Desreal: i come!

"Abra was ready ere I called her name;
And though I call'd another, Abra came."
-- Matthew Prior

Beyond this place of wrath and tears, he thinks, his somber expression never changing as the conversation changed from the casual talk of shadows to the surprising (though perhaps not so surprising) murder of one of Alcatraz’s old friends.

Dead?

It was hard to imagine the pale ghost dead. Though for a long time Alcatraz suspected the Wraith was never alive to begin with -- his life had been cut out from under his body much the way his shard had (but Alcatraz didn’t know that). Perhaps, in essence, it had not been murder after-all (though the Glade of Desreal still rang with his despairing cries) but the extinction of an old alliance.

It was a shame Alcatraz didn’t care as much as he should have.

“Is he now?” His eyes narrowed as he processed the information, never moving even as her muzzle brushed across his disfigured chest. A sneer spread across his features as a slow, churning laugh (much like the strange rustle of unoiled machinery) escaped his scarred muzzle.

“Let me guess, friend - - was it a Shadow that killed him?”

See, even someone as banal and as primitive as Alcatraz could have a sense of humor sometimes, even if that sense of humor circles around the slaughter of another being. Humor can be twisted, I guess.

His laughter died away, echoing into the deep forest as his calculative eyes settled on hers. She was missing something - - that frenetic stir of energy was gone from her pulsing body (though her mastery of her wicked wind still remained). The relic. While the Savage was barbaric, he wasn’t quite as stupid as he looked. Where had it gone, both of them?

“And the shard?”

A L C A T R A Z
"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. . . . The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?" -- John Steinbeck, East of Eden