He listened, the cup of half-filled wine immobile in his hands. His eyes were still, for not once did he glance away from her as vapors of verbiage sallied forth to strike upon his ears. Her loquaciousness held more than mere words. The strings of the instrument of vocalization expanded, if however briefly, a melody of her history spread out before him – the summer of strife, the autumn of loss, the winter of discontent, and finally the glory of spring and of growth – there was more than a hint of corollary in this tune to that of his own experiences. He would not say so though.
“Thus we have the being between, the half-breeds, the proverbial mule of perceptive existence.” His speech lost some of the polished air that had comprised every utterance here-to-fore. The words just uttered and those that followed were hard as stone and as cold as the frozen as the land just being discussed. “Always, or near always, we are used by many, abused by many, loved by few, but almost never entirely wanted.”
Then as quick as a spark, the entire emotional character of his companion altered.
As the caterpillar becomes the butterfly, as the ugly duckling becomes the swan, as the cursed frog becomes the prince, winter’s harshness gave way to vibrant lush sunny spring. His eyes crinkled as one does when smiling and a hint of warmth went into them. Then He spied the other onlookers, their pernicious expressions, the condemnatory cast of their eyes, the hush-hush conversations that shouted that aspersions were being hurled his companion’s way.
It might have been a mere consequence of the geometry of the building, or the topography of the various furnishings, or perhaps of just an outcome of random mass conversational dynamics, but whatever the case was he clearly heard the bald red beard near the wall snort, and say to his companions
“Feast your eyes on the dunce lass at the bar, a real pig slopper for sure, what aye?”
The table broke out into raucous laughter, as apparently they all agreed. Across the way, Drumheller spied the flamboyant harlot make a lewd gesture in the bars direction, followed by an exaggerated face, like the comic buffoonery of the idiot used by actors. The demure one at least had the good sense to cover her smile, or her laughter, with her hand. These actions were to be expected, he understood, but he also comprehended, on a near instinctual level, that he could not allow the current situation to continue given the high likelihood it would escalate. He needed to shut it down.
He needed to kill it, the idea of it, so it would not continue.
So he did. A common phrase that had thrown around the Holdfast was that he could let his eyes do all the talking. Kel’Kaush had been the one to coin the expression, and given that it came from him meant that the expression carried more weight than it would have had coming from most others in his relative age group. It was a simple trick really; he just let his true nature show. To do that his soul simply had to retreat. Return back to the hidden place deep inside that were his and only his. A place he had constructed when he was only five years old and desperately needed somewhere to hide, when he could not hide. He would not fully go there, only go there in part, as going there in full would be a disservice to his companion.
So he stood in his mind’s eye on the threshold of that secret inner place, while he tensed his eye muscles, just in time to match gazes with the gaudy strumpet. He witnessed her eyes go amazingly wide as her large painted lips opened slightly in slack-jawed fear. As from some indiscernible distance, his awareness catalog the sharp causticness of fear, not total panic mind – that putrid odor would have cut through all the aromas of the room in a heartbeat – as it was he only smelled faintly her anxiety over what he might do. His gaze swept across the floor, meeting the gazes of many of the jeerers, letting them all see the transformation that he had obtained, letting them all have a small taste of unease.
He knew precisely what they were looking at; he had once looked into a small mirror and witnessed the change himself first hand. The eyes were no longer gem like, no, but looked like the face of a frozen lake. They were more than that, and he knew it. They were not the eyes of a zombeefide corpse, the dried out husks of necrotized flesh, nor the altered animalistic orbs of the vampire or the Nether spawn; no, these were something alien in their own right. The soulless gaze of a fully living being, capable of who knew what.
Drumheller closed his eyes for a moment, and recalled the core of himself from that place where he had let it go; from that threshold of the hidden place buried deep inside. When his gaze once more fell upon his companion no oddity would be noticed. He took another sip of wine.
“I would very much like to meet your mistress someday. She seems quite the woman; no doubt you have learned many skills from her.”
He sat down his wine glass, which was now half full and bent down to snatch up the unconchus tiefling, and dumped him unseramoniously on a bar stool. He made no move to stop the fellows head from hitting the bar when he slumped forward.
“In a moment, we’ll take your friend for a walk.”
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