stoneface.

[Luz Cresceno]

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Perhaps this was how friendships are formed, mused Luz Cresceno, eying her companion’s scar-smile with little caution and less distaste. Even his eyes, and the cracked-gold world they cupped, did not threaten so much as invite second glances; yet her curiosity was caught most predominately on his mismatched ears, one whole, one battle torn. This appearance-jigsaw affected nothing, of course. Her tastes were of a decidedly different persuasion – but all the same, he was interesting to look at. Had she an art to her name, she might have been inspired to snare some memory of him within song or story or even a few paint-sweeps on salvaged paper. Alas, she had none, save some split-second poetry that ultimately fled from memory with the astronomer’s parting (excepting a bit of bad aftertaste). Did she herself want to be captured into memory, preserved as a silver-skinned constellation of ideals and faults? (Mostly faults, mind you.) Perhaps. On that count, Luz was unusually silent. Once, she would have laughed – loudly, and with undue amounts of she-wolf scathing – and told him that though the dilemma lay before him, she was but ephemera, a pinch of dust with a name and amethyst eyes. Now she was not so sure. Some fit of madness had bid her make her home amid the foggy bottoms of Clouded Tears, where other lunatic things dwelled. It was comfortable, suspiciously so. Sometimes she even had shadow-suspicions that she was in a story – not the heroine, naturally – and it made her curl her hands to her breast, afraid, alone, half-dead already. “Destinations,” she said, making her feelings known on that point with a flutter of the fingertips. A whim to share her feelings on the natures of destinations and journeys struck without warning. Her brow creased; her thoughts wheeled like scared songbirds, hearts aflutter, wing-flap sounds abound. However, the moment of contemplation passed by with little turbulence and no comment, and she slid smoothly into the next step, her companion presumably at her side. What a world! She could see its loveliness, sometimes – and yet her heart had never cracked at a sunset, nor had her breath been stilled by anything but deepest shock, dread sorrow. “This is a pretty neck of the woods,” she commented, making her newest cognition known. “So old, and somewhat... dead.” Her fingers, in passing, made a skip-trip over a few falling bark-flakes; she strode on, even as they fell away. “Though there are times when I suspect I’ve had my fill of old oaks.” For a moment, Luz Cresceno enjoyed the oddity of that statement when it stood solitary, but the pleasure she sampled was brief. “Clouded Tears,” came the explanation. She raised a finger to her chest and smeared a wry-line smile over her face, sharing it with the warrior-wolf by way of a quick head-twist.

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