Jupiter is the loneliest planet.

He had wondered if he should build a case or a party first. Would anything make this more appealing to ~~the Labradorite~~ Master Vargas? Did he even need to worry about Master Vargas, who didn't know and wouldn't know the deeper intentions of it all, who would sooner jump at any chance for a new monster, jump at any chance to prove himself and his spawn to be powerful and useful? Or was Khavur just afraid of something?

Khavur was certainly afraid of one thing. An ongoing melody it could not escape, looping again and again in its mind, the flutter of bird and butterfly wings. The chorus, his train, awaiting his next song, his next muse, his next move. What Khavur had not yet figured out was what it meant to be an artist. He only knew desperation for expression and understanding. He was only just learning of a crowd that was anxious rather than adoring; he was only just learning of the experiences of freedom, power, responsibility, and liberation. All this and so few souls to share it with, or take it from. So few.

He stared at the piano. Had they come here, unbeknownst to him, he who listened and watched the brilliant storm of his mind for the hint of any other sound breaking through the swirling dust? Had they come in secret, and had they played until their hands melted into the keys? And if Khavur lifted his clumsy, beastly claws to play the same notes as the tremoring loop in his mind yet again, like an allure, an addiction, if he came back again and again, could he hold their hands in his own again? Would he someday reach somebody outside?

Perhaps power would become his own driving force someday, like it was his Master's. If he could attain it to the point of sating every fleeting whim, from his strongest to his faintest, it was almost certain to devour him too. Everything existed within the scope of power: liberation, of himself and his family, of his dearest friend. If he could rip them from the chrysalis or wherever they now hid, place them at his side and beg them to stay, or to not even need begging; would that ability "to be able to" not define him just the same? Well, he supposed it would not have to. All is within the scope of power, including the power to refuse definition. Now that sounded...

I'll tell you how it sounds. It sounds like the same refrain from before, cut off at the ends and the edges and folded back in on itself, then expanded to fill a room. It sounds like a path with no direction. It sounds like a spiral of ants whirling around on a broken record. It sounds like Khavur carefully, gently hammering away at the same keys, the same notes, the same pieces of his big stupid puzzle, comprising a soliloquy to mourn the pieces he yet lacks and the pieces he ~~has lost~~. 'It's pointless,' but he plays anyways. Everything the same, emphasizing and faltering in all the same places, but this time his choir of caroller birds lacks the same enthusiasm as before. He could make them participate, if he wanted to. He doesn't.

Directionless thought. Definition definition. Plan. Loop. Meandering whimsy. Devious note. Definition definition. Split and cauterize. Plan. Loop. He can almost feel the tension in fingers that are not his own. He doesn't want to. Plan. Loop. Plan.

She could hear it from her room.

Laying alone in her bed, listening to the loop. It had even been calming, at first-- a steady, constant noise to help her fall asleep. Soon, she found, however, that its predictability had become... grating. It was an echo of her every day life: the same in and out, watching voidlight dance off white walls, trapped, patrolling the same enclosed space, worrying over the same things.

Teeth grit. When she couldn't take it anymore, she flew the blanket back and left.

She had half-expected Akane to be the culprit. Aethril had even prepared her 'honey you're annoying me'-voice and positioned the fabric of her dress to fall off one shoulder when she padded, barefoot, into the room.

It was quickly hiked back up to Dignified Position when she saw the monster hunched over the piano.

One of Vargas's, no doubt-- she had caught glimpses of it before in Draco. Which one is it...? She wondered as she approached, but ultimately, she concluded that it did not matter. The Valkhand took up residence on the lounge near the piano, legs tucked neatly underneath her, chin perched on her hand as she watched with a critical eye.

"Often," her tone was advisory, "playing the rest of the song will cause the fragmented loop to stop playing in your mind."

She blinked back the groggy sleep from her eyes. "Had your Master sent you?"

He did not even notice her, until she was there. First his steady droning quieted somewhat subconsciously, to hear but not quite to listen — that was, until he— until it looked, and saw. Her. Tall, and blue, and her pose, her imminent, radiant dignity, the way she held herself even as she sat. Khavur landed ever so softly on a flat note, like a pebble had fallen onto a rock, and instead of a clanging of wills there was a sad, almost pathetic withdrawal. A silence. It backed away from the piano and bowed both its heads. "I cannot—"—that is not what she asked—"I was not sent, no. I came for..." One of its grasping claws floated towards the piano again, "this." It dared not touch; not without permission, not within a presence like hers. One set of eyes, the most functional, drifted up to find hers, while the other stayed planted on the floor. "You are not... Lord Dhracia, correct?"

She did not have the exact same persona, the same aura. The slightest hint of Lord Dhracia's wrath had been enough to boil flesh; this felt like a story of a different ilk. But Khavur would never forget that impression. Definition. Khavur would instead look for the signs; oilstone if it was there, familiarity of shape and poise, possession so much more knowledge that Khavur itself. Definition. The eyes that could still see sought out every tell. Definition: not Lord Dhracia, unlikely to be, but tired. Familiar... familiar. Tired. Khavur wished it could be tired too. But instead it was here, playing loud enough to wake(?) someone, someone who felt within seconds like she belonged more in this place than Khavur ever would, and on top of that it was bathing the floors in its sickly cherry scent. Now Khavur was sorry. Khavur wished it hadn't come, but that was a less recent and somehow even more futile wish.

Khavur's mind burned bright with an immediate, inevitable rising flurry of questions, but this was not its place of dominion. The floor was hers. Khavur was just here, making a mess on it.

A small, bitter sort of laugh rumbled from the Valkhand's throat. "Lord Dhracia is browner," she answered after a beat-- and she pushed down those feelings of yearning. She did not want to admit-- even to herself --that she missed her presence quite sorely.

Tap, tap, tap-- her fingers found the iridescent oilstone nestled into her chest. "I am Aethril," came the reminder. "I remember you from the meeting where the bird was killed, though I do not know your name." There had been many there, and although she inspected a great deal of the Valkhounds that attended, only a spare few remained strongly in her mind. Draconua, the little white whelp, and the humanoid-shaped one that bit the owl.

Then, her hand left her sternum and it beckoned-- not to Khavur, but to something else. A Lesser small and stocky like an alabaster hedgehog came wordlessly trotting towards Khavur and began mopping up the floor around him with its entire face; diligently working away while Aethril continued on. "The piano was meant to be played." Perhaps this was... encouragement?

"Why don't you play something other than the same bar over and over again?"

Ah, right. Browner. How could it forget? Well the truth was, it hadn't. It could never. But that question was a test; a 9-and-a-half foot pole with which to prod a sleepy bear. It had made her laugh. That was good, it supposed — it liked her laugh, or more that she was laughing, but it still worried. Lord Dhracia had laughed too. And that's when she had given Khavur that gift of hideous, awakening truth. When she had taught it about the existence of another definition. It was nothing without its definitions.

This was Aethril. How could Khavur have forgotten? The remnants of the bird and the throbbing of its chest; monstrous. Khavur had done nothing then, just like it was doing nothing now. Too afraid. Too ignorant. Too powerless. It disliked this cage, now forced to remember every moment when it felt like it had the strength to impress upon those bars. New cage, new metal, not strong enough for this one yet it could already feel from the resonance of that laughter and the command in that gesture. But Khavur was adept at playing along.

One set of eyes followed the motion of a Lesser now assigned to be the Reaver's personal mop. Perhaps Khavur should have been embarrassed, but instead it was rather curious. Very curious. One set of eyes remained on that motion, one track of the mind breaking away and speeding off a different cliff. The other set remained on Aethril, on the piano which was meant to be played. "...Miss Aethril. I am Khavur... the Reaver." It introduced itself swiftly, opting out of the embarrassment of sharing its full title. It did not feel quite so connected or summarized by that title anyways; it was not so telling as the simple word "Hand" which had so effectively outlined her. "I cannot remember more than that one... bar," it admitted. "I heard the full tune many cycles ago." It could not seem to swallow the forlorn notes rising to the delivery of its words. "I have never heard another song composed that way. Birdsong is not very fitting for a piano." It glanced around to the carollers perched on various parts of its body, some of which had decided to retreat from the presence of the Valkhand. Or maybe it was making them do that. It held up a grasping claw for inspection, to exemplify its next point: "...My hands are not that fitting for one either." Finally, all eyes drew back to her. It let one question slip. "I imagine yours are far more suited to it."

"The Reaver," Aethril echoed with amusement dripping like venom. The Chaos Forge certainly liked their titles, it seemed-- though she could not imagine how Khavur had earned this one. Perhaps, she thought, Vargas simply bestows them to his creations for flavour. This, similarly, seemed quite funny to her.

She eyed the carollers, then Khavur and his claws as he spoke. "They are hardly hands," was her next comment-- hand-shaped, perhaps, and with similar dexterity, but Khavur's 'hands' were not for the delicate work of creaton and holding and whatnot. Khavur's hands had been created with one purpose obviously in mind: kill.

"You're asking me to play?" She asked, half-smirking. Pianos were too much of a luxury for her to have experienced them in childhood, but since she entered the Nest she had become much more intimately familiar with them. She'd been tutoring Akane to play properly, to use her feet on the keys below, not to press too long on the keys or the notes would dull out: good for emphasis on a final note or pause, but sour among the fray.

Her hands were idly shooing Khavur from the piano from her seat. "Birdsong can be played," Aethril explained. "It all depends on how you adapt it. Sometimes it can be too disjointed; it needs... spice, to sound right."

"You should, either way, learn more songs."