the bait. And she was more than willing to bite.

Seyatte’s pew had emptied when the stained-glass mural beside her began to blister and melt. When all those doe-eyed stares were stolen away from the Rauko behind the altar, she was the only one that had remained sitting and she offered the offended parties a banal shrug. The flock fled, abandoning their temple to the very beings that their meaningless evil-eye’s were supposed to drive away, and flooded Lomedor Square with their pale faces and linen dresses. All those that could hurry, did so, even the martyrs and the infirmed hiked up their skirts and hightailed it for the cool outside air. The priests were the last to leave, desperate not to go down with their ship, and Seyatte could hear them rush to lock and bar the cathedral’s thick doors.

He had cloistered her and she gracefully accepted the invitation to his personal convent by untying her cloak from her shoulders, folding it in a neat square on the seat next to her like a dirty habit. She stood as if to waltz down the aisle and drink her uniform cup of wine, but turned, tossing the dark demon a look of alabaster contempt from beyond the curve of her jaw. The stones beneath her bare feet were typically cold and she lifted each weedy leg until she perched proud and tall upon the bench of the pew. The smooth wood cackled and sweet smoke curled about her ankles as she walked on their backs, balancing with her arms out as if she dared the circus tightrope high above an awed crowd. Her eyes captured the placidity of a strangler’s acumen in their syrupy depths and she lent them intent, purposefully drawing her features into a fallow attempt at innocence so to give her gaze the proper potency.

“My, my, my…” Less than a drawl, more than a slur, Seyatte rolled her tongue and clicked it against the roof of her mouth. “Who do you think you are walking onto hallowed ground only to curdle the babe’s milk?”

The thief wound her way to the front of the church and lowered herself down from the pews. Rows of votives sputtered at her approach, wilting and weaving blind shadows across the mote laden sanctuary. She cocked her hip and sent her small hand across the tiers of candles to feel them burn, “Children throw tantrums, not Rauko.” Seyatte looked squarely at the mark.

One hard push sent the trays of stubby tallow crashing to the floor, freeing the flames to lap at the prune colored carpets and haughty vestments. The fire climbed the tapestries of cheap satin and slithered across the cold stone slabs to lick at the pews it correctly mistook for dry kindling. Suddenly the angles that were carved into the lintel of the pulpit did not look as though they were singing, but rather screaming as soot clung to their faces in thick ribbons. Seyatte warily pawed around the glass, gilded slivers like dying embers in the emerald pierce of her stare, and a bark of scornful laughter escaped her. She let his eyes follow her hands; other than a slow inhale and a melancholy blink, they were the only things on her person that moved. Her fingers gently caressed the flaccid dagger at her hip from hilt to tip and she tilted her head at him, elongating her neck as a purely faux pout screwed itself onto her lips.

“If it meant that much to you, one would think it would have been looked after.” Seyatte drew the bone blade from its belt loop slowly as she soured her tone with fierce sarcasm, emphasizing her statement with the angle of her blonde brows. She held the dagger by its honed edge and extended it to him as the air grew hotter than the memory of the pits.

“Here, you can have it back.” The thief’s body was rigid, coiled to the point of palsy. Her expression darkened, “For I have another that I mean to stab through your heart.” Her smile became a sneer, “And then, may the fire send you back to where you left me.”

“Seyatte.” He breathed her name like an oath and immediately regretted making a sound. In the up tilt of her chin he saw the splitting of her mouth tremble into a grin, but for a moment, enough to doom him in recognition. Her sneer was his oubliette, his crimes the lock on his stone cell, and as the fires caught the tapestries on the wall, he blamed irony for so sinking him in such a predicament. Rough hewn cotton dyed with living colors burned unevenly, sketch work saints haloed with orange flame and then martyred to Jupiter’s will. The pews caught slower, like campfire logs still moist from long rains, and as the fires filled the cathedral, they stood like pyres to a heathen god. Heat baked off the stone walls, clouds of fresh ash and the mint haze of expensive wood oil holding just above their heads like a fog front. Auere removed his faux priest habit, crumpling the rice paper at his collar into a ball and tossing it to vanish in a bit of heady flame. The fringes of his cloak caught embers and smoked at his ankles, cherubim of his blasphemy leaving scorch marks like freckles. He kicked divots into the stone floor with the toes of steel tipped boots and kept his eyes down turned, away from the offered blade.

“I’m not willing just yet to trade bone and steel for bone and blood,” hominy amber, prehistoric glaze, looked up at Seyatte’s face. When he knew her last, she was a hodgepodge of lost memories, regret laced with the misnomer of hope, calcified by hatred. In the inky sensuality of the void, promises made and forgotten were like bitter almonds against a starving palate, the debt he owed to the female Rauko could not be assuaged with gold. Auereliano would not peddle lies to such a woman, who slept a breath away from oblivion and laughed at the cost of destruction. The way she held nightmares, she held a blade, and Auere knew well enough that the price of sweet, disarming words would be a short trip back to the earthy blackness he came from.

“I will not excuse myself for abandoning you,” Auereliano took two slow steps backwards; dragging his feet to symphonic harmony with the crackling of hungry flames, lapping at the edges of their parley. “But fire is not mine to control, I have no favor with these gods.” Auere held his hands over the nearest pew to the altar, which had been stripped of its lace mantle in a geyser of hungry combustion. The caress of fire patterned scorch marks into the pads of his fingers, drawing moisture from his palm until the skin blistered and cracked. Auereliano pulled his hand away with a grimace, showing Seyatte the burn with a sneer. “What birthed me, denies me. I am not surprised you would deny me as well.”

The demon gambler took in Seyatte’s empress expression and marveled at beauty scintillated with madness, creeping on her handsome features. The hard pallor of the streets did little to hide the majesty of her soft jaw, the auger of color that crept into her cheeks as anger and heat played with emotion. In the rhapsody of her green eyes he could see a world of torture, reserved for him in the hills and valleys of her fantasy. The groan of longing that he withheld from her glaring constancy considered the pain in lieu of death; this was no game to be won. Seyatte was his dark conscious, the epicenter of his deceits in this world and the last; he played slight of hand to the defamed of Ea’s crust. To her, he offered the bland truth.

“I know that my tenderness means nothing to you, your highness.” He couldn’t have imagined a stronger blaze than the inferno she had birthed; the cathedral would not be able to contain the explosion so ready in her anger. Auereliano did not pause for her rage to erupt. “But I would have sacrificed my life to draw you here in your original glory.” He sighed, just a bit along the border of drama, “But I cannot expect you to accept that, so…” He caught it out of the corner of his eye, as the pew at the head of the church crumbled under the weight of its consumption. A gust of long trapped air had created a whirlpool of ash, drawing his attention to some hidden passage by the wooden bench. Auere felt a rush of mead laced recollection come to him in waves, bar stories penned in breathy lies and half truths singed with recollection. The church was rumored long ago to be a sanctuary to the thinnest of the criminal element in Lomedor. The illusion of the hole in the ground promised sanctuary from an untenable situation. All it required was a confident bluff.

Auereliano drew his sword with a flourish, holding it at his side as confidently as he could. “…we will carve out our pound of flesh among that which birthed me and gave me succor. I will pray to Jupiter for his guidance.” Auereliano spoke the words as quickly as possible, hoping that Seyatte’s ignorance of this world would not mark them for what they were. With his prayer spoken, he charged her.

At the very least it appeared that way, an Illusion of limited flare but an effective distraction, his body already tensed to move. When his shouting doppelganger passed the marks he had dug into the cement, Auereliano sprung to action. The muscles in his legs spun like pistons at red line, he pushed himself into the air and landed on the ledge of the shattered stain glass window. Seyatte was at his back, he could not know if she fell for his ploy, yet even if she didn’t, she would expect him to be trying to escape. With his booted toes pressed on the thin window ledge, he propelled himself backwards, twisting in the air and opening his arms as if pleading for an embrace. In the mixture of fire and ash, smoke charring his lungs with each breath, Auereliano slammed into Seyatte, aiming for that thin hole in the ground. Their bodies met in a rush of flesh and they went, tumbling, into the darkness, their voices in unison as they screamed through the fall.