The two men walked into a bar. The first, the shorter, had boots and long, pitch robes, with thick gloves concealing their hands. A hood and an ornate, silver and blue, birdlike mask protected their head. The second, taller and thin, was entirely covered by a sprawling beige cloak.
“He said there would be a proxy here. You still don’t find it strange that he told us nothing about what we were heading off to face, Lynn?”, the second man drawled. By his voice, it was clear that he was, in fact, no more than 17. His cloak shuffled as he fidgeted, deeply nervous.
The first man, Lynn, intervened, who had a deeper, but not completely mature voice. “Creed is testing us. He wants to use us, and this is his exposition on who we’re going up against. Are you sure this is what you want to do?” His voice took a turn of strange concern as he spoke.
“Aaron? I-” He was immediately interrupted by Aaron in question, who shifted uncomfortably in their robes. “Don’t talk like that. You know I have nowhere else to go”, he muttered. He coughed silently, and brought up his arm to tap on his face 3 times. Each time sounded of finger on plaster, and the air took up an aura almost adverse to the situation.
Footsteps sounded from outside the door, noisily. The heads of the two masked individuals snapped up to meet the doorway. As the doors creaked open, the men saw nothing except white covering the doorway. That is, until the man outside crouched down to enter the door. He must have been over 7 feet tall. His legs were hugged by a long, white skirt, his torso covered by a buttoned white cape. His hair was the most notable thing about the man, however; it covered his whole head and face, it’s curls traveling all the way down his body. It was a blank white color, and almost made Aaron’s eyes hurt to look at.
The man walked towards the table that Aaron and Lynn sat at, his hair bouncing up and down as he took long steps, his garments shifting across the floor. Only then had they noticed his hands, hanging limply from his sides, twitching lightly. They were skeletal, and dyed a deep, bloody crimson. Even as they looked on, the liquid dropped from his hands, staining his skirt. Veins of gory coloration ate through its pearl color every step the man took. His presence filled the whole room as he walked, and, immediately, Aaron knew for sure that this was the man Creed spoke of. In fact, he even looked familiar, to a short extent, but in the seconds he had, he could not pinpoint his identity. His instinct told him to run, but he ignored it, slowly lowering and wrapping his hand around the hilt of his sword.
“It’s him”, Aaron whispered. In his train of thought, though, Aaron had failed to realize that Lynn had already perched himself on the table, pointing his bow directly up towards the man’s hair-concealed head. An arrow, notched in the bow, vibrated violently on the bowstring, which was pulled back wickedly far.
“Why don’t you put your weapon away?” The strange man prompted, in a deep voice, even as the arrow released with a powerful snapping sound, and pierced directly through their hair, landing somewhere in their head with the sickening sound of caving flesh and snapping bone. “It’s very ineffective, you know”, he continued.
He started whistling, eerie tones seeming to emanate from each wall, as he raised his corpse-like hand and grasped the projectile with his spindly fingers. With a single motion that made Lynn take several steps back, he tore the arrow out of his head, with the nauseating sound of more tearing flesh. Tiny pieces of flesh and droplets of dark blood trickled over Aaron and dirtied the floor as they spurted from behind his hair, silently trailing down the front of his cloak.
Aaron could barely think; he tried to scream, but it only came out as a stutter, which was drowned out by the continued whistling from the man. Every note felt like an intruder to his ears, and Aaron clawed at his mask rigorously while Lynn took another step back, his grip on his bow shaking, his hand in the middle of drawing another arrow, frozen in time. The man in white relinquished his grip on the arrow, where it clattered to the floor. Its head painted the wooden floor with crimson as it bounced about, the resulting clattering and the drip of blood adding a percussion section to the man’s whistling opera. The projectile ultimately came to rest in front of Aaron, who was too shocked to notice.
Slowly, whatever it was, took its crimson hand back, and parted its bloodied hair, dripping with vile fluids. What was shown was indescribably pure; the one eye that was shown was a luminescent, swirling blue. Immediately, Aaron’s mind was seized and dipped into a deep, icy, abyss. His mind rang slowly while his conscience flickered on and off. They were beautiful! Like ancient, glacial ice resonating with a sort of ethereal, omnipotent energy.
Even after three tries, he could not take his gaze away from the being’s eyes. Only one observation disturbed his solace; this feeling was familiar. Searching deeper, into the man’s eyes, he found something that was not here the first time: Pain, hunger, and deep, gnawing, primal enmity. Beyond the surface, something vital had shattered long ago.
Before he could fully recognize what he saw, Aaron was spontaneously inserted into a vivid memento; his helpless, limp body frozen in ice, while tongues of flame writhed around him, licking passionately at his frigid incarceration in a desperate attempt to turn him to ashes. As the sudden memory faded, the only sense he could perceive was the tickle on his skin of sweat trickling down his face, the violent and uncontrollable shaking of his arms and legs, and the heaving of his chest as he desperately gasped for air. Though Aaron tried to stop the realization in futility, the truth clawed through his mind, and soon he could think nothing else.
“I-it’s you.” Aaron stuttered, coughing violently. His legs felt like long, thin sticks, crumbling under him as his body whipped backwards and violently clashed with the wooden floor. The stool he sat atop toppled and collided right next to him, but he didn’t notice. His hood flopped off his face from the impact, revealing a head of untamed, dirty blond hair, and an ornate mask, bearing the patterns of flowing rivers and seething oceans. It was, revoltingly, entirely stitched to his face. Aaron’s stomach rose and fell with heavy breathing, and he groaned softly with pain and shock, his eyes rolling back into his head.
The whistling ceased, and the room wailed with silence. “Hello, prince,” the monster chuckled, amused. He turned to face Aaron, and allowed himself the slightest smirk beneath his curtain of hair. “You came back to me!”
