Sometime in the night, longing crept under his skin, and a state of distraction hounds him throughout his day.
He catches himself leaning closer to people as they speak, falling half in love with the expressions of strangers. A need for touch burns like an itch in the back of his thoughts; inconvenient and frustrating. He envies the errant brush of a hand across another’s throat, the silk hem of a constricting frock.
Seeking the relief of solitude, away from the storm of exchanged glances and wind-caught scents, he is driven to his chambers; but the yearning haunts him still, and he finds himself pacing like a lion in a cage, half hoping, half dreading that someone will intrude upon his suffering.
The vampire went through his day with suspicions, finding that the very atmosphere of emotion and half-transient memories embedded in this place to be suddenly bitter and filled with longing. Something, someone whose affinity burned holes in the reality had kindled them, stirring them up like so much dust across the stone.
Yualie continued his work, or attempted to focus. It was difficult. He plodded along, every gesture filled with purpose. Yet his concentration kept slipping. Not only do the inedible emotions fill his nose and throat, teasing his hunger, he finds himself changing. A caress of the cheek of a patient, a brushing of lips on a thorny orc brow. Words stirred on a page, distracted and unlike his other composed reports. It would have been one thing to declare his being interrupted. It was wholly another to realize that his distractions were wholly his own, catching fire.
The vampire ran his hands through his hair, and with a deep sigh, knocked.
A scent like dead leaves accompanied the knocking; a dry, autumnal rot that was not entirely unpleasant. He recognized the presence, but not intimately. It took a long moment to recall the servant who it belonged to; a flesh tailor, a collector of whispers that flew in on little leathery wings, a creature not unlike the messenger he’d befriended long ago, as Thû.
He couldn’t imagine what had brought the petty necromancer up from his cave, unbidden. Was it a dreadful coincidence that brought him this company, when every stray thought made his heart race and memories of past lovers rise in his mind’s eye, or was it fate laughing at him?
But the breathy sound from the other side of the door was one of sympathy, not mockery, and the aura surrounding the fey servant (not Maiar nor Eruhini) seemed to mirror his own– distracted and tender.
He did not know what to make of his guest’s appearance, except that it eased for a moment his loneliness. With a gesture of his hand, the door swung open.
“You may enter, if you wish,” he beckoned from where he sat by the window, voice almost melancholy. “Yualie, isn’t it? What brings you here without a summons?”
MisbehavingMaiar: Tumblr Archive 