A futile blow from this shaman of bone.
So much knowledge accumulated in the shaman’s mortal span, all useless in the face of one simply more powerful. The law of the jungle.
Another breath through the nose sent curling wisps of fog from Xun’s nostrils. He should not answer the tiger in like...
“Animate? No.”
Those serpentine eyes regarded Ivory’s every movement.
“They are but scaffolding for meat.”
Xunlóng stood there, still as stone, wondering what the necromancer might do next.
“Strings on which puppets dance.”
He canted his head the other direction and held out bound hands...
“You next, poet,” grunted one of Iron Gong’s minions and shoved Xunlóng into the circle.
Xun stumbled forward, giving no resistance, head tilted down. They had not even bothered to undo his bonds. He rattled in a breath, then exhaled.
Foggy wisps curled from his nose and mouth, perhaps just...
Ah, reckless Half-Blade. If only he could look beyond the cold steel of mortal men, perhaps then he might find the weapon which has so long eluded him.
"A warrior’s heart is as fragile as the petals of a lotus," Xunlóng muttered.
His gaze moved, flicking over the faces in the crowd. Iron Gong...
Bursts of paints in reds and blues filled the air overhead.
Festival goers danced in the streets, on the stairs, on the shingles of the roofs.
One might never know them starving. One might never know their lives pitiful. This one moment of joy a bonfire in the ashheaps of their mortal spans...
"Eh," Iron shrugged, looking supremely disappointed by the lack of food.
"That's the thing, Swordsman.... I'm not exactly alone."
Iron Gong raised his torch into the air. Suddenly, dozens of lights blazed to life in the night, all around the campsite.
"You've got room for all my friends?" a...
A sidelong glance flicked toward the irascible swordsman. Not very demure.
"What is your name, traveler?"
The soldier - for soldier he looked - approached, a congenial smile on his lips, broad and warm as the fire he no doubt yearned to sit beside.
"They call me Iron Gong," he rumbled...
"I-"
Xun tilted his head slightly to one side and became, if possible, even more still - as stone.
Then his eyes snicked open and slitted, yellow opals stared out into the night.
From the darkness came the rattle of metal against metal and the glare of torchlight. A solitary figure emerged...
The sealed sage did not move from where he sat upon a bedroll, as still as the tall pines in windless summer on High Cloud Peak.
No stars looked down upon them, occluded by the grey clouds amid the night sky. Snowflakes drifted down from them in small flurries, no hint of winter's wrath in...
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