My wings buckle against viscous fizz as swill strings reach out and pull me under. I plummet like an eventide shadow as a shallow surface pop steals my last breath. Boney branches dislocate from dissolving joints and my abdomen turns to iron.\n\nHe is as oblivious as he is potted. It's a long way to the bottom, sellsword. Mend or bend.\n\nThe golden embellishments of his sword's hilt glimmers faintly against candlelight, catching the eye of the distant paladin. She moves toward him like a desperate mountain in an earthquake, clinging to her goal.\n\nShe demands him as a guide in the blizzard, with heavy echoes booming behind my bedraggled mercenary. \n\nHer interruption wounds me like an axe to heartwood; his thoughts trail away into memories of distant [[water|water]], but my bark is left unsodden. \n\nHis voice hangs and loosens like a bramble snake, nodding off his indifference of their troubled journey. \n\nShe retorts like a waking volcano as ripples in his drink reverberate from her voice. Demands turn to desperation, and the volcano lies dormant among her pleads once more. \n\nHis mumblings trace the tale of being just as lost and forgotten as the next, silently shrinking into his barstool, begging to be ignored. \n\nWith hand on pommel, the mountain woman bellows, weaving her story like fragmented tapered yarn of countless lives lost, kings and their daughters, and her unwavering holy guard. In passing, she maps his fate of honor and glory, depicting the illusion of choice, of treasure or treason. \n\nAle dribbles from his lip as he attempts to reclaim the little humanity he has left. With a weak neck under a heavy head and a face as wrinkled as a sleeping hound, he grizzles out and questions her name and loyalty.\n\nShe answers with falsehoods and claims of unbridled virtue, of the campaign to reclaim their lost king. Truly, she is of unanswered love, a dreamer clinging to an impossible life that will never unfurl, willed by surrendered faith and pocketed infatuation of the princess she holds so dear. \n\nI am illusive wiles, an ethereal temptress, a skullpainted moth. \n\nYou, my little sellsword, are a plaything. \n\nAnd I grow tired of waiting. \n\nHe swigs the last of his ale as I make my home in his throat. I lodge and spread like a budding wildfire, suffocating his breath with each desperate endeavor. I disentangle and eject within a bloodied cough, soaring through the air as I meet my predestined destination: a candle filled with dwindling light. \n\nThe tallow is soft and wet. I bounce and tumble as what remains of me combusts like a tiny storm. The burning wick bends and collapses against the ale-soaked oak. \n\nI yearn for the sound of catching [[flame|sellsword end]]. \n

My wings buckle against viscous fizz as swill strings reach out and pull me under. I plummet like an eventide shadow as a shallow surface pop steals my last breath. Boney branches dislocate from dissolving joints and my abdomen turns to iron.\n\nHe is as oblivious as he is potted. It's a long way to the bottom, sellsword. Mend or bend.\n\nThe golden embellishments of his sword's hilt glimmers faintly against candlelight, catching the eye of the distant paladin. She moves toward him like a desperate mountain in an earthquake, clinging to her goal.\n\nShe demands him as a guide in the blizzard, with heavy echoes booming behind my bedraggled mercenary. \n\nHer interruption wounds me like an axe to heartwood; his thoughts trail away into memories of distant water, but my bark is left unsodden. \n\nHis voice hangs and loosens like a bramble snake, nodding off his indifference of their troubled journey. \n\nShe retorts like a waking volcano as ripples in his drink reverberate from her voice. Demands turn to desperation, and the volcano lies dormant among her pleads once more. \n\nHis mumblings trace the tale of being just as lost and forgotten as the next, silently shrinking into his barstool, begging to be ignored. \n\nWith hand on pommel, the mountain woman bellows, weaving her story like fragmented tapered yarn of countless lives lost, kings and their daughters, and her unwavering holy guard. In passing, she maps his fate of honor and glory, depicting the illusion of choice, of treasure or treason. \n\nAle dribbles from his lip as he attempts to reclaim the little humanity he has left. With a weak neck under a heavy head and a face as wrinkled as a sleeping hound, he grizzles out and questions her name and loyalty.\n\nShe answers with falsehoods and claims of unbridled virtue, of the campaign to reclaim their lost king. Truly, she is of unanswered love, a dreamer clinging to an impossible life that will never unfurl, willed by surrendered faith and pocketed infatuation of the princess she holds so dear. \n\nI am illusive wiles, an ethereal temptress, a skullpainted moth. \n\nYou, my little sellsword, are a plaything. \n\nAnd I grow tired of waiting. \n\nHe swigs the last of his ale as I make my home in his throat. I lodge and spread like a budding wildfire, suffocating his breath with each desperate endeavor. I disentangle and eject within a bloodied cough, soaring through the air as I meet my predestined destination: a candle filled with dwindling light. \n\nThe tallow is soft and wet. I bounce and tumble as what remains of me combusts like a tiny storm. The burning wick bends and collapses against the ale-soaked oak. \n\nI yearn for the sound of catching [[flame|sellsword end]]. \n

<i>The apple orchard. \n\nIt was only for a season, but I can still taste them in everything I eat. \n\nI arrived by accident. Couldn't tell you the job that brought me there, either. \n\nCan't remember. Doesn't matter.\n\nShe said she had some work for me. I guess I still looked trustworthy then. \n\nA pack of skunk pigs were having their way with her crops.\n\nAngry little shits. Should've used a bow. \n\nCouldn't get them all, but they'd learn to stay away. \n\nShe kept me warm and well fed as thanks. \n\nTold me there'd still be work there if I was interested, and I was, but couldn't pay me until they'd ripened. \n\nShe taught me everything there was to know about apple picking. \n\nI thought I was dreaming.\n\nIt felt like I was someone else. \n\nBut winter came by early that year. \n\nAnd she lost the late harvest.\n\nI knew at that point she couldn't pay me, but I didn't care.\n\nShe'd let me stay until the trail warmed up. Or at least that was my excuse. \n\nMaybe hers, too.\n\n"Consider it my payment," I said. Real slick.\n\nWe picked what few apples could be saved and got drunk off the rest.\n\nI fell in love that winter. \n\nShe never asked me to leave that spring.\n\nI was tending to the trees one hazy morning. \n\nRaking, or... pruning, or... \n\nI don't know, I can't remember. \n\nShe was somewhere in the distance, a voice in the fog. \n\nI knew because she sang when she worked. \n\nBut then the singing stopped.\n\nAnd suddenly I regretted staying there for as long as I did. \n\nThe past will always catch up to you, no matter how far you run.\n\nHe was looking for me. \n\nBut he found her first. \n\nI buried her body in the orchard and planted a sapling as her tombstone. \n\nThat tree must be bearing fruit by now. \n\nAs for him...\n\nI dragged him behind her horse until I found a hungry pack of skunk pigs. \n\nI broke his legs and left him there to die.\n\nI left that orchard the same way I came - in a haze. \n\nA day doesn't go by without me thinking of her. \n\nI'll never have that peace [[again|Fleeing from Frost 2]]. \n</i>\n

<i>During the day it's easy to forget your demons, but they always have a way of sneaking right back before you try to fall asleep. I've fought off mine by dreaming... dreaming that I'd lived a different life away from the unclean work of a sword for hire. \n\nI even had a chance to get out once. I didn't understand the choice I'd been given at the time, to leave this life and start another. I was only on my third or fourth job, and the demons were still few enough that I could ward them off with a few pints. \n\nThat's no longer the case.\n\nI was the furthest east I'd ever been and still young enough to think that one day, I'd go further. I've only ever seen one ocean, and it did its best to not be seen. Hidden so heavily by the mist, I can barely remember what it looked like. \n\nBut I'll never forget the sound of gulls over rushing water, or the smell of sour and salt. \n\nI was waiting for a package - or more specifically, a person in a box, but that's another story - at a small tavern built out on the last leg of the pier. After a few days of waiting and drinking what tasted like fermented fish water, a merchant ship docked and every sailor that came off that boat first came through the tavern. \n\nA man, who I'd later learn was the ship's captain, sat down beside me at the bartop and ordered a drink. He was tall and thin and old with skin like tree bark, and wore so many golden trinkets that he jingled as he laughed. We had a short conversation that likely meant very little to him, but I retrace my words every time I close my eyes.\n\nHe asked me what I did for a living and I told him. He laughed and called me stupid. He said that if I was looking for death, that I would die happier on the sea. \n\nThen he invited me to join his crew, just like that. He explained what he did, and while he wasn't a pirate, it wasn't too far off; he preferred the term 'merchant smuggler', whatever that meant. \n\nI'd no interest in being a pirate or living a life on the ocean, so without hesitation, I declined. I was already on a job, anyway, and the pay was good for just picking up a package. \n\nHe didn't like my answer. \n\nHe turned away from me and faced the bar then ordered a few more rounds in succession. \n\nHe didn't say another word to me. \n\nAfter he was done drinking, he padded me on the back and let out a whistle as loud as a horn. His crew - who turned out to be everyone else that filled the tavern - got up and followed him outside. \n\nHad he just asked me one more time, I might have reconsidered. \n\nI've gone through the conversation every so often in my head, each time it changes just a little. Sometimes -no, most times- I accept his offer. \n\n"Could use a person like you," he would say before laughing slowly and heavily.\n\nI wouldn't respond. I was an idiot, even in my dreams. \n\n"You," he would say. "Man at arms. Landlubber!"\n\n"Me," I might have said. "You could use a person like me - I heard you. Why, because I'm big? Thanks, but-"\n\n"No, you are not big. You are a small man. No. No, I could use you on my boat because you are stupid," this time, his laughter stopped and the tone of his voice fell. "You do not know where you are and you do not try to blend in. You come here looking for bones and will find your own if you're not careful." \n\n"I'll be careful, thanks." \n\n"But I like stupid people," he would continue without hearing a word I said. "They sing songs about stupid people, and I like that," he would slam his palm into the center of my back and laugh.\n\n"There's songs about love loss, and hunger, and the monsters of the deep, too," I probably wouldn't have said, but in this dream I did. \n\n"Yes. Yes, there are songs of those things, but I do not like those songs. I like you. I could use a person like you." \n\nIn another life, I shook his hand and accepted his offer. \n\nI would have told him of the package I was expecting and the men that would be chasing me down til the end of my days.\n\nHe'd say that they'd never find me. \n\nI would learn how to navigate by the stars and everything it takes to operate a vessel. I would drink and make love at every corner of the world. My hands would bleed and my bones would ache, but from - mostly - honest hard work, not from being a ruthless thug. \n\nWe all have our demons, and I can't say that I'd be free of them out on the ocean. \n\nBut I know I'd have [[less|cling 2]]. \n</i>\n

The walls of melting wood washes over her announced titles and accolades. Disbelief freezes the tavern's patrons as the paladin acts on instinct; she rips the cloak from her back to douse the enveloping fire. \n\nBut it mocks her as I have mocked her, bringing cloth and fur to ash. Her cloak feeds the flame, guiding it to wooden casks filled with ale.\n\nLong have I waited for this moment, decades of hiding as seedbombs and apple orchards, of barkfaced pirates and mossy druids. \n\nIncandescent arms embrace the tavern whole. Those who were meant to join me escape with their lives and watch the tavern crumble and burn. Those that were in the way of my toys burn the same.\n\nThe remaining few shiver in awe as smoldering flame touches snow. \n\nAn ill prepared drunkard who will later die of frostbite.\n\nThe bent barkeep who will die of a voided heart.\n\nA princess revealed and protected.\n\nHer paladin.\n\nTwo faceless knights of the holy guard, trembling and fatigued.\n\nAnd my sellsword.\n\nHe clenches at the emptiness under his belt, a location once filled by a charmed satchel of limitless coin, an inhibitor of my own design. He thinks of the burning leather and melting gold and the fire finally hurts him. \n\nI feel again.\n\nHe tries to find the words to express his longing, his words crisp like floating embers as his guilt buries him. \n\nBeside him, a horrored paladin, a face muddied with tears. \n\nThe sellsword slurs out an acceptance to the paladin's previous proposal, a bond that may finally give him a purpose. \n\nAll paths, woven and worn, will sooner or later trail back to my infinite forest kingdom. \n\nSome of you will reach me, but you will find no kings in my forest, only salvation or death.\n\nThey look to the west, and in the face of the moon, I look back. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Small tallow torches melt and mock with parasitic light; empty beacons burning boards and barstools. \n\nBundled malefactors stay from frostbite with tapered slow furnaces, shivered statues in shadowed cobweb corners. \n\nI search not for madcap rapscallions who have already found their way; I seek those who have stopped looking.\n\nI keep to the ravaged face of a sellsword drowning in desolation. A fortune hunter warped and withered by regrets and self-afflictions buries deep in his clay coffin goblet filled with ale and ailment. \n\nHis dull stares reflect off the frost polished metal behind the bent barkeep, inspecting what could have [[been|First Flashback From Fire]]. \n\nI see a mangled toy worth mending, guiding, twisting, breaking, and my plot expanding, enduring, unfurling.\n\nI am the dancing fish to the sickly bear; the trail of gold to the selfish man. I am both the quenching thirst and the running river, through whims I carve through the earth and guide you to me. \n\nThe tavern's hatches burst with whisping floods of snow, dousing neighboring candlelight. Wearing woolen furs, freshly flayed bearskins, and drenched gowns, a tiny army fills what few seats that remain unoccupied. \n\nSooner than I [[speculated|Speculated]].\n\n

I am unseeing, bound beyond and below the snow, bethinking trails long forgotten. \n\nLow hollow hills blister and kench at my thinning influence, a tangible clout of spider silk and farmer's ilk lost in frosted billows. My reach is oft broadleafed and evergreen though dead and distant dandiprats are sifting sands in this glaciate glebe. \n\nHalfghosts hover above faded footsteps; sinking swordsmen and invented nobility march to deathsong. A fellowship shackled to honor a lordling mooncalf's plight, but the chains are heavy hanging. \n\nHere in the endless white, a tavern taunts the winter hammer. An alehouse of limitless supply, a checkpoint for the wary and the worried, a volunteer prison.\n\nHere, I am a moth\n\n[[flitting by flame.|Flitting by Flame]]\n[[fleeing from frost.|fleeing from frost]]\n\n

<i>"Wake up," I must've said a dozen times before he snapped back into reality. \n\nDrugged up to oblivion with both arms reaching for the stars; this was the guy we were looking for? We scrambled for months in the cold north, barely surviving by the skin off our bones... for him? For this?\n\nThe man who hired me called himself the Banker, but he was just as broke as me. This druid held information that was going to make us both filthy rich, or so he rattled off to me every time I'd give him a chance. The story never made any sense, and when the Banker started crushing the druid's face under his boot, this voyage felt fueled by revenge instead of gold. \n\nI didn't understand, and in my lack of understanding, I was overwhelmed with regret. I risked my life for some fruitless bounty in hopes of retiring; a decision I repeated over and over while labeling it an occupation. Always bright eyed by potential and greed, always disappointed in the outcome. I'd gone gray without learning a lesson. \n\nThe Banker's boot started to twist against the druid's cheek.\n\n...or a home to call my own...\n\nThe druid's face flushed with struggling rage.\n\n...or a son or daughter to call me father...\n\nThe Banker spat obscenities while clenching his fist. "TELL ME! TELL ME!"\n\n...or a wife to call me anything... \n\nThe druid's eyes rolled into the back of his head.\n\nI could have had an apple tree. I could've watched it grow. \n\nInstead I'm pulling hallucinating deer-worshippers out from under blankets of moss and dangling their lives over a cliff's edge. For a few pieces of silver. \n\n...I don't know. Maybe the cold was getting to me. Maybe I needed to be as high as this druid. \n\nMaybe I needed a drink.\n\nI couldn't hear anything but the crashing water. I was lost in tired thoughts.\n\nI watched as the druid stood up and effortlessly pushed the Banker's foot away as if he wasn't there at all. \n\nI froze as the Banker's other foot slipped from underneath him, his face washing white.\n\nI did nothing as he screamed and fell into the mist below. \n\nThe druid and I stared at one another. His eyes no longer wandered with stoned wariness. Instead, he wondered what the hell I was going to do. \n\nI had no idea.\n\nBefore I could react, he dove off the cliff and vanished with a fucking swan dive. \n\nThere went my retirement. Well, shit.\n\nI would spend the rest of the day finding a path down the cliff face, then rummaging through the mist and debris looking for any remnants of either one of them - or maybe even just a gold piece - but found nothing. \n\nMy mind gave up on me before my body had the chance. I knew what I had to do: get out of the cold, find some shelter, and hopefully find something else to do with my life. \n\nEither that or lie down for a bit. Maybe it was time for me to go, too.\n\nNo. \n\nI did the only thing my body could let me do. \n\nI started [[walking|swim 2]].\n\n</i>

<img src="http://www.ofelements.net/images/compassgod.png">\n\nThe thoughts of gods are unstable little things.\n\nThere are some who are of Beauty, trapped and torn by scent and skin, resting symmetry beneath fevered lions. \n\nThere are some who are of Fear, bloodied dreadfruit sleeping on black mirror shields with hurried faces. \n\nThere are some who are of Time, trickled and spent like coined seasons, bellies bursting with blue birth and red oblivion.\n\nThere are some who are false, forged by flesh and feeble mind, harvesting drowned rats through liar labyrinths. \n\nThe are others who lay and frolic and dine and wither in the in-between, floating capricious Thoughts wary of none other but themselves.\n\nI am of none, a toymaker, a dreamshaper, a willbender; hatching, breaking, and building through rot and crown.\n\nI was a fleeting trembled Thought, a drifted void, a flickered flame born of winter valiance and summer chicanery. \n\nI am a lost god of nothing, freed and absent of acolyte and ceremony, worshiped by white rivers and collared branches. \n\nCurious and parched for burdens am I, and I wander. \n\nI pierce through the canopy and spy my [[sellsword|sellsword]], precisely where I last left him. \n\n\n\n\n\n

Snow slivers and ice fingers reach through salt-lined wooden walls, curling and cutting through warm semblance. \n\nBundled malefactors stay from frostbite with tapered slow furnaces, shivered statues in shadowed cobweb corners. \n\nI search not for madcap rapscallions who have already found their way; I seek those who have stopped looking.\n\nI keep to the ravaged face of a sellsword drowning in desolation. A fortune hunter warped and withered by regrets and self-afflictions buries deep in his clay coffin goblet filled with ale and ailment. \n\nHis dull stares reflect off the frost polished metal behind the bent barkeep, inspecting what could have been. \n\nI see a mangled toy worth mending, guiding, twisting, breaking, and my plot expanding, enduring, unfurling.\n\nSeventeen autumns shed as he stays a stone of dizzying complacency. He perplexes in a way the wind has never swept, marked a hero but empty of attempt. \n\nThe tavern's hatches burst from whisping floods of snow, dousing neighboring candlelight. Wearing wool, freshly flayed bearskins, and drenched gowns, a listless fellowship fills what few seats that remain unoccupied. \n\nSooner than I [[speculated|Speculated]].\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

<i>Every man has his regrets - whether or not they're willing to admit it - and anyone in my line of work has had at least one job they'd wish they could forget forever. \n\nI've had a few. Everyone's young once.\n\n"Wait til our signal. You're getting paid to wait. You'll know it when you see it."\n\nTheir words rattled in my head for weeks. \n\n"A fire in the sky." \n\nWhat was I supposed to make of that? By his bones, I'd know it. \n\nI made myself a home with some livestock in a butcher's barn on the outskirts of the desert city. \n\nThere I waited for the signal. Drank when I could, slept when I couldn't. \n\nIt never rained. My eyes couldn't adjust to the smoke, dust, and sand. I was afraid I might've missed the signal in between slow blinks and constant squinting.\n\nThen one day, after spending nearly a month sleeping in pigshit, it happened. The thin and uniform gray above me turned a shade of orange that I'd never seen before. It was bright... and terrifying.\n\nThen it started raining down. Hail-sized balls of fire bounced and sparked off the dead earth. I didn't have much time. I was probably too late. \n\nI never bothered to roam the city streets beforehand, you know, to gain a footing on the layout. \n\nMazes of irrigation and sewer systems made this city more complex than most. Bridges stacked on other bridges connecting to new bridges, with homes and shanties neatly tucked in every corner. \n\nThe men who hired me - dressed in robes of shifting colors - gave me what looked like a large seed and told me to plant it and that after that, the job would be done. \n\nAt the time I thought they were being poetic. Thought I'd be looking for a sunset maybe, or taking part in some ritual. Instead they unleashed hell from the heavens. \n\nAnd I helped them. \n\nFire and ash continued to rain down in heavy clumps. \n\nThe streets were empty and the windows locked shut. Most of the slums that were built with wood and spare parts were already lost, black smoke pouring out from underneath bridges and archways. \n\nI expected to hear screams or cries for help, but all I remember were the rumbling flames. \n\nPanicking and struggling to breathe, I lost myself in the smoke. I was supposed to reach some statue, or a town center, a place where all streets - and cesspools - lead to, but I'd gone far enough. \n\nEven if it had been the most coin for a day's work I'd ever make, I wasn't about to lose my life. \n\nI pulled the large seed from my pocket and tossed it into the nearest pool of sewage. \n\n"Once you plant it, run."\n\nSo I did. My legs were trembling and I was hard for breath. I felt the ground shaking beneath me, but I couldn't tell if it was my legs giving out or something else. I'd learn later that my legs were fine. \n\nI reached outside the city walls and stopped to catch my breath. The sandstone barrier hid the pillars of fire, but couldn't hide the billowing smoke emptying from the city. \n\nI ran again and didn't stop until the red sky above me was gone. \n\nOnce I felt safe enough, I turned back to see the damage I'd done. \n\nHalf the city was burning while the rest was crumbling like a kicked-over sandcastle. \n\nAt that distance, it barely felt real. Had I not been in the heart of that mess just a moment prior, I would have thought my eyes were going out on me. \n\nI watched as a once great city became a pile of rubble. All from my doing. \n\nThe fire in the sky was just the start. That seed brought the whole city to ash. \n\nYears went by and I tried to convince myself that if it wasn't me that did it, they would have hired some other idiot to get the job done. At least I got my money. \n\nThe lie never comforted me. \n\nYeah, I got my money, and the pay was good, but all the gold in the world wouldn't have ever helped wipe that memory away. \n\nI never figured out who the men in robes were or what their motives were beyond the obvious. \n\nThousands of lives were lost because I needed money to rest my head. \n\nNever thought about all the nights I'd wake up drenched in a cold sweat, wishing I'd done something [[different|Flipping from Flame 2]]. \n\n</i>

My legs dangle like loose roots over a cliff's edge against the glazed rim of his mug. A frozen tidal wave to the touch, I cling like a beggar to rotted fruit. Deep below the dark murk bubbles an ocean of brown. It fizzes and scrapes against my jittering powder wings, each snapping pop the beckon call of a breaking jaw. \n\nHe sees me through eyes of hazed inebriation. It's a long walk home, sellsword. Mend or bend.\n\nThe golden embellishments of his sword's hilt glimmers faintly against candlelight, catching the eye of the distant paladin. She moves toward him like a desperate mountain in an earthquake, clinging to her goal.\n\nShe demands him as a guide in the blizzard, with heavy echoes booming behind my bedraggled mercenary. \n\nHer interruption wounds me like an axe to heartwood; his thoughts trail away into memories of distant fire, but my bark is left unburned. \n\nHis voice hangs and loosens like a bramble snake, nodding off his indifference of their troubled journey. \n\nShe retorts like a waking volcano as ripples in his drink reverberate from her voice. Demands turn to desperation, and the volcano lies dormant among her pleads once more. \n\nHis mumblings trace the tale of being just as lost and forgotten as the next, silently shrinking into his barstool, begging to be ignored. \n\nWith hand on pommel, the mountain woman bellows, weaving her story like fragmented tapered yarn of countless lives lost, kings and their daughters, and her unwavering holy guard. In passing, she maps his fate of honor and glory, depicting the illusion of choice, of treasure or treason. \n\nAle dribbles from his lip as he attempts to reclaim the little humanity he has left. With a weak neck under a heavy head and a face as wrinkled as a sleeping hound, he grizzles out and questions her name and loyalty.\n\nShe answers with falsehoods and claims of unbridled virtue, of the campaign to reclaim their lost king. Truly, she is of unanswered love, a dreamer clinging to an impossible life that will never unfurl, willed by surrendered faith and pocketed infatuation of the princess she holds so dear. \n\nI am illusive wiles, an ethereal temptress, a skullpainted moth. \n\nYou, my little sellsword, are a plaything. \n\nAnd I grow tired of waiting. \n\nMy wings twitch with jittering temptation as I stare at his spotted hand. His eyes catch me again, now brimming with delirious disdain. A finger bends back against a thumb. He flicks me toward my predestined destination: a candle filled with dwindling light. \n\nThe tallow is soft and wet. I bounce and tumble as scale and wing combust like tiny storms. The burning wick bends and collapses against ale-soaked oak. \n\nI yearn for the sound of catching [[flame|sellsword end]]. \n\n\n\n

My legs dangle like loose roots over a cliff's edge against the glazed rim of his mug. A frozen tidal wave to the touch, I cling like a beggar to rotted fruit. Deep below the dark murk bubbles an ocean of brown. It fizzes and scrapes against my jittering powder wings, each snapping pop the beckon call of a breaking jaw. \n\nHe sees me through eyes of hazed inebriation. It's a long walk home, sellsword. Mend or bend.\n\nThe golden embellishments of his sword's hilt glimmers faintly against candlelight, catching the eye of the distant paladin. She moves toward him like a desperate mountain in an earthquake, clinging to her goal.\n\nShe demands him as a guide in the blizzard, with heavy echoes booming behind my bedraggled mercenary. \n\nHer interruption wounds me like an axe to heartwood; his thoughts trail away into memories of distant [[fire|fire]], but my bark is left unburned. \n\nHis voice hangs and loosens like a bramble snake, nodding off his indifference of their troubled journey. \n\nShe retorts like a waking volcano as ripples in his drink reverberate from her voice. Demands turn to desperation, and the volcano lies dormant among her pleads once more. \n\nHis mumblings trace the tale of being just as lost and forgotten as the next, silently shrinking into his barstool, begging to be ignored. \n\nWith hand on pommel, the mountain woman bellows, weaving her story like fragmented tapered yarn of countless lives lost, kings and their daughters, and her unwavering holy guard. In passing, she maps his fate of honor and glory, depicting the illusion of choice, of treasure or treason. \n\nAle dribbles from his lip as he attempts to reclaim the little humanity he has left. With a weak neck under a heavy head and a face as wrinkled as a sleeping hound, he grizzles out and questions her name and loyalty.\n\nShe answers with falsehoods and claims of unbridled virtue, of the campaign to reclaim their lost king. Truly, she is of unanswered love, a dreamer clinging to an impossible life that will never unfurl, willed by surrendered faith and pocketed infatuation of the princess she holds so dear. \n\nI am illusive wiles, an ethereal temptress, a skullpainted moth. \n\nYou, my little sellsword, are a plaything. \n\nAnd I grow tired of waiting. \n\nMy wings twitch with jittering temptation as I stare at his spotted hand. His eyes catch me again, now brimming with delirious disdain. A finger bends back against a thumb. He flicks me toward my predestined destination: a candle filled with dwindling light. \n\nThe tallow is soft and wet. I bounce and tumble as scale and wing combust like tiny storms. The burning wick bends and collapses against ale-soaked oak. \n\nI yearn for the sound of catching [[flame|sellsword end]]. \n\n\n\n

The Compass God

A mountain of effeminate flesh enters among a fray of tin soldiers, a frame hidden by scales of hammered metal. \n\nLike a flash flood, she drums and thunders out demands as quickly as she enters, summoning words of ale, meat, and bread. \n\nA monolith of majesty and devotion, the paladin woman towers as a pillar of possessed obsession, a warped mind from unrequited love. She and the sellsword shared one commonality: both broken toys begging to be unbent. \n\nHiding in her shadow, glimmers a shivering freckled princess drawing listless breaths. She is the carrot dancing at the face of a foolish mule, and she entices both broken toys to me. \n\nThey sit in shroud and secrecy with golden hands gathered by glowing torch light, warmed only by waning ardor of aberrant honor. \n\nThe splintering, stained bar top is as distant as the desert sun; I flutter further from the frozen fellowship and rest my tired wings atop the sellsword's shoulder like a perched parrot or a wheedling whisper. \n\nHis eyes wander like loose lanterns while his posture wilts from the voices behind him. He suddenly, solmemnly feels the tavern walls shrinking inward, discomforted and anxious from his stolen solidarity.\n\nHe lashes out at the barkeep, grumbling and griming over secrets of fresh bread and lamb legs, and the tavern owner bitterly belches of the sellsword's well worn welcome. \n\nMy broken toy's wrinkled face stretches and scrunches with distasteful disdain, hoping and wishing that the loaf molds before it reaches its destination. \n\nI grow tired of his shivering drivel, a displeased depiction that has been painted on his face for a decade too many. \n\nMend or bend, I wish and wonder my vessel's end. \n\nI float and flicker, disputing whether to\n\n[[cling to the edge of his mug|cling]] or \n[[swim to the bottom of his drink.|swim]]\n\n\n\n\n

Kyle Rowan

Snow slivers and ice fingers reach through salt-lined wooden walls, curling and cutting through warm semblance. \n\nBundled malefactors stay from frostbite with tapered slow furnaces, shivered statues in shadowed cobweb corners. \n\nI search not for madcap rapscallions who have already found their way; I seek those who have stopped looking.\n\nI keep to the ravaged face of a sellsword drowning in desolation. A fortune hunter warped and withered by regrets and self-afflictions buries deep in his clay coffin goblet filled with ale and ailment. \n\nHis dull stares reflect off the frost polished metal behind the bent barkeep, inspecting what [[could|First Flashback From Frost]] have been. \n\nI see a mangled toy worth mending, guiding, twisting, breaking, and my plot expanding, enduring, unfurling.\n\nSeventeen autumns shed as he stays a stone of dizzying complacency. He perplexes in a way the wind has never swept, marked a hero but empty of attempt. \n\nThe tavern's hatches burst from whisping floods of snow, dousing neighboring candlelight. Wearing wool, freshly flayed bearskins, and drenched gowns, a listless fellowship fills what few seats that remain unoccupied. \n\nSooner than I [[speculated|Speculated]].\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Small tallow torches melt and mock with parasitic light; empty beacons burning boards and barstools. \n\nBundled malefactors stay from frostbite with tapered slow furnaces, shivered statues in shadowed cobweb corners. \n\nI search not for madcap rapscallions who have already found their way; I seek those who have stopped looking.\n\nI keep to the ravaged face of a sellsword drowning in desolation. A fortune hunter warped and withered by regrets and self-afflictions buries deep in his clay coffin goblet filled with ale and ailment. \n\nHis dull stares reflect off the frost polished metal behind the bent barkeep, inspecting what could have been. \n\nI see a mangled toy worth mending, guiding, twisting, breaking, and my plot expanding, enduring, unfurling.\n\nI am the dancing fish to the sickly bear; the trail of gold to the selfish man. I am both the quenching thirst and the running river, through whims I carve through the earth and guide you to me. \n\nThe tavern's hatches burst with whisping floods of snow, dousing neighboring candlelight. Wearing woolen furs, freshly flayed bearskins, and drenched gowns, a tiny army fills what few seats that remain unoccupied. \n\nSooner than I [[speculated|Speculated]].\n\n