Sentinel Species [Doev / Keiko]

Her voice seemed to boom like thunder, but it was only the natural amphitheater structure of the tunnel that had produced such a sound; however his perception slithered beneath it all—beneath the modified voice, beneath the imposing visage of scales and antlers—tasting the air with the lashing of a forked tongue. Doev had a fast eye and sharp ears, both impressible to the betrayals of her body against her, and they were details he selected as concisely as an oxpecker bird dousing for a wound. Fear—that shudder in the voice, the manner she had thrown up her head, how quickly she back-pedaled with those tucked hindquarters, and even her way of standing, so very still, all had been spies; she was afraid. It was effortless, so effortless, the manner in which he was capable of reverting to the primordial beast he was in his youth, one which identified weakness in the way a predator would focal point a animal with a limp, and while there was an almost tactile shift in energy at once, Doev did not pounce. Doev reversed that energy, and relinquished control.

“As you bid.” Then his statuesque silhouette shifted before a small stony scratch brought forth a tiny flame that only barely illuminated the bronzy face of the stallion as he bowed to an abandoned oil lantern and lit the wick. Within a moment or two, a yellowed light bloomed out into the shadowy niches and crannies of the entry alcove to the tunnels. That single tawny eye turned on her; in the sudden difference of light, its pupil had shrunken considerably, rendering his intense stare more so.

Doev studied her for the briefest moment, noting her pale cream coat, her motif of salmon-flesh scales, her startling blue eyes, and the sharp crooks of her branching horns; he did not fail to note the bandage on her side. He looked at it unfathomably before he turned away and placed his linen parcel on a natural table of hew stone beside him, unwrapping the folds in his own time. “I don’t think I can hold you to any blame for a lack of trust when you’re being stoned for having a stroll.” There was an undertone—a new note to that deep voice, but its nature was nebulous.

The two persimmons and the pomegranate were revealed, and Doev brought out a small pocket knife, opening it with a metallic scratch of the blade. He did not look up while he cut into the fruit. “Are you hungry?” There was a pause as he cut into the leathery husk of the pomegranate. “Aodh does love exotic foods. I would have better cottoned to peaches or plums, but with such tender flesh they don’t survive transport well; and flies are quick. Persimmons, however, are like stones before they ripen, and pomegranate can survive months if kept cool and away from the air—“ Doev looked up with a pause before offering an off-kilter, somewhat broken, smile. “Sorry. I apparently just don’t know how to entertain beyond the subject of fruit and insects.” Not entirely true. His smile lingered, though dulled, as his eye returned to the fruit and he finished portioning it.

“What may I call you?” Doev asked, wiping the blade on the linen before closing it and tucking it away again. “The word ‘kirin’—as you likely hear it these days—is indistinguishable from a curse. I feel using it would be discourteous of me."

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“Look at me and breath once.” Doev chuckled; a faint whisper of cold subterranean air currents through the tunnels leavened his pause. “I’m a politician. Had the intent been to harm you, I would not be here, and you wouldn’t be capable of doing that anymore. I believe you’re smarter than that.” Albeit ‘a politician’ in name only, noted an afterthought.

Doev leaned a shoulder against the natural arching door frame of the alcove, affecting an air of casual confidence as he brought a halved persimmon to his mouth; his oddly gentle eye crackled with the warmed honey of lingering laughter, and albeit so, his smile became wistful. “When Breim first looked at me, do you know what it saw?” He asked in rhetoric, pausing to cast a glance at the edge of Nariah from over his withers. “What Breim saw was refuse, a beast. I was born a bastard of the royal family, a living testament to the ugly truth that nobility is not as wholly pure as perceived. My sire was a criminal, my dam a royal whore, and I’d inherited the very worst from both of them. My color was, and is, conspicuous—‘ugly’ in Breim standards—and as nothing more than an investment in-training to my sire, my heart became ‘ugly’ too; I became a beast that could elicit the same caliber of murmurs and glances you’ve become familiar with when I was no more than twelve years old—and I’d become that beast because that was what society said I was.” Even when verbose, his tone and pace remained smooth and even, seasoned with the strolling vowels and the soothing pauses that marked his idiom.

“But then I chose and decided, 'to hell with that.' ” His lion’s eye returned to her. “That is my reason for being here: because I find great difficulty in believing that all kirin are the monsters society claims them to be, because the greatest gift the Gods have bestowed upon us is that power to choose. What I want is to learn who you are—that is part of what you want, isn’t it? To be understood?”

His smile was a genuine yet broken thing that broadened unfathomably before his eye turned away to once more regard Nariah, his expression preoccupied as he appeared to glean the sleepless illumination and oddly solemn murmur of the capital. “I digress,” Doev said. “You’re welcome to the fruit; it’s all yours.”

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Not entirely true, Doev thought for her statement on the unity of Briem. “A people must stand together if they are to stand at all,” he said, gauging the wistful smile she offered in return, and it was then that something oddly contented entered his expression, something ruminative. For him, there was a single thread that connected them then, thin but apparent, small but valuable, and it shortened the gap society had placed between them.

Her following comment on the nature of his character elicited another one of those cooled chuckles—as though he were in on some joke she was not privy to. “O-o-o-oh, don’t romanticize it,” Doev drawled, a following sigh separating his sentences. “There’s sadly little bravery or strength in desperation.” Or brutality, he added inwardly.

Perhaps it was hard to imagine a child as monstrous; in retrospect, when Doev recalled his smaller siblings and how other he had been compared to them, his former self had become alien, a stranger, a shadowy reflection, someone else. It was upon this concept that he had come to his philosophy, one that encompassed a far broader spectrum than the kirin alone.

Doev looked up quickly from where his eye had drifted to the cold cavern floor. “So the rumors are true, then:” he stated, his mouth bowing in a frown,“the kirin have lost their memories.”

He immediately thought of the times he had crawled into the suffocating dark beneath the tavern floors as a child, groping blindly for something, anything, whether it was money or information; the kirin also groped out in their own darkness, one deeper than the caverns surrounding them, one that sank in deeper than their external world. He blinked over the sorry stare he hadn’t realized he’d been holding on her for a moment too long, his gaze shifting somewhat to regard the text book she’d been studying. “This for that, then,” he began again gradually.

"A fair trade. I can also offer help aside from information; where I can, if I can—” Doev paused, his lone eye turning to hold her whole “—but in order for me to do that, I’m going to need you to be honest with me; I cannot assist in something I know nothing of.” He did not expect trust so easily from an individual that had been tormented by the very people he owed his alliance to, nor did he expect his altruism to seem immediately genuine, and it was, admittedly, symbiotic rather than one-sided.

“A-a-and to start:” Doev droned, moving into a rough segue to initiate the back and forth, “prolonged eye contact is definitely taboo here.” Doev smirked coyly, exposing the fact that he had been openly breaking this very taboo for the entirety of their conversation. “It doesn’t often translate well with nonnatives that aren’t familiar with the custom,” he admitted. It might not be a hard deduction at that point, perhaps, to realize that he had done so in prospect of fostering a connection between them rather than broadening the gap. He was, in the end, still predispositioned to the behavior that had earned his place in politics—whether or not he cottoned to it personally. "Now, what do you want, Keiko? Tell me. Tell me what you do remember, and ask whatever you wish."

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