faderift | OPEN

She narrows her eyes. Then she shoves the kidney in her mouth.

"Next one," she promises, mouth full. Not very full. The little kidney is so little that it is gone in that one bite. Very warm still, very good on the way down. Doki goes back to digging in the bird's body cavity, her head bent industriously over her work.

Some of the down feathers have pulled loose from the wing's underpinnings. The next gust of wind fluffs them, pulls them aloft. They form a brief and amorphous kind of halo around Doki's head, stick to the flyaway hairs that have escaped her elaborate braids.

"You like the Coast?" Squish, squish. Fingers in guts.

Next one.

Dick drops his hand loose from the wrist, willing to hold her to it.

“As much as I like anything.”

He’s been more interested in the squelching of her knuckles in offal, but looks up at her prompt to take in the churn of the surf sucking grey at the shoreline, birds perched on a cliff face looking on in concerned silence. Others wheel out over the scholar’s work, unawares, their cries carried thin on the wind.

“What about you?”

There's blood on her teeth when Doki grins.

"Yes." With sticky fingers, she points down the beach. "There is a cave close, there, very big. When the water comes in, the cave fills up. When the water goes out, there are things to find in there. Swords and bones and bags. Once, a diamond."

She raises an eyebrow at him as she sticks one finger in her mouth, and cleans the blood from it.

"I want to go and look now."

His eyes tick distinctly down to the blood on her teeth, and stay there when she points away down the beach. He hms to himself when her finger emerges clean. ‘Clean.’

This cave, close, very big sounds like a good place to murder someone and smack on their larger and juicier kidneys while leaving behind minimal evidence. Or simply to be caught inside unawares by the tide, drowned and broken on the rocks. His expression doesn’t change, curiosity mild as the rest of him.

YOLO.

“May I join you?”

Someone else would at least ask, should we say we are leaving? Should we leave our guest alone? Should one of us not stay here in case death and danger comes?

Doki says none of these things. She pushes her fingers into the seagull and, with a great final squelch, draws out the second promised kidney.

"I am glad you are no coward."

She stands with a creak of leather, an easy and surprisingly graceful move, and holds the kidney out to him, just as she'd promised.

"Eat, and follow."

No second looks. The moment she's relieved of the kidney, she's off down the beach, heading for the bend in the coastline, where the strip of sand meets staggered rock.

Surely there are others to attend to an emergency in immediacy; Richard isn’t even in armor, traveling clothes fastened up neatly beneath the ruff of his cloak, all dark in shades of black and grey. He does glance back once he’s stood, measuring distance, raw kidney rolled hard between thumb and forefinger to tear the tissue open.

A cursory examination as he falls into step behind Doki reveals no wormy squiggling, and he rakes the mess off his thumb with his teeth.

His footfalls are quiet behind hers in the sand, a damp handful scooped up along the way to scrub the blood from his glove before it cools into the leather. He doesn’t chew much before he swallows either, clinging sand dusted aside, a flask twisted from his belt.

“What do your tattoos represent?”

Edited 2021-03-21 20:50 (UTC)

Doki wipes her arm over her mouth as she walks. Her boots scuff in the dry sand. There are marks like veins that trace the shape of old dried waves, rising and falling and rolling like hills in a painting. These she takes a particular care to scuff over, erasing the marks, destroying the evidence.

"Why do they represent anything?"

She rubs her fingers over the bridge of her nose. The tattoo is old. The color is still good but the mark is as flat as her skin. No one can scuff it out.

"I am not Dalish. Maybe I am just liking blue. What does your beard represent?"

Dickerson’s skepticism rings through his silence for the supposition that she likes the color blue enough to have permanently marked up her face with it. His stride is longer than hers, leaving a line of boot tracks pressed in clean across her scuffwork.

Presently, he spies the edge of an abalone shell poking up from the sand and stoops out of line to scoop it up mid-step.

“It helps me to pass for human.”

Edited (dont look at me) 2021-03-27 01:05 (UTC)

Doki's focus snaps to him, keen like a razor. There is a sparkle in her eyes. Her legs are short, so she's lagged a little behind his big long strides. She's quick now to close that short distance. Who gives a shit about a shell?

"Then it is a very good beard, for a bad beard." She angles her head sideways, as if this will help her see what is beneath the beard. "You are looking very boring, very lowlander, very human. What does it hide?"

The beard is short and coarse and fastidious. Richard looks back to her catching up to him and there’s nothing to discern beneath it but the ghost of a weaker jawline. It goes well with his wind-tossed combover.

“Why would it have to hide anything?”

Abalone in one hand, he smooths his whiskers with the other, reproach mild in the knit of his brow in aside. Rude.

Really. Doki blows out a breath, and the wisps of hair that have escaped her braids puff back from her face. "If you are not human," she says, slowly and with great logic, "you will be needing a way to disguise and hide what is not human. If it is your beard doing this, then your beard has been grown to hide that. So you have not-human chin, yes? Or not human-mouth? The beard would be distraction then. But--"

She leans down, nearly turns her head upsidedown to look from this new angle. Squints. Hmmm.

"I am not seeing."

“There’s nothing to see.” He tucks the shell away in his coat, the ruff of his cloak at his ears stirred faintly by the force of her huff before the wind retakes its hold.

“The idea was to keep people from looking closely at all.”

Very boring, as she’s said.

“Have you enjoyed your time in Riftwatch?”

Doki, with her eyes narrowed, does not let up on her scrutiny for a moment longer. She is looking closely. Very deliberately, then, she raises her hand to her mouth and pulls at the knot of her handwrap with her teeth. Gravity unwinds the long skinny strand of dirty cloth as she shakes it out, holds up her hand. Here is her shard, embedded in her palm, glowing sickly green in the overcast daylight of the Coast.

"No," she says. She bends her fingers over her hand, so that her palm is covered. The glow peeks through. "I have not enjoyed. It is shit to be trapped in one place. I am always running away, before. Now? I am a prisoner. No running. I hate it, so much that I am wanting my hand cut off. This," she shakes her hand, "it is itchier than a bad beard. Instead I will make it a weapon but I will still be hating it. I am being honest with you so that you will tell me what is not human about you."

The steady sink of Richard’s boots slows to a pause when she shakes loose the cloth; he turns on his heel to study her raised palm head on.

“Hm,” he says, following the peek of it through her fingers.

The matching splinter of light wedged in the heel of his left hand doesn’t show through until he’s tugged at the tip of the glove on that side and turned it over to face her. Same hat, same hand.

“My ancestors performed profane rituals with serpents, permanently mingling our bloodlines. Those of us who appear mostly human mix easily back into human society.” He snugs the glove back down firm to his wrist, and there’s nothing in an even glance to indicate that he’s pulling her leg. “This is the longest I’ve remained in one location in many years. I know people here willing to separate an arm at the elbow without asking questions.”

A casual offer, if she’s interested.

Edited (back on that million edits shit) 2021-04-08 18:24 (UTC)

Doki looks from the glow to the boring human face. She looks at the boring human face very hard. Then she looks back at her hand, her arm, which she bends at the elbow, then flexes out again. A test.

She keeps her fist closed, the handful of green light just eking out between the crack of her bunched fingers.

Hm.

"Do you perform profane rituals?"

She sounds hopeful. The irritation has smoothed out, cleanly as if a wave has come up on her and washed it out of her. She begins winding the cloth around her hand again as she walks, the dark blot of the cave's mouth coming closer.

His eyes are a clear, keen blue -- friendly, in spite of osprey intensity against her scrutiny. Daring her to isolate anything especially snakelike now that she knows to look for it.

“Only on special occasions.”

A crook at the corner of his mouth is appropriately sinister.

Then they’re walking again, amidst the sizzling of waves up the shoreline and the cries of gulls squabbling as they cannibalize the bird Doki left broken open on the rocks behind them. The cave mouth looms ahead. This would be an excellent place for a robbery.

"Tell me about the Avvar."

Pleased, Doki laughs. "Good. The Avvar love profane rituals."

Well. To be unbiased, she adds, "I am Avvar and I love profane rituals, so, this is true. We are the people of the Frostbacks. Nothing in the Frostbacks stays the same forever, so, nothing for the Avvar stays the same. My brother and I, when we are wanting to visit our clan, we must first track where they are living. It is a very good game."

As they walk, she pins her hand against her chest to hold the wrap in place. With the fingers of her free hand, she does up the knot, to tie it more securely. It isn't easy to do this one-handed but she has had practice now. She can even do it while avoiding the wash of the waves. She could even do it while thinking of a robbery.

"And we are better than lowlanders. Our gods are better. We do not fuck snakes, but, that is because snakes die in the cold. Bears we would maybe fuck."

“Some snakes are capable of hibernating through the winter,” Richard says, helpfully. “Not that I advocate breeding with them even under more temperate circumstances.”

A look back over his shoulder confirms that their University charge is still turning over rocks in search of their quarry. Ahead, the sounds of the beach rebound strangely off the back of the cavern walls, rolling back on themselves over the low tide.

“Have you pledged yourself to one particular god or do you follow them all?”

Mmm! Doki's noise of keen interest at this new fact is too bright to be merely polite. She has learned something. She will remember this.

"We do not pledge. That is for lowlanders. Why would we bother when the gods live in all things." Theologically simplistic, deeply meaningful. Doki gestures around them, the sheer walls that rise above them, the spars of rock and driftwood, some of it still bearing the shapes it was formed to by human hands when it lived its former life as the boat.

"We have favorites. Everyone is loving the Lady of the Skies, and the Mountain Father, and Hakkon Wintersbreath. My clan has our spirit, Kriccobog. She has been with us very many years, is very fierce, makes her braids into a beard--" She pinches her braids together under her chin to show him. "--much better than yours. Is always eating goat hearts. Someday she will die and we will get a new spirit by making her gifts and singing her songs and things. I will be here--Riftwatch--but it will happen."

She shrugs. Easy come, easy go.

"You have pledged?"

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