Challenge #14: An Augury
Author: Raphiael
Word Count: 406
Game: FE7
Characters/Pairings: Tactician/Mark, Hannah
(PS, mods, would you mind changing my tag to reflect my username change? It isn't a super big deal, and no rush.)
The crone smells of sour milk and stale tea, old lavender and a hint of. . . jasmine, Mark thinks, or maybe it's rose. Her deep-set eyes are ever sharp, and sharper still when she hears the clang of gold on gold in his pouch.
“An augury?” she offers, extending her claw-like fingers. Mark digs through his pouch, past the antitoxin and vulnerary he keeps just in case, and finds the bit of money he took with him just for this. However it is she gathers her visions, they've yet to steer him wrong. They're worth the little gold she asks.
She presses the coin between her palms, her knobby knuckles showing white, before turning and pulling her basket of trinkets up to her withered chest. Both hands reach in, leaving the flash of gold behind, and come out full of small, yellowed blobs, the same ones she showed him last time – little bits of old bone, each scratched with an indecipherable sign.
They clatter against each other in her hands, and there's a look on her face Mark can't quite place, a light in her eyes, a curve at her lips. It's familiar, and yet foreign. He wonders for a moment if it's always been there, if perhaps he never noticed before, too focused on the rattle of bone on bone.
“Patience,” she cackles, and he thinks he almost has a name for that strangeness. It's gone in a moment, gone with the crack of yellow-white on cold stone, and all Mark's attention is lost to the signs he doesn't know.
She pokes at the floor with those long, gnarled-up fingers, huffing and sighing and mumbling words Mark's never heard in all his travels. There's a music about them, a tune to the way she speaks to herself, though it isn't one any man might hope to hum.
Perhaps that's it, Mark thinks. There's something else to the sound of her voice, the sway of her wrists, something older than the bones and the stone and maybe even the words themselves, something that makes him think of the music of a certain flute, the path of a dance's steps, something he almost knows, but not quite, and –
And she speaks something again, and though Mark thinks, for a second, he hears it in her chuckle, it's all but forgotten as she leans in and whispers her visions in his ear.