ORIGIN

Black was unsure of the way.

He had emerged from the depths of the Hole, with its altar, disoriented: by his body, by the darkness, by the whispers that still seemed to cling to him. Bipedal legs stumbled here and there, clawed feet kicking lightly through the bones, though he tried to avoid them.

He'd been to Canis, before--he knew it, knew of it--but nothing in particular told him to go this way. Nothing told him to go the other way, either; he was wandering, drifting. Dazed, to some extent.

...Hands. One pale blue eye regarded them: furred backs, and padded fingers, long, pointed black claws.

...Feet. Bipedal, now.

The light of Canis, too, seemed altogether too bright. The dimmer corners seemed easier to see into, somehow; the orbs above were... blinding. Perhaps he'd just been in the darkness too long. Perhaps his single remaining eye needed time to adjust once more.

...Where had he been going, before? Ahh, yes--with Max... to find the hole. No-... No, that had been days ago. Weeks ago, now..? He had been-... No, he had been going to the whispers. Listening. Understanding.

Black listened again.

"They have come with me," he rumbled, aloud, a strange spectral hollowness to his bass voice. It made no coherent sense, but it was an echo of his own thoughts: he had no need to return to the altar, now, for the voices had come with him. A soft, indistinct whispering pursued him even here, skittering over the rock and bones like echoes of spiders.

He paused, and simply stood there: silent, staring off into Canis, listening to the whispers and wondering why the light was blinding. When he tugged at his magic, this time, it came: and the darkness that cloaked him eased his vision.

It was easier to see, this way, and so he left it, for now: a pool of shadow shrouding him as he stood listening.

He startled, blinking, and slowly turned to trace, with eye and ragged ear, the quiet movement and murmured speech of the Collector behind him. They'd met, before, at the creation of Aether, but the touch of the Collector now was far too familiar. The dog had no reason to shrug it off; it didn't make him uncomfortable, exactly, but he took note that the creature was taking liberties.

He wasn't aware that perhaps Max had made him think that dogs, quite simply, liked to be petted. Black had never been that kind of dog, really.

The cloak he accepted in silence, half-distracted by the constant whispers--this one promising... something, something but what-? He couldn't quite make it out, and the Collector's words broke in on it. Ears shifted this way and that, trying to catch it all, trying to pay attention-...

Black gave up, after a moment, on doing both at once, and shifted his gaze abruptly to the Collector.

"What is it," he rumbled, slowly, "that requires payment?"

The whispers spoke of power, and chaos, and war. They spoke of driving a blade through the Collector's chest and out the other side. Of tearing out his throat, and dimming the red light of his eyes.

Black--as he had been doing before the onyx had taken him--pressed this thoughts down and focused. "They ask for me to kill you, he informed him.

The Collector had given them a task in the past, and from it had been birthed a guardian. Guardians were good, Black knew. Whatever had happened to Aether, he couldn't say; he'd never had a need to call on it, outside that one time, and he'd hardly thought of it in time, back then.

Rather than think about slaughtered children, he turned his pale blue eye on the Collector, and thought.

Clothing..? Armor, even?

Hands flexed.

No; a guardian needed those things, that was true, but the Collector granted items of power. Black wanted-... "A weapon. A shield."

Black eyed the Collector.

He had, it should be noted, no reason to distrust him. And any other being might have questioned why--just why--someone would want shadows and whispers of violence spread throughout the caves.

Black had believed in the shroud of darkness since his hatching. He reached forward, and pressed his hand to the parchment. His new hand.

"The dog will try." This rasp was, most likely, as close to an agreement as Algol would get.

Black stood for long moments after the Collector had gone, hardly registering his departure (bar the fact that the flash left him very blind, for several long moments).

He was paying attention, instead, to the susurration of whispers rising and falling around him, the words picking at the edges of his consciousness like vultures at these bones.

At length, abruptly, he blinked--and, realizing perhaps that he was going nowhere with deciphering these sounds--turned and strode back for Tunnel K, clutching the strange black cloak around him. He was not particularly thinking about his goal, his task, a weapon or a shield; just... he had somewhere to be, now, something to do, and his mind was so stretched, as it was, with trying to grasp all that had happened and all that was happening that he was left moving, rather mechanically, to the next thing on his list.