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The First Step; An Endless Path


mmat
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Ambience if you want it idk

 

Brother Cinder he was indeed. It was a fact which was, to Avius Csarathaire’s all-but unmoveable soul, unbelievable. A valah’s lifetime of waiting, postponing, procrastinating. The Elven warrior, and warrior he had always solely been and thought he would ever be, found himself contemplating the fraternal moniker keenly in his own mind. Uncannily, a false thought burst forth that he and this Brother Cinder were not one and the same. The amateur weaver of nature - the greenhorn Brother Cinder was an interloper, set solely on its nefarious task to dethrone and drag down the mighty phoenix of Csarathaire, greatest among warriors and highest swordsmen of all the mali’ame, as well as all the peoples beyond. Brother Cinder - that very same phoenix, felt a pang of shame at the boundless arrogance of his fleeting thought. So what, even, if it were true? 

 

A centuries’ worth of honing his skill, training the reactions and drilling ones endurance, he had done it all and more besides. Still, when the hour of trial came and every moment of that long-accumulated lethality was most required, Avius Csarathaire had singularly failed. The shadow of an old, but familiar anguish made its way back onto his face as a sad consideration swept unlooked for through his mind, with the destructiveness of a hurricane. His lioness, the mother of his only son, had died. She had actually died, and would’ve been lost to him forever if not for some miracle, a miracle of pity to him as he wrongly judged it on the days of guilt. The warrior’s mind set to upheaval by such evil thoughts, Avius Csarathaire, sat cross-legged in the uttermost centre of a stone circle, opened his tired, icy eyes. He nonchalantly blinked away a solitary tear and scowled. Focusing on the voices and discarding all distraction was not going well.

 

As though paranoid, he looked around the empty stone circle and let out a sigh. Then shutting his eyes anew, the ‘ame recalled how he had been instructed by his mentor: breathe, four seconds. As he had when the elder had been teaching him directly, Avius shut his eyes and slowly drew in a breath of the cool, high-up air. One. Two. Three. Four. Doing his level best to drown out every meaningless aside that wasn’t his breathing or the ever-present, rancorous song of nature, Avius gave forth a measured, hushed exhale of the refreshing breath he’d just drawn in. One. Two. Three. Four. Again and again he breathed like so, repeated ably over the course of ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two, more still, each time allowing himself to, against long-held instinct of life and death, immerse and drown himself in the perpetual song of tree, plant, bird and beast that now permeated his every living thought, and that of all druii. There was some inherent companionship in that, Avius thought, and it made him glad. It was at that moment, with struggle and vast concentration, Brother Cinder’s eyes ignited as a dull red fire. Scattered wisps of the same dry-blood icolour danced fleetingly around the upper part of his form, weak and barely formed. With eyes focused on naught but a single rose which stood immediately in front of his crossed legs, Avius held an open hand out and perceived, as though resting a palm on the beating heart of another sentient being, the life of the flower. 

 

But when barely a single second had passed, and perhaps not even that, this most unprecedented of moments in the life of Brother Cinder came to a disappointing end. His muscles enfeebled, sweat flowing down the bridge of his nose from wet hair and vision growing ever more faint, Avius slumped onto his back and stared in exhaustion at the blue sky. He felt dejected and weak. After all, it was just the first step.

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