Gold Fur Black Feathers

[Forsaken]

By the time the last Sentry returned to the wayward home that currently housed their latest batch of refugees, everyone had gathered at the community table for dinner. It was a surprisingly noisy gathering of people, given their various traumas from the escaped City of Manticore and the long journey of the previous night. The last of them hadn't gotten here until a few hours after dawn. Only the first had arrived before the veil of night lifted. She had been found traveling alone, after the murder of her sisters. Zaq had been the Sentry who reported the incident to Lucien, the informal gatekeeper of the city and the only other resident who bothered with the allies at fault for the incident. The feathered man had been conflicted, to say the least, but the disaster seemed to have caught his interest. What that meant for their youngest lone refugee was hard to guess, but knowing Lucien they would be finding out very soon. 

Two distinct knocks sounded through the metal door when their meal was only half finished, and the strange man himself stepped in. He looked to be a mass of black feathers suspended above loud gold-and-black striped pants, his coppery pink eyes shining through the shadows cast by his feathered hood when he looked in their direction.

One Sentry elbowed the other in outright aggravation. "What is he doing? Did he escape from a circus tent?" Zaq's partner hissed the questions beneath her breath, glaring reproachfully at Lucien.

Zaq could only sigh in resignation. "Trace...you know he likes that raven jacket. Leave him be."

The man in his raven jacket did not seem to hear them, unlikely as that was when the entire room had fallen into a near silence as everyone stared. 

"Look at this room of bright new citizens!" He announced to them all, giving himself an excuse to study them while he looked for the orphaned one he'd been told about. She wasn't hard to find, seeming to keep herself apart from the rest with a distant demeanor and haunted gaze. There was one seat left open between her and the people next to her; Lucien swept in and claimed it without asking, draping himself across it so that his entire body slanted to face her. He slid a long arm across the back of the chair, and all the bright lights and noise in the room seemed to dim to a soft amber glow and the peaceful murmur of the ocean. Then his coppery pink eyes, generously feathered with sparkling gold, set their full focus on the young refugee and he smiled. 

"My name is Lucien, young one. Lucien Zyren. How should I know you?" The way he phrased that question seemed to imply that she could change her very circumstances, if she wished. She could be whoever she desired, now that she was there with him. Though they had been in a crowded room only moments ago, everything else had fallen away.

[Seven]

She didn't know how she had gotten here, not really. Not when in the last twenty-four hours, she had gone from living in a cold shack barely standing in its state of disrepair in the ghettos of Manticore, to running for her life through a blizzard, from the city, from those monsters in the snow, to somehow landing here. At the end of a long table, with a bunch of other people that were mostly in her age range. For them, there was chatter--exhausted, but mostly enthused. There was a sense of security and new freedom in making it to Wyvern. For her there. Was. Nothing. Were the. Fragments of a. Mind. 

They had plopped down a bowl of stew with sympathetic looks when they passed her. She took the spoon, gaze zeroed ahead at nothing, and began to eat without so much as looking down. The others were wise enough to not sit beside her, and even wiser to not sit across her way. 

At least until this annoying person just showed up. Her arm muscles clenched just slightly as she squeezed the metal of the utensil in her hand; it was the only shift her body made, since she gave up nothing else. He seemed to want her attention, to be at least a bit in wonder, or a bit amused, or he seemed to want her name. But when she turned to look at him, there was nothing droll in her unblinking gaze, despite her almost dryly morbid humor.  "Nihilistic Despair," she announced herself, then with a motion far too polite to be shrugging him off, turned back straight in front of her bowl of stew and took the next bite. 

[Forsaken]

Her response triggered a funny sort of twinge in his expression as he forced down the urge to chuckle. That answer was the spirit of troubled youth distilled into two words, but she had been so creative and precocious in how she expressed those feelings. Her phrasing made something that was otherwise normal extraordinary. As delighted as he was, however, he was not the sort of thoughtless man who would let it show. He would not laugh in reaction to these moments if she wasn't in a place where she could laugh with him. 

That didn't mean he couldn't tease a little. 

"Nihilistic Despair, hmm? So you have chosen a title with both darkness and grace. Of course, a name with so many syllables begs to be abbreviated." While he began speaking with focused intent, he trailed off now and began to tap the fingers of his free arm against his leg while he thought. Eventually, he began to murmur beneath his breath; "Nihilair, Dehilis, Espair...Aspire. There are so many." He liked that last one; despair could be taken apart and reassembled to form aspired. Now wasn't that interesting? It could be said that despair rose from the dust of crumbling aspiration. 

"For now, if not forever, I will call you Listair." He finally decided, if only because that particular combination of syllables made him think of listening through long silences and staring after stars in a black sky. Something about it just seemed to fit. 

While he'd been daydreaming and playing with syllables in his head, he had failed to notice that he had essentially been rambling on about a name the young creature next to him had given him in jest, and now he had just chosen to adopt her sarcastic dismissal as the actual herald of her identity. This is exactly the sort of thing that could make Lucien very difficult to communicate with in any meaningful way. 

Or so the two Sentries thought, as they shared alternately concerned and puzzled glances over this. The rest of the table had by now continued on with their own discussions since Lucien had shown no further interest in addressing the rest of the room. 

[Seven]

As much as the young wolf had tried to ignore him, his incessant muttering made it exceedingly difficult to do so. Her gaze had shifted from prudently to her food to finally slithering in a sidelong glance. She wasn't sure if it was curiosity of just disdain that was holding her attention now.  

It probably came down to how one interpreted his actions. Was this cheerful behavior an attempt to lighten dark, soured moods, or just ignorant banter, either oblivious to or at worst indifferent to her recent ordeal? Well, he had got what he wanted; he had her full attention now as her torso turned to face him, arm leaned against the table. The wolf found herself irritated either way.

"Do you always make a habit of assuming familiarity with strangers by renaming the names they've given you?" She arched a brow at him. Of course, 'Nihilistic Despair,' could be argued to not be much of a name, but that was besides the point. She had chosen it for herself. "That's rather rude."  

[Forsaken]

The delight upon his improbably sun-drenched features was so obvious when she finally turned to face him. Though his arm was still balanced on the back of her chair, he managed to lean away a little further so he could face her more directly. His limbs were long enough that he didn't even have to compromise his hold to do so.

"Oh my young friend, I would never assume such familiarity if it were unwarranted." It would sound like a blatant lie from her perspective, and he wasn't bothering to explain his. The fact that, in a fashion, he knew everyone who walked through Wyvern's barrier because the shield could recognize motives and intent. It was quite an illuminating flash of knowledge; still not enough to claim he truly knew everyone who came into the city. Their personal stories were a mystery to him until they were told. At the same time, he routinely got a glimpse into the hearts of people that lifelong friends and family could never see so directly. 

It was difficult to explain these things to someone he just met. Reckless even. A lot of people became uncomfortable with the thought of mind readers, no matter the stripe or the individual nature.

So there he sat, with his otherworldly presence and convincing attitude of just knowing these things, beyond all conventional knowledge. On one hand, he was believable because there was truth to his statement and he was, in reality, quite knowledgeable. On the other, he was behaving a lot like charlatan.