There was a shallow tub in a squared off section of the room the three had booked, Uris walking out with her clothes back on and a towel rubbing at her hair. The towel was blotted with red splotches from the blood she struggled to extract from her ashen blonde strands, her face numb but her eyes revealing some slight displeasure. Try as she might, the worst part of fighting that she never got used to was the cleanup, the undertaking quite gruesome in its intensity.
She had washed up first because Bie refused, taking a bottle of water in hand and simply dumping it over his bob. She remained dubious as to how that would suffice as a way to cleanse off his hair, though she was rebutted when Bie's hair started wiggling as clumps of strands presented themselves under the water and waved along, diffusing the clots they were previously coated with.
Her jaw still hung low as she thought back to that incident, somewhat envious of his abilities. She felt the wish to play with his hair welling up within her, but she refrained from asking when the image of his smiling lips on the battlefield flashed to the forefront of her mind. Maybe he was taking in some form of joy as he extinguished the lives of those that had separated him from his family...?
The conjecture that Bie was the descendent of some tattered demihuman nobility strengthened, as the viciousness he displayed was far above what she would expect. It was said that only those that were either completely demihuman or had a strong connection to them through ancestry or husbandry would display an aura that rivaled even the fiercest predators, but it said nothing about taking joy in the process.
She thought back to her mother before her dad patted her shoulder, a white towel curtaining his firmly built waists. "It's rude to stare," he said, noticing how Uris's eyes were drawn on the meditating pose Bie had situated himself into. He slumped low against the wooden wall as his eyes were firmly held shut, white and yellow flashes occasionally flashing strong enough for them to be visible behind his eyelids.
"What do you think he's doing? Demihumans normally can't use magic?" Ulun shook his head in response, donning a black shirt with a faded insignia along the ribcage area. He sat down on one of the two beds, wondering if Bie simply felt more comfortable on the floor or if it had something to do with wood. He noticed that the kid was slumped on the table before, and he was similarly splayed along the wall.
It was not that he didn't consider the intricacies of what Bie was capable of, other than enhanced strength, of course. He puzzled on it on his own, uninterested in receiving an answer from Bie unless he spoke about it himself. They hadn't even known each other for a full day, after all, and it was quite rude to pry.
Uris sat across from Ulun on the other bed while dragging her attention away from the unresponsive Bie, fixing her gaze firmly on her father as her dark lips pursed. Ulun pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pouch that laid alongside his armor, taking in a deep puff before Uris breathed it in.
"Stop that." Ulun frowned, shaking the stick before taking a smaller puff and blowing downwind, though Uris moved her head as well and sucked those plumes of smoke into her mouth as well. Her irises became filled with the grey haze, as a vertical black bar formed in the place where her pupils would be. Scales appeared on her skin as one horn rose from the upper leftmost corner of her forehead, smooth with very little notches along the ten-centimeter protrusion.
"Father, you know I can't help it. Mom was like this too, wasn't she?" A small smile hung on her face as she tried her best to evoke the feeling of acceptance to stave off the grief that beset her. Ulun's countenance remained stoic, though he bit his lips and injected a fresh intake of the smoking stick into his lungs.
"For someone that's only a quarter demihuman, you still seem to have more of their traits than human ones. You know what happened to your mother." Ulun paused as he talked while the smoke situated around him, enveloping in a thin circle of smoke. When half of his face was hidden by the rippling tendrils of gas, he continued.
"She was rare, taken and experimented on. I fought tooth and nail to rescue you both, but she was already dead as they removed all her blood. They were going to raise you like cattle. Thankfully, I killed everyone who knew about you, and since the concentration of blood in your veins was so low, your beast traits could be kept from arising."
Ulun spoke with an intellectual as he whirred off thoughts on why her body acted this way, before lecturing her to remain as human as possible. Uris breathed in more smoke as her body shivered, her cells asking for more while her father kept pushing out small streams of smoke. Time passed as he lectured her even further, reminding her about all sorts of things that now laid in the past. The fog parted a bit as the man snuffed out the burning end of the cigarette, just enough for her to see the faint smile etched onto his face.
Regardless of what happened, he was still her father through and through. She wished her mother was here to at least witness the rare outright expression of happiness he displayed; her heart pumping as the germinating seed of hate flowered in her brain.
She gritted her teeth intermittently while she was inhaling the last fumes, just quick enough to escape her father's notice.
--
Bie was now in his spirit body, white dusty specks pushing outwards from his fluctuating form as he laid in the darkness, far away from the hub of his Inner World.
His eyes were similarly shut as his whole body rotated along in the dark, his knees brought up to his chin as his arms hugged his legs against his chest. A faint imprint of an axe was the secondary form of light, rotating in the opposite direction of him as the two spun on an invisbible axis.
The primary were a couple specks of flickering globes that lingered near Bie's spirit body, having found their way to their host. Thoughts ran by Bie's head too quickly for him to ruminate or even perceive them, though a weird change was transpiring as a buzzing noise encroached his ears.
The quantity of his Ink could not rise under most circumstances, though nothing impeded the Guide from improving on what he already had. The quality of his Ink seemed to shift as the black and the yellow streams finally started to mix, while Ekulech let out a series of flashes. The orbs danced around in the dark space, and the band of light that represented the Sconce shimmered, before all the sound in the world was cut off.
The spirit body's eyes slightly opened, and a portion of the lowest bar of light of a white cross shown as it replaced his black pupils. Rivers of topaz yellow streamed from the crack, before a small boom resounded.