The haruspex had not intended to fall asleep. Sleep was the enemy. The leach that was sucking her dry. She had tried everything. Hot baths. Long walks. Wine to relax her. The dreams mocked all that, brushing any attempt she made to stop them aside like a giant flicking away a gnat. But this night, as the witching hour waned into pre-dawn, the writing stick she held slowed its frantic scribbling along the vellum, before it fell away entirely. Her head leaned into the gentle prop of her hand, nuzzling her cheek to her cupping palm. She was asleep before that slender writing instrument had finished rolling under the low table. It didn't matter that the postion was uncomfortable, that her hair was caught under the elbow of the supporting arm, that her cheek might slip her palm setting herself up for a nasty fall. She had gone too long without rest, and her body was now demanding it. Silly flesh. It did not understand that recuperative rest was not in the mix, not at all. The dream seemed to be waiting for her, because as the real Athame's head dropped to her hand, her doppleganger's shifted in it's foreward loll, a soft moan escaping. Something was stinging her bottom lip. Over and over. The bugs? Were they back? She reared up in the chains, shaking her head madly, snarled locks whipping about her face as she spat whatever was clinging at biting at her mouth .. away. Off her. Kings. ...get it off! Get it off! Get it off! It was only when the stinging erupted into glowing hot pain that she realized there were no bugs on her. Her bottom lip was fissured like bad masonry and now..that raw skin was awake and talking.

Within his own bed tucked beneath layers of warm pelts, in a mountain home secreted away betwixt a back-drop of stark, snow-capped mountain peeks, the metal worker slept alone. While the most he might ever remember upon waking be the fleeting blurred sensation of having gazed upon a veiled face from his past, this night in particular the petit mort of nocturnal scapes opened up a portal he may have held as a wish in the further reaches of his sub-conscious. Rising from the warmth of his bed, he turned and gazed briefly upon the sleeping shell of the metal worker before stepping through a round-shaped void of grey mists.

Completely unaware that this was a dream, Athame believed she was simply waking to another day of pure hell. She had been sleeping, succumbing to exhaustion but now she was being spat out of that sweet haven, to wake to this abominable place. She had been hanging from the manacles the entire time she had conked out. The toes of her boots could just barely make purchase to the ground, but enough for her to stand there on tip-toe and take some of her weight from her arms. They were numb, mercifully so. As she balanced there, she lifted her face to look to that hated metal serpent, and despite that locially she knew that her action wouldn't make a shred of differerance, she yanked her arms down over and over, rattling that fucker. The chain was solid, big thick links, as if whomever had fettered her had been chaining up a larl. Or a full grown sleen. Not this slip of a woman that was scarely tall enough to link chain to terra firma.

For him, this was no dream at all. The other existed on a separate elliptical charged with twilight breath while the metal worker slept.... or unfairly beneath a Kanda haze. In rarer instances his apparition conjured in the heat of rage. Yet this was his territory now, and as long as the metal worker slept unprovoked, the wisp of aural thread seemed endless. Time and space bent itself into blurred incomprehensible shapes, for as he passed though to the other side of his connecting portal, he seemed not the least bit surprised to see what he saw, off in an immeasurable distance. Yet each step forward caused that distance to elongate ten-fold, until he found that he was running.

She fought that chain until she simply could not do it anymore. There was no leverage, not with slender arms stretched upwards as if she were exalting some uncaring god. Perhaps the very one that had plucked her from her erstwhile life, and now was relishing her unraveling. There were times like these when she was at the dead wood. Ahns when she was left to stew in the silence, to fully experience the painful suspension of her body. No one came at all for long periods of time. She prayed someone would come. Then prayed they would leave once they did. Letting her body go slack save the precarious balancing act on her toes, her eyes roamed. First down the length of her own body to see if anything had been taken away while she slept. The first night, the black-bladed dagger. The next, the hair ribbon that kept the tide of sable from falling into her eyes. Nothing seemed to be missing. She was still wearing the white gowns, although to call them white was laughable. One bloody handprint, once a vibrant crimson now had darkened to a dried maroon. There were smears of dirt along the hem where she had stepped on it along with more than one tear from the very same reason...Slowly her head lifted, ebon eyes darting above the veil she wore. Something was changing. She knew what that felt like by now. Had been gleaned to know it. It invariably started with the acrid taste on her tongue.

Eternity fused itself with the passing ihns, counted off in some spectral distance by the constant drip of a water clock. It echoed rather loudly here almost as if to remind him that he was still bound to the sleeper on the opposite end of the winding thread that grew thinner and thinner the further out he ran. Perhaps if he ran fast enough, the space that stretched out before him might be overcome. He ran therefore, with a calloused hand outstretched. Reaching.... willing.

The dream Inamorata stilled in her chains. No breath wasted, each nothing more than an excited whisper through her clenched teeth. Hisssss. Only her eyes moved. On the hunt for whatever was energizing the very ozone of the skies over the badlands, they were as scythes threshing the sa'tarna. Nothing impeded their advance. No one stepped out from behind one of the sheer monoliths or ambled up from the gorge that was within a stone's throw from her. She strained to hear footsteps. Perhaps, the sound of pepples breaking free to shower down the side of a slope. Nothing. Still that feeling was clawing its way up her back, getting its hooks in nice and good. As if it had its own magnetic field, her eyes were drawn to the Skull at her feet. If she hadn't been chained she would have fell on her ass in her attempt to back peddle from it. Instead the fetter drew her up short, and because of the sudden backward push of her body, swung her forward, exactly where she did not want to go.

Upon a ringlet dervish that endless stretch of time and space closed in upon him so fast, that his outstretched hand now followed in his wake. Acid trails of pale hue far too numerous for the eye to plainly see, shifted in their spectral doppler until he was on the rebound. Broken callouses snagged across the belly of the Inamorata's white and bloodied gown bfore he landed exactly as he had meant to, in a sagging crouch upon his haunches before her. He pressed his knuckles to the ground and let his gaze lift slowly upward, as his expression curled into a rather fiendish and predatorial one. Perhaps he and the skull were one in her vision.... as for him, he'd not seen the thing.

Unable to even lower her hands down to sheild her face, her reaction turned to her other half. Primal. A few stray souls had ever witnessed that side of the Seer's harlequin's mask. Perhaps a handful might suspect it of her, those that had listened to her speak of the Blood and its esoteric properties. As the air shimmered before, looking much like a Taharian mirage in the making, she snarled, baring her teeth. Her adrenaline level hit the top of the charts, a flushed sheen sweeping her head to foot. She was trembling...ready to run, ready to claw somethings eyes out, and she could do neither. She was helpless but to watch those ghostly fingers reach for her. She leaned back as much as she could, the heels of tabuk leather boots digging frantically against the sandy dirt. "Nnnnoo.." It was more mouthed than said, her mouth to dry, her terror a garrotte to her breathing...breathing that stopped altogether when it touched her. The slow reach of the thing that was ripping its way into her world suddenly snowballed, coughing up the rest of it, close enough that she could feel its heat. She screamed, raw..at the top of her voice, the sound so foreign to her own ears...before her panicked mind soaked up what she was looking at. A man.

It was here, in this realm, that he was unmasked and unfettered by the one who slept. Despite the dismal and far-off sound of a groan, it was naught but the pure and unadulterated psychic desire that now reigned unchecked. No Ritual had been perfomed to lessen his domain, and despite the sleeper's equilibrium, the other waxed stronger and stronger as the months had passed. With an upward press upon knuckles leaving no divots upon a mist-covered ground, he too bared his teeth and bit down into the riveting softness of dressing gown and flesh, just above her right hip. The scream that seemed to rise up from nowhere and everywhere, only fueled a rising need to draw blood and taste the coppery wash over lips and tongue.

Recognition rolled in on the heels that crouched before her was no cadaverous monster. For a sweet heart-wrenching ihn, she thought he was here to save her from the chain, take her far from this malignant dead wood. It bloomed inside her, the finest ambrosia for her parched soul. That joy was quickly snuffed, taken from her bite by bite. He was on her in a heartbeat, his mouth clamping right beneath the soft jut of her hip bone. His teeth found skin even with the once lily-white robes shielding her. She couldn't tell if he had cut them, or they simply didn't absorb any of the bite. The burr of pain hit, and the more he bore down the quicker it escalated. She gasped in, choking on it. There was only one thing, only one need in her universe. Escape his mouth. She forgot all else. Words. Threats. Pleas. She twisted violently, her hips oscillating to literally shake him off.

Yet another groan across a far-reaching chasm, as her would-be savior tossed restless in his dream laden sleep. But not him.... the chains were recognizable, their soldered ends fusing steel and alloy into unbreakable links.... and they were his. Both hands lifted from their knuckled press into the ethereal ground below to cling to the woman's ribbed sides, beneath captured arms that hung suspended above her head. Yet again his gaze rose staunchly upward beneath the bush of his brows, deep inside the colorless grey, willing her to cave in to the bruising assault upon hip's flesh. Slowly he pulled his bloodied maw away, only to reveal a rather sinister grin level still with the Inamorata's hip.

Her skin broke to his teeth. She did not. She screamed at the tail end of it, when he really dug at her, a gnaw that would leave his mouth warm and sticky with her blood. Above each manacle, her hands had curled into small fists, ragged nails biting into her palms in small cresents. She would be giving herself more pain, but it was something she could hone in on, and pull out the rug on some of the power he had over her. Those little devices were dredged up from base instinct. It was not a conscious ploy. It was a reaction. She was panting when he stopped eating her, her head tipped back to stare into the naked limbs above her. Up there, the boy was watching a scene no small child should witness, his gaze unflinching. Without emotion. She closed her eyes on the vision of him up there, willing her haggard breathing back to normal. As she struggled with this, the warm slink of calloused palms up her sides brought her head down so she could stare down at the man who was grinning at her through a blood mask. A shiver wormed her spine with glassy fear. Had he ever seen her shiver like that? So feminine. "How do I taste?" she said quietly before one knee rose viciously. He was crouched before her, his hands upon her body. Perfect alignment for that knee to ram that sweet spot beneath his chin.

From his haunches he rose up against her, smearing her own blood from lips and chin against the soft printless chintz of her near-white gown. Briefly turned aside by the rudeness of her knee colliding against his adam's apple. Yet uncoiling like a hith, readied for the strike of fang, until the petal-soft hems of her Last Veil rained down across his uplifted features, the clench of his calloused fingers dug themselves between the woman's ribs. How did she taste? How did she taste? Odd question, for across this chasm of separateness, he realized suddenly that it was tastless.. and that his realm could easily turn and shift upon the stirring, rousing of the sleeper. One hand, the left one, ceased it's clench of rib flesh, only to rise and swipe aside the one veil left. No answer from his lips given her, lest she overtake his domain through witch trickery.

She had failed this man, sent him away in his ahn of need. Denied him. This was reckoning day. When the question about how she tasted to him fell from her lips, she understood. Understanding the why, did not mean that there wasn't a certain amount of pleasure from slamming her knee to his throat. She almost screamed out YESSSSSS!!!! Surely the bon fire in black was raging with just that visceral pleasure of giving back some of that pain. If only it would have sent him from her, this Vedric whom wasn't swayed by the possible hexes she could pour over his head. The intense blaze started to die in her eyes when he curled from his hunkered-down position. He was ghosting her front, rising up in a full body caress. Her face turned to one side, eyes closing to cut off the visual she didn't need to add to the sensation. She refused to react. Stilled herself not to move a muscle, yet..she was up on the balls of her feet, as well as under the microscope. It was obvious that she was trying to keep the soft swell of her bodice from rubbing against his chest. She knew what he would do. That veil was a goner. She silently begged him not to.. but with an easy bat of his paw, it was simply taken away from her too.

Curse him. Kill him. Set me free. These non-verbal cues unspoken, though by whom it remained enshrouded. Something for the Inamorata to decipher. His fingers clenched into the sheerness of the Last Veil, carelessly ripping it's cleave asunder. His press upon the woman's fettered form both weightless and crushing all at once as he sought her lips out with his own.

Crazy, but she had kept a small kernal of hope that he would not face strip her. He knew what that meant to her, how deep that would hurt. So when he did not hesitate, she closed her eyes, to whisper.. "Vedric." The chain rattled with her instinct to hide her face in her hands. It wasn't that she was a hag, and shame of her looks fueled that need to hide. It was an uncrossable barrier, one of many that she relied on to differentiate the woman from Seer. Gone without so much as a thought. Tears gathered in her eyes, yet not falling as she was gathered up against him, absolutely molded to that hard body. His second skin. One of white. One of dark. One full of trembles on trembles. She turned her face away at the ihn, only to dip her head, huddling her face against his throat, just under his jaw. Nuzzling closer to him...to hide from him.

No answer given to the call upon a use-name he had so little use for. Let the sleeper toss and turn! Let him groan, unable to rouse himself with mercy! As for this one, he let his mouth consume her own. Let her feel the scorch of endless torment and wandering, being bound against his desire for absolute freedom. Do not call out to one as good as dead. He cannot save you. Save yourself. The echo of unspoken words once again reverberated across a sea of boundless mist, broken only by a single tree and the serpentine imagery that coiled itself around the fore of its gnarled trunk. The merest glimpse of the woman's lips now buried somewhere 'neath his chin as he listened with baited nerve, to see whether the Inamorata's pleas had been heard.

Unspoken words, yet the very molecules of air vibrated with their potency. Save yourself. That was an arrow meant to ventilate her very soul. Had she not already taken that route with him? When the chips fell, and it had come down between taking a risk on him, or sticking to the safety net, she hadn't banked on him. In this place and time, the whys did not matter. Just the actions. So she pressed close to the violent pulse that sprang up against her lips, letting the guilt wash her. He hurt..because she had not seen it through. What do beasts do to comfort eachother? It began with the silken parting of her ruined mouth against his skin. Just a brush. "Vedric.." Arian accent made his name sound like the moniker of the Ubar of Ubars. She nuzzled his grizzled jaw with the tip of her nose, tasting her frantic heartbeat on her own tongue.

"Athamé!" Damn that voice, shattering the deafening silence of his domain. The metal worker sat up quite suddenly, rigidly in the dark, glistening with a sheen of sweat as both hands lifted to rub at his face and eyes. Beneath a single slatted beam of silvery moon's light, he glanced up into the steepled turret housing a skylight over his sleeping chambers. This dream had been invasive. Far different from the rest of his haunting dreams of her. The sound of his own voice echoed its report against his chamber walls, and for a moment he was unsure whether he had called out her name at all in the darkness. Yet all the same he'd felt a sharp needling sting in the flesh of his neck, warm and tingling in its aftermath. His fingers automatically rose to touch at the very spot.

Athamé! Someone yelled her name LOUD, and she came to life as if someone snapped their fingers and willed it. Sheaf of vellum was knocked to the floor along with the open tome she had been copying from. The thump of the heavy book sounding against the tiled floor of the library was the key sense that grounded her to this realm. Her hand went to her mouth first thing. She was veiless being that it was the dead of night and neither Cook nor her quartet of guards would walk through those double doors without knocking first. No painful cracks along that lower tier. No..swelling from being kissed so fiercely. "I .. I don't know. I just don't know." She toyed with her lips, pinching the fuller bottom as she thought about the dream. She had not even admitted that guilt to herself. Why now was her mind nursing at it, almost as if she wanted to be punished? She had no answers. Now just this image in her mind of her mouth smoothing over his throat, and the very real need to make him...whole.

Though the clinging clutching fingers of the sandman's grasp failed to lure him back into the warm folds of unconsciousness, he could not rid himself of the aftermath of a dream so vivid, so real.. even down to the faint coppery residual taste in his mouth. Perhaps he had bitten his own tongue in his sleep to the point blood had been drawn? Both arms curled across one another over his bared chest to stave off a shiver in the wintery dead of night, as the frayed remnants of his latest dream refused to die away as quickly as the previous ones so often did. For several ahn.. perhaps until the sun rose to paint the sky several shades of morning, he stared at the far wall. Unblinking.

Pushing the table back, she rose up, the tears she hadn't shed in the dream now sparkled in her eyes, welled and slid down her cheeks. She let them fall. Hotly streaking her cheeks. Her hand lifted, wiping at the wetness under one eye, streaking the sodden kohl in a more pronounced line beneath her lashes. There was some disgust lurking behind that motion, the way she did it as if she hoped to totally banish those tears from ever having existed. She was heading straight to the fashionably carved side-bar, and more specifically to the crystal decanter of ka-la-na that was atop it. She never drank it, or anything alcoholic for that matter, as it could mess with her visions. Tonight would be the exception, save those one or two sips. Could her visions get any worse? She didn't pour. She took a glass and the entire bottle with her to bed.