Absolution

Dawn breaks over the highway, paved stones lining the path east, weariness closing his eyes to narrow slits. Jolen re-shoulders his leather satchel, resting a hand on one of the stoppered flagons at his hip. He reaches upwards a--nd combs his violet crest feathers through with his talons. Brow knitting in concern, he resumes his swift, determined pace, a great round shield slung across his back; a long, javelin is secure in his grasp, resting the steel shaft on his shoulder.

"Adia... gods," he growls to himself, the memories of the previous evening flushing warmth across his aged features, down towards his groin. Why now, he thinks, how did she reach me from beyond the Collective's reach? Fear and regret claw and scrape at the inside of his skull, tormenting him, piercing as those words reach out from the past, grasping at him for purchase like a drowning man.

"Go back to your people." His words, ringing in his memory. They sound hollow, wrong.. he has dreamed of those words, that moment. The moment he turned his back on the woman he had spent countless years defending. He has relived it countless times and taken the dark skinned woman into his arms, granting forgiveness in a betrayal of his long-held beliefs. He has watched her belly swell and his children born, named them. Every time, he has woken to find himself old, regretful and brooding.

The miles melt away, his feet taking him off the highway with time in into the meadows and fields. He pauses briefly to relieve himself, eat, drink. His mind sets to to the task of of murder, suffering, subconsciously recalling the wild kestrel of his youth. His blood boils and adrenaline courses through him constantly as a parade of torments and violations race across his vision, each more terrible, perpetrated on her beautiful form, grace made low in an orgy of blood and steel and leather.

"... Adia.. I am coming."

***

Adianna tan akmah Tarshin De'Karsh, proud daughter of the Karsh leader was focusing on her breathing, deeply in through her nose, ignoring the scent of decay that filled the cave, and then out through her mouth. Each movement she made was laced with a searing agony, so she lay as still as she could. Opening an eye she gauged the distance to her weapons, slung carelessly aside against the wall of the cave. She closed her eyes again in resignation. No matter how she twisted in her bonds and ignored the pain, she would be unable to reach them.

The soft echo of footsteps reaches her again, the only sound this far within the tunnel system of the cavern. Adia forces her body to relax and her breathing grows deep, feigning sleep. As her guard enters the room, he watches her for a moment before crossing the floor and kicking her roughly. Swallowing a cry, she allows a husky laugh to fill the room instead, disconcerting to the guard. He eyes her angrily, "What ha' you got ta laugh about?"

Adia forces a smile onto her lips, though the ice in her gaze holds the man captive as she murmurs, "Na' plottin', jess takin' a pleasant nap. Yo facilities hea' a so vera' comf'table. Do pass my thanks along ta my fatha' fo' the hospitality."

With a snarl of disgust the guard apparently decides she is mad. Eying her warily, as though she might suddenly heal her wounds, shed her bonds, and leap up to attack him, the guard skirts her form and retrieves a heavy chain from the other side of the room. Attaching the hooked end to a link in the shackles about her ankles, he loops the chain through a secured stud in the ceiling and hoists her body off the floor. Adia bites into her lower lip as she sways, suspended by the metal cuffs cutting into the flesh of her ankles. The blood rushes to her head, throbbing through her temples, and her entire body screams as the position pulls and strains her already aching and torn limbs. As the guard raises his flail to continue where he had left off earlier, Adianna closes her eyes, allowing her mind to sink back away from the painful present and escape into the past... "Jolen."

Her consciousness conjures him up before her, what she can imagine he would look like now. His youth gone, though the muscles of his body remain firm and trained, his mouth pulled in a chiseled line. Pushing away from the periphery of her imagination, she submerges herself in the fantasy, desperate for an escape. He sits before her on a cot, perhaps he was sleeping...in a single movement, she throws herself at him, straddling his frame and seeking solace in the recalled scent and taste of him, "Always mine, neva' anyone else's," she thinks, stroking at his bared chest. Immersed in the pleasant scenario, she manages to barely register as the guard methodically strips the flesh from her back and legs until her blood flows in rivers to pool and stain the stone floor beneath.

The beating ceases suddenly, and draws her back to the present. Her gaze finds two new pairs of legs standing in the doorway of her cell, and softly spoken words in Karsh land on her ears. She strains her gaze upwards in the dim lighting and freezes. Her father is just visible, the keen glimmer of his eyes taking in the bloodied form of his daughter and a dark smile twists his mouth perversely. A bare movement beside him arrests further thought as Adianna takes in the sight of a young kestrel warrior, dark and very like the tribal leader beside him. Then, the young male's eyes meet hers, blue as his sister and father, but echoing back her own visage.

And she screams, the sound her torture could not elicit, her will shattering into splinters of irreconcilable pain.

***

Jolen comes to with a start, the blanket of night still weighing heavily on the world. Too long, I slept too long, he chides himself. Pushing onto his feet, he darts around his camp, dousing the dull coals and collecting his belongings. The breakdown of a camp is second-nature to him now, the steps returning to him from the years of pitching camp, only to being forced to move out at a moments notice. Nothing is left behind, no signs are left that would be discerned by the untrained eye.... Adianna.

Pack shouldered, he checks his water flagons, finding them empty. His eyes close and he raises his beak into the air, his senses altering to vastly enhance his olfactory capabilities. He sniffs at the mild breeze, once, twice. There. He smells the mellow scent of riverbank mud and vegetation. The flagons drop back to his hip and thump together hollowly, each one drained almost entirely. Soon the water is replenished from the stream nearby, fortunately still in the general direction that his destination lays. ... Adianna.

The pace set for himself is brutal; Jolen is spurred onwards by the tremor he felt in her scream, the agony. Torturing her, they are torturing her, his subconscious echoes back at him constantly. These thoughts permeate every moment he is awake, and through his dreams. I never dream, he continues to think to himself, now it is all a nightmare. This, along with his desperation to find her, robs his sleep nightly; he wakes earlier, two-three hours here, an hour more there.... Adianna.

Before his rest each night, he delves into the suffering he sensed from her, the razored strips criss crossing his back and legs evidence of a of a lashing, perhaps with a flail or a whip; his wrists and ankles pulse, the sensation of peeling flesh tell-tale of shackles, used to bind and suspend. He focuses on his pain, but finds himself returning to the need he felt for her. Even with the roll of years, he finds himself shocked at how easy it was for him to dismiss everything, even Sharay. I am not in love with Sha... I never can be, Jolen muses, unsurprised at the revelation. She.. I still love her. Oh, Adianna... what have I done?

***

She reached out once more, stretching and straining within her mind as she tried to reconnect to the energy she could still sense in her core, yet a wall shielded it from her and it remained inert despite numerous attempts at grasping it. With a hiss of frustration she flings a goblet against the cavern wall, the pottery shattering into rough shards and splattering red wine across the stone. A low laugh sounds from behind her, the amusement laced with a dark tone of malicious enjoyment. Adianna slowly turns to face her father where he stands, clothed in elaborate ceremonial garments and bracing his weight against his spear. She smiles slowly, returning the vicious enjoyment with her own hatred, thinly disguised behind painted lips.

"Fatha', I could na' imagine you would miss the evenin', na' with such wond'ful enta'tainment planned. My humilation befo' ma' own son. What have ya' turned him inta'?" Her final words drop the posturing and hiss out in a scorching tone filled with her anger. Her father merely gives another chuckle and turns, leaving her in solitude again to wait.

Adia collapses against the wall, her anger leaving a hollow inside. Unbidden images rise behind her eyelids...times she had tried so hard to forget. She had repressed and locked them away, now they washed over her, taunting. Khor and Latai, two beautiful and unexpected blessings that had melted away the bitterness harbored from Jolen's defection. Laughter had never been a part of her life, but the twins were irresistible, and she found her own laughter joining theirs. She had tried so hard to protect them from the ugliness her own childhood had been. Their gentleness was such a far-cry from what she had known among the Karsh...she would never allow that to be spoilt or their innocence robbed. Her days with them, secluded deep in the Everwoods had been a life she had never dreamed possible for her. Adianna smiles unconsciously even as moisture escapes her eyes to slide helplessly along her dark cheeks. Khor's smile had twisted her heart, so much like Jolen's, and yet his joyful nature was his own. Khor who had looked at her yesterday with no pity or remorse at seeing his mother shackled and beaten. He had stood beside her father in all the pagan splendor of the Karsh...and this life she had wanted to protect him from had drawn him down to its breast. Her sobs were wrenched from somewhere deep inside, dry now, tearless agony for the children she had birthed and lost.

***

Five days. The miles have blurred together, but he is aware enough that it has almost been six days since he left Sable behind, the hurriedly written note to his mate, Sharay, swiftly becoming a faint memory. Jolen drinks when his body absolutely requires it, eats the same; his honed psionic abilities maintaining his body far beyond the the point of exhaustion of a normal man, let alone one of his years.

Camp is struck and pitched without a second thought, fire made and food cooked hurriedly, racing to find scant rest and to dream. The dreams do not change; anger, fear and most of all, pain, categorize his sleep. It is in his sleep when the fire of his rage dims, and the calculating chill twined about his core douses the heat, bidding him to consider, to think. She must be captured.. overwhelmed.. she is held by great force, the inner voice whispers to him silkily, Caution. Plan. Consider. Execute. His years as a Lovite leave to him a broad range of methods to rain suffering on her captors; his youth shows him how to cleave a path towards her holding place. They will not hold her for long; he is resolute.

Deep into the sixth night, he sleeps again. Again the cold voice helps arrange his thoughts, his plans. It guides him and his body into maintaining himself at his peak, forcing rest and rejuvenation on the biological level. Warmth begins to grow, in his lucid state he senses the chill voice lessening and returning to its place of waiting. The warmth spreads wings, flaming like plumes of silver and grey fire. They fold around his dreamself, charging him; love, adoration fill him. The sentiments from a bygone time recently rekindled, but for the first time focused. The warmth instructs wordlessly, its tone an ancestral tenor reaching back generations. He learns war and battle, the javelin thrusts from his hand a hundred times, a thousand times, guided until perfection is attained. He feels the rage and anger cool, becoming like steel in his hand, a weapon. The chill too, cools further, encasing him in its lessons, armor. The warmth teaches Jolen how these things in tandem will save her. He shall.

Before waking, the warmth recedes, still there but not as apparent. It leaves him with the sense of hope, for the first time in decades, it is genuine. The gift is held tightly to the age worn kestrel's breast. Epiphany strikes him, rousing him completely from his sleep.

Dawn breaks on the sixth day. There are many miles left still to go. He has hope. He needed it. Looking off into the direction he last sensed her, he makes a decision. Closing his eyes, he focuses, channeling his entire being into the forefront of his Mind. With a primal roar, the pent up psionic energy courses through him, flying from him and affecting the camp around himself palpably.

All of the energy drives a single thought away, towards its intended recipient.

"I am coming. Hold fast."

***

The airy tinkle of music drifts into the room, carried in from the main room where ensconced torches light the perimeter of an enormous gathering and a central bonfire blazes green and gold in the brazier set down into the floor, the licking tendrils sparkling as they are fed in new colors by the powdered minerals periodically cast across the flames. The scent of roasting meat and heady wines mixes with the harsher odors from the burning wood and incense. A backdrop to the pleasant music, the rumble of kestrel voices fills the air, and nimble, dark-feathered bodies weave in and out as they mingle in the cavernous hall. The eastern floor is occupied by an assembly of elven musicians, their skilled fingers drawing out the hauntingly beautiful tones, punctuated on occasion by the lower clank of the shackles that secure their ankles, ensuring there will be no escape attempts made. The short, stocky figures of dwarven folk can also be made out as they blend into the predominantly kestrel crowd, carrying platters of food and drink to the hungry mass. Their steps are carefully taken, inhibited also by sets of iron manacles.

Adianna's mouth curls in disgust as she watches the scene from a curtained doorway, a number of Kishvite slaves fluttering behind her as they tuck and pin and paint the last minute adjustments to her garb. Their shortened stature and pallid feathering marks them as slaves more clearly than any chains would. Adia spares them a brief glance before turning back to the half-veiled room. A guttural command from the alcove behind her signals a flurry of movement as the Kishvite kestresses are dismissed and disappear down the adjoining corridor.

"Ha' lovely you a' lookin' this evenin', Adianna."

"I look like a whore, an' you a' fully aware o' that fact. I ha' no doubt this is part o' yo plan ta break me. Yo realize that requires me ta be breakable? You think I still ca' what you do ta' me?"

The tall kestrel steps around her to block the doorway Adia is looking through, forcing her to look up and face him. The glint of fire in her eyes is unmistakeable, gleaming sharply out of the darkness of her face. Her long crest feathers have been left loose, flowing around her shoulders in a heavy cloud. Elaborate inked designs cover her skin and line her eyes in sapphire and silver, the lines exaggerated to her temples. Tiny flecks of crystal trace exotic patterns along these lines, flaring with pale blue sparks, and a thin chain centers a single cerulean gem on her forehead. Her garments are scant and sheer, bare silken scarves in vivid colors that catch the glimmer of torchlight are looped about her waist and another criss-crossed and tied to cover her breasts. Dripping silver chains encircle her bared midriff, accentuating every movement made.

As her father lays a hand on her arm, she jerks away, turning from him to step out into the bustling room, his mocking words follow her out, "Ya will provide enta'tainment one way o' anotha' Adianna, the choice is yo's."

Her chin rises stiffly as she works her way through the crowd, raucous caws of approval rise from several male throats, and hands reach out to boldly grasp at her hip. She glares fiercely at the brazen kestrels surrounding her, fighting her way through to the front of the room. She watches as her father makes his way to a recessed lounge, reclining against several luxurious pillows. His cruel gaze sweeps her form and he waves a taloned hand, "Then dance fo' us, Adia. If you will'na be a' seer, then you can ce'tainly enta'tain us. Dance." Beside him, Khor looks up abruptly, seeing Adianna there for the first time, his brow lowers and he glowers as numerous cries of encouragement are voiced.

Setting her teeth, Adianna closes her eyes and allows the music's low throb to fill her blood with fire and movement. Her father meant to humble her, she would not allow him to triumph. Instead her mind swept the crowded room from her thoughts and she found herself on the beach. Reclining in the sand before her, Jolen looked up with lazy, half-lidded eyes...and she danced for him. Passion lent seduction to her movements and a flush of heat through her skin as she swayed and twisted, feet striking a heady rhythm on the floor. Suddenly her vision shatters as one thought blazes its way into her mind

"I am coming. Hold fast."

Her lips draw back from her teeth in anticipation; lust, hate, longing fight a battle for control over her expression. A low snarl rips from her throat. Her movements stop, body shaking as she absorbs the force of the psionic projection. Crows of protest harshly proclaim disfavor as her dancing stops, and one brazen male jumps out, his hands mauling her chest and pulling her body onto his thigh as he wrestles with the scarves, ripping them free of her flesh. The clan leader stretches his legs out lazily and his mouth presses into a sneer as he raises a goblet of wine to sip languidly.