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Sigrun is probably the most conspicuous thing within a ten league walk. Rippling with unbridled wrath honed to its true purpose and given license to put that feeling to its intended use, the Valkyrie stalks through the hedge leaving a burned out ruin in her wake, looking picked over and stripped by war. Her mantle lashes and tears at the thorns around her as she devours the ground ahead of her with one brazen stride after the other.
Her body seems stretched somehow, more grand and imperial. Taller, perhaps. More powerful in ways the mind can measure without aid of the eyes, but then the eyes too. Ice blue eyes beam out rays of piercing bright light, lashing the darkness ahead of her as intensely as the heat about her scorches the ground.
Always about her the distant cry of unseen ravens, the distant din of unseen drums. The promise of corpses and war and then more corpses. The thorns bleed away from at each brandishment of the very plain, very simple, very mundane broadsword held in her mailed fist. Everything about the manner in which she grips it cries out for blood.
But she's containing it all, somehow. Stalking. Hunting. (edited)
No one can presently see Teagan. That's how they like it, being an ambush predator and all. However, if people could see Teagan...
The Mirrorskin walks up and down the hedge walls, walking on the trees as normally as if they're just ... walking on the ground. A whirling nimbus of metal shards curl around them, and they -- too -- would look taller, grander, somehow more present. But as Sigrun is the light, Teagan remains her shadow self, her polar opposite -- the unseen, the darkness, the danger which lurks. The anger buried deep in the gut until it erupts.
Their Mantle wraps its heat around them, and Baby hangs loosely in their hand, their broken-mirror eyes scanning slowly. She stalks, she hunts, and Teagan has her back -- and Johnnie's, too. Naturally. That's how this works.
That IS how this works. The Light, her Shadow, and their Unseen besides. Vorpal sidles along behind Sigrun, the combination of her own powerful Mantle and her placid, faintly pleased expression combining to create a subtle but unmistakable "I know something you don't know" impression that would make Morticia Addams smile behind her teacup.
Granted, that something is that she's come to the conclusion that being protected by intensely competent, intensely gorgeous people makes her very, very happy- but there's no need to break the witchy aesthete, is there?
It's easy to miss the extra depth to the shadows swirling around her form, but they're there, cloaking her in deeper darkness than even her Wyrd does alone, and beneath it, her hands rest on hilts. One on the handforged blade Sigknifr, and the other on the nameless, terrifying thing Johnnie made herself... sort of. All jade and gold, it stays on her belt.
She's very much certain she doesn't want to wield it.
And very much certain she needs to be able to in case of Helldiver.
There is a pulsing in the air. It's hard to detect at first, but within seconds it grows more and more vivid until with a sound somewhere between a heartbeat and a war drum it bursts like a bubble, depositing a figure into the Hedge. He's decidedly inhuman. He's lanky to the point of being skeletal, his skin more like a pulled taught latex glove than traditional skin. As you look at him, your brain starts conjuring images of Violence. Either that you've committed or has been committed to you. It probably has to do with his eyes which are showing black and white footage of massacres. In one hand he wields a beautifully crafted blade, while the other a small sculpture of a spider.
"O God of the Hunt," he intones in his British accent. It is not an English accent. It is an accent that calls to mind all of the cruelties of British colonialism, "Shall we dance?"
There's a second appearance, this one far less dramatic. One moment, there's no one there. The next minute, there's Teagan there. They loom, somehow -- taller than their six feet of height, broader of shoulder. Their skin ripples like black quicksilver running over glass, and they beam broadly toward the Huntsman. "My friend! I'm so glad that you could join us today for this meeting." They clap their scarred palms together, stepping out in front of Sigrun and Johnnie in a move that is likely to confuse the fuck out of both of them.
It may occur to them later that there's more than one way to be an ambush predator, and more than one way to win a battle.
Teagan's Summer Mantle unrolls in a way they've never seen before -- the sounds of steel against stone, of soldiers marching to war, blend in with the familiar scents of tar and hot asphalt, the sounds of men calling for medics who never, ever arrive -- as they rub their palms together. "I'm very enthusiastic about your energy, but I do need to call this meeting to order; we really cannot get off into the weeds. I understand that you are missing a critical part of your internal infrastructure which you are incapable of finding on your own, and thus you've been commanded, my friend, to do damage to my darling Vorpal." They dig into their pockets, rummaging around and coming up with a battered copy of Robert's Rules of Order. "Ah, here we are. I believe first I need to call to order this meeting of the Impromptu Society To Find This Huntsman's Heart And Also Not Stab Someone Who Isn't Attacking Us Of His Own Free Will. So -- this meeting is hereby called to order."
Sigrun had started to wheel on the emerging threat and begin the business of closing in to begin the bloody and terrible murder. There is absolutely going to be a conversation in the future about warning the Fairest about your clever strategems before undertaking them. But it's not like she can do anything about the matter now that she's very much on propriety's leash. Sigsverd is turned towards her sheath and the cold steel hisses slowly out of view.
She whistles a mournful melody that ends with a hollow sounding trill on the tip of her tongue. It's enough to spin a table into being. A few chairs. A little name card is set out for each, a charcuterie board, some proper British ale, some mead. Prominently displayed on the table, a little sign reading 'No Vorpals Welcome'.
When a Valkyrie says the following words with that look on her face and her sword freshly sheathed, most people comply. "Sit down, please."
Johnnie is incapable of expressing the degree of surprise she feels to this turn of events, but she is most assuredly capable of rolling with it. As Sigrun arranges their seating and Teagan takes reign over the proceedings, Johnnie slips a hand under her longcoat and produces a thick book of her own, kneeling delicately to copy an arcane tracery into the ground which- upon completion- creates a right and proper Victorian pavilion, rising from the Hedge around them to finish setting the stage for Teagan's diatribe. As for her response for the invitation to dance?
She holds a finger to her lips- and gently gestures towards Teagan. This is their show right now, dear sir, please do be polite and attentive as is customary.
"Two. Yes, that's a good number I think. Two innocents for each minute you spend wasting my time. Do you have any particular charities you're fond of? I could avoid that cause. As a favor for being so pleasant." The Viscount sighs. "You people don't get it. I'm not some common Hobgoblin. I like to think I have sense. And-"
There's a flicker in his eyes as, for a brief moment, they turn to colored photos of the veldt. Something Teagan said sparked something in him. "What was I saying? Oh, yes, you are Lost. You have humanity. You feel for the violent beasts that infest the earth. To me, they are as beneath me as a piece of lettuce stuck in your teeth."
"It doesn't have to be this way though. Give me Lady Drexel here and I'll be off. You won't hear from me again and neither will the citizens of Philadelphia."
"I think you misunderstand me, sir," Teagan continues, smiling broadly as he steps forward and first pulls out a chair for Sigrun, then for Johnnie, before taking a seat at the table himself, continually talking without missing a beat. The Huntsman can get a word in edgewise if he wants to, but Teagan is always talking. "We are here in good faith to negotiate a bargain with you which would benefit both sides. You should know -- since you are so clear on us being Lost -- that we cannot do what you ask and remain as we are. And you also know that you won't have any rest, nor will you be allowed to determine whether you'll see us again or not, if my beloved's Keeper decides that he'd like to add to his collection." The Mirrorskin opens Robert's Rules of Order and thumbs through it.
The threat just makes Teagan smile broadly. That is a smile that neither Sigrun nor Johnnie have seen in a long, long time. It isn't a kind smile. It isn't a good smile. There's an ugly, terrible part of Teagan buried deep in their gut that they have to access in order to get to that smile, and the words that follow after. "Oh, good sir, I think you mistake me. I am the assassin. I have killed more innocent men, women, and children in my day than you have ever laid eyes upon. I have killed weeping, sobbing men in their hundreds, one at a time. I have strangled them to death with my hands. I have held their faces down in the mud and pressed my knee into their back until they stopped kicking and turned from men into lumps of meat."
"Besides which, you sound just like my very late husband, and if there's one thing therapy taught me, it's that I'm absolutely not responsible for the actions of abusers. If you choose to kill innocent people, that is your action, not mine. We aren't going to be capitulating to 'look what you made me do,' and if you try that again, you will find it gets you nowhere a second time, and a third, and a fourth. I will turn you down as many times as I left parts of my child's father on the kitchen floor, and a hundred more times besides."
"Good news, though, I'm not interested in whipping out my dick and comparing it to yours on who has committed the most heinous atrocities. I know that the Title compels your action, and I understand this is why you say the things that you say. I don't forgive you for your threats, but I do understand them."
"So, now that we understand one another better, I move that we move on from the 'useless threats' part of the meeting to the part of the meeting where we discuss how we might find your heart and release you from this particular task. You don't want to go through the whole dying-and-resurrecting thing, your threats won't work, so let's just move on."
They flip through the book. "The chair moves that we move on to discussing solutions."
Sigrun slowly, gracefully, and with both an incredible care and dignity reaches over the table and takes up one of the stoppered bottles of ale. She works out the stopper in one smooth twist of her hand, and begins pouring the draught before the head has had a chance to escape the bottle. It's a barman's pour, quick and light and easy. It leaves a proper English head at the top, but an otherwise amber clear body to peer through. She sets this perfectly poured pint down for him. A pipe is produced, packed, placed on a tin close to hand. The chair, at which his presence has been requested, is then drawn away from the table. She makes a second offering with her arm, towards that chair. Just watching how he reacts. Don't you want to be served? To sit and have this creature fill your cup while you boast? Wouldn't that be better, don'tcha think? Hearing them out might be fun.
She just stands there like a warrior, ready to kill. Prepared to serve the table. With zero apparent contradictions in herself about it. Just none. (edited)
"Motion to move on, seconded."
Johnnie appears on the surface to be indulging in the conceit of it all. Of Teagan's excellently bandied banter, of Sigrun's step into her role, but she's doing as she ever does the entire time. Her name, her truest name tucked away in her heart of hearts, was come by honestly, and the longer she sits with this abomination casually discussing the eradication of innocents as leverage, the harder it is not to fall into old habits.
After all, she thinks. It isn't the Huntsman that's the problem. Not truly. Not at the end of the day. The Huntsman is only the Viscount of Victims and Villainy because the Stone Haunter made it so.
Such ties could be...
Severed.
A number of emotions pass on the Huntsman's face. Then, without a word, he sits down at the seat Sigrun has so generously offered. "Solutions," he spits the word out bitterly. "I only want one thing." He stops, his eyes flashing wildly, static and color bars. Does he only want one thing? Can he want more? He clears his throat and returns to normal, like nothing had happened.
"What solutions do you have?" (edited)
The look that Teagan gives to Sigrun is brief, and there's some small shade of apology in their face, a little reflection in the mirrors of their shattered eyes. Yes, they should have told Vorpal and Sigrun about their Extremely Clever plan. But all the time, they keep talking. "Thank you, Johnnie," they offer towards Vorpal, reaching out a hand to touch hers briefly before folding their hands around the second-hand copy of Robert's Rules of Order in their hands. Their expression is calm, their fingers tightening subtly around the book; the backs of their knuckles silver briefly.
"I believe at this point I am able to open the floor to suggestions." Because an entire scene where only one person can monologue and the other two can't hop in gets boring, so let's call it five minutes here. "I have some thoughts, of course, but I believe my beloveds both have clever minds and can help us come up with solutions which are mutually beneficial to all of us."
Sigrun watches as the Huntsman moves forward. Towards her. Into the reach of her sword if she could. If she were able. Everyone involved knows it, and surely Sigrun's expression is making it clear she's very much aware of when he's near enough to taste. But instead, she eases the chair in behind him to aid the gentleman into his seat. She makes a point of stepping off to the side. Back a half step. Her mantle flares, gutters, and slowly begins to sputter out. Oh, she keeps staring at the creature. She watches his every tick. But slowly, bit by bit, she begins to transform herself from a chooser of the slain to a lily-throated maiden, and servant of the table. This is usually round about the time people start to forget she's there. Especially if they're used to The Help. (edited)
Johnnie smiles, a knife's edge flash of white in the shade of her Self as Teagan reaches for them, and she waits a moment before speaking when given the chance- more due to not immediately realizing that Sigrun isn't going to offer a fix herself, due to the role she's chosen to play. She considers it all a moment, and then- only then- speaks. Her tone is soft. The voice of the Wise Woman counseling, rather than the razor singing scarlet.
"You have been deprived, and bound to a purpose whose irony is nearly unimpeachable. To be forced to hunt and denied the ability to hunt what has been denied you- your heart. What lies in you, what informs your interactions with us and everything else, is not yours. It belongs to the Being that bound you.
But that binding lies in the Leash itself, and we are able and willing to find that which you cannot- and return it to you, allowing you to expunge what is not Yours, and be Your Own again. That is the ideal solution. We have no more interest in seeing you bound to that twisted bastard's will than anyone else.
Perhaps even less."
"And how do you propose to do that, God of the Hunt?" He gives her an incredulous look. "Find a grain of rice in the sand that is humanity. It seems so far that my best way to get off my Leash is to return with my quarry. But. If you can tilt the odds in your favor..." he trails off, drinking the ale.
Teagan turns their attention to Johnnie as she speaks, and silver slides over their face, their eyepits widening for a moment before returning to their normal shape, their face going totally calm. They gesture with one hand toward her as if to say 'continue, please.' They seem to have an idea what she's talking about, but don't jump in, just in case they're wrong.
Sigrun finally manages to get her mantle properly in check. The last flecks of bitter ice fall away from their swirl about her person. She becomes still and watchful, observing the rise and fall of her guest's shoulders to match her breathing to his own. Decades at Odinn's table taught her too many lessons to be counted. Some more useful than others, in the end. When she goes still like that, it's like looking at a painting. Or a statue, perhaps. Or more appropriately a painting of a statue. The idea of an idea of a thing, rather than the thing itself. It's how a magical, glowing, charismatic, bubbling center of attention can just disappear at the side of a throne. Practice. A good bit of dissociation, perhaps. But practice, too.
And once she's fairly certain she's just the help, she resumes her careful persual of the Huntsman. Her right hand moves to touch her hip, pausing there for more than a second before moving up to her temple where it again pauses before her fingers curl into the collar of her breastplate to rest. Casual, to hide the purpose of her arm's motion.
"Well," Johnnie drolls, "Aside from the paradox of addressing me as God of the Hunt and then asking how it is I will hunt a thing. As it happens, while I am a Witch, there are they even more arcanically empowered than myself, and I am personally acquainted with those so in tune with the fabric and places of dreams that they speak of travelling to places near to your own origin- for fun. It would be a trifle, I should think, to locate so unique a Bastion as That Containing The Heart Of The Huntsman Entitled Viscount Of Victims and Villainy. Retrieving it... that will be another matter. But on the list of ways to remove you from your service to the Stone Haunter, that is my favorite, as it not only deprives that beast of a toy, but releases you to be yourself once more."
The Viscount stands up and brushes off his fine clothes. "You have until the seasons turn. Consider this my warning of Autumn, lest we both mourn your beloveds in Winter." And with that, he ripples and distorts like you're viewing him through a bubble. And then POP he's gone.
"Þið eruð öll eins," Sigrun says, if only to herself "bara verstu hlutir mannsins." Once their guest is gone, she puts her boot on the back of his chair and kicks it rather purposefully forward until it slams into place in a manner that's far too clean to be anything but acquired through lots and lots and lots and lots of experience. True, the Trod will consume all of this once they're gone. But that felt good, just the same. After a pause of several silent seconds, she lifts up her shield and starts to call the column back to order. "Let's fall in. Just because the thing we were hunting found us doesn't mean there's not other things out here hungry for blood. We can push to the Old Iron hand-off and duck out there."
They stay perfectly calm and poised and still until the Huntsman disappears, and then their hands crush tight around the battered old book, the silvering of their knuckles going almost white briefly. The thud of the chair against the table, her boot against the chair, doesn't seem to even stir Teagan for a moment. They grunt, then, and unfold themself from their chair, rubbing their scarred palm over their hair and straightening their heavy, perfectly-tailored leather coat. "I'm sorry," they say, almost as if they didn't hear Sigrun at all, and continue, putting the book in their pocket, "If I'd told you what I was planning, you might have hesitated, and if it hadn't worked -- "
Rote motions, muscle memory, they fall in next to Sigrun, next to Johnnie. As long as they're breathing, they'll know to do that much.
Jackie's hand slides off the discrete jade handle beneath her longcoat and nods to Sigrun, rising at the directive. "Ah. Yes. I suppose we should carry on, shouldn't-" She glances between the two of them, picking up on the discord beneath the surface now that each are letting it show in their way, or allowing their specific refusal to let it show arise. "-we..?" A moment. A grimace. "... forgive me, I got so caught up in watching you two manage the Viscount, I didn't think what it could be costing you two. Old Iron will do just fine." She looks to Teagan as they apologize, taking a moment to try to figure out if they are apologizing to her, or to Sigrun- she doesn't feel a need for the apology, but neither does she want to presume Sigrun feels the same.
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