The Merchant's slow, shuffling gait became audible a few moments later. Step, drag, sweep, as feet pulled along the rock, as the battered robe's frayed edges slicked along the stone. Bones clattered in his path as he pushed from the tunnel into Canis proper, though his strange three-holed face (mask?) stared, lightly tilted, at the waiting Gembound.
He came close, towering far over either of them, and then stopped; and there he stood, waiting in silence, for an explanation. A hot wind, carrying the dust of Hydra, coiled and drove out around him, flattening fur and feathers as it passed.
@Nameless
The Merchant knelt, without a word. One strange, clawed hand lifted, palm-up, to display the eye... or was it a stone?--in the hand, which stared unblinking at the Gembound. This then lowered over the apatite itself, claws lying splayed across it.
The Merchant gestured, then, for Oleander to draw close... presumeably to use her magic, though what might happen with his aid had yet to be revealed.
@Nameless
The Merchant's hand rested there, Oleander's magic flowing through and added to the brief, sharp surge of his own. Through the filter of Hag-treho.
When he stood, and backed away, there was a life growing in it--and the stone quickly took root, as they do, to fuse to the stone and to grow. But the Merchant--now turning away, now sweeping in silence back into the hot winds beyond the bones--had left his own touch on the gemstone.
___________
This child, when hatched, will bear a voice much like that of the Masked Merchant's: halting and raspy, often a scratchy whisper rather than a boom.
@Nameless