so close to healing the weak

Gabriel de le Poer · 05-06-2010, 12:13 PM

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500+

It had been raining for days now. Gabriel had been traveling along the borders as best he could, hunting when the weather broke. The rain had stopped long enough for him to leave the borders, chasing a hare through the still recovering blight. Somehow he lost the small creature, and aggravated, Gabriel had picked up a fast trot. Above him, the fretful clouds had broken wide open. The moon, in a standstill between cycles, stared down at him like a half-open, bloated eye. Something in that light called to him, daring him, asking him to run with it. And he did.

Gabriel ran without any direction, breathing in cold air and the distant smell of rain. Under his feet the ground rose and fell, soft earth and grass, which began to thin as the world changed. Soon he was running on asphalt and sucking in the smell of dry rot and ancient metal. Then and only then did he stop, hesitating. The city was a place that made his blood crawl uneasily. Something about it was wrong. This feeling had been with him for a long time now, longer then he thought.

Suddenly he knew why.

His scent crept up from the bowels of the filthy place. Gabriel’s nostrils flared wide, sucking in the demon’s musk. Amber eyes widened and his pupils shrank to twin pinpricks in the moonlight. How soon had the beast passed here? How close was he to destroying the only thing that he could not catch? Black lips pulled back from his teeth, and his tongue tasted the air cat-like. He was close. He was so fucking close.

Desperately, Gabriel trailed that scent through the abandoned skeleton of humanity. He weaved drunkenly after his shadow, and found the iron gate fitting when he was stopped by it. Of course, the bastard would hide in a cemetery. The romance of this was lost on Gabriel who slipped under the bloated eye of the half-moon. All around him the scent was overwhelming. It stopped at the door of a tomb, and Gabriel’s mouth broke into a vicious snarl. He did not recall breaking his way in, only that he did so.

All he remembered was that smell.

Carcasses and pieces of bodies were strewn about in a pagan display, but there was no method to the madness. Chains, ashes. Blood. More blood then anything else. It coated the walls and the floor. There was no fear in Gabriel—the archangel would protect him. Ahead, his eyes adjusted to the dark. Tails hung on the wall, sick trophies that suited the beast. Metal traps. Everything that he had known he would find that Dahlia would not listen to. Maybe he should have taken one of those rotting tails back to Conor and thrown it in his face. Do you see now?

Then he saw it, a singular piece of sharp and clean stone against the ruined insides. It was a dagger, one that seemed formed from shadow. He touched it and understood it was not metal, but stone. There was a power in it, though, a power that Gabriel knew in that moment was needed. This would be the only way to destroy Haku. Every part of his body was echoing this truth, and his soul felt it deeply.

He left the bastard’s tomb behind and traveled under the cloudy sky, the dagger clutched in his palm.

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