((ooc -- Black & Eve conception thread. Takes place just after Fiery Pit, Pt 4.))

Black snuffled over the rock, lapping briefly at the dragon's blood.

It was burning stuff, and he winced, glancing up and away, surveying Polaris.

It was ruined. Jumbled stone spires twisted into the air, shallow crevasses opened up. The vast corpse of a moth lay strewn over the ground, and other Gembound remained quietly talking in the distance. Dust from the catastrophic fight still drifted through the air. Polaris had been wrecked.

Black wasn't better off. He limped slowly along, his fur matted with blood and singed by dragon fire, every muscle and bone in his body aching horribly. He would live; none of his bones were broken, so far as he could tell.

Fisher, being tended in the tunnel behind him, was much worse off. So much damage inflicted--yet the mustelid was already healing, already recovering.

Impressive.

Still, something had to give, and Black knew that the gembound who had gathered likely would not survive another fight with Raheerah. Never mind the soulful howling of Aquarian in his memory, calling the name of the one who had led Raheerah off and away from them: Nemean.

Unless they found another way to fight these strange creatures, they would all perish.

They needed weapons.

And, in case of failure, they needed a backup system.

With these thoughts in his mind he continued to survey the damage, wandering along with furrowed brow and limping gait.

________________

@Eve dun dun dunnnnn

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.

The boar had gone. Shit, shit, shit. She told him to stay where he was, but now he was gone. Shit. Eve didn't even know what to do. For a moment, she paced around a puddle of blood where the boar once lay, repeating the mantra of "shit, shit, shit."

But swearing and pacing wouldn't help her. At all. She looked up and noticed the mastiff not too far away and the crow quickly scampered over, talons scraping and scratching against the stone ground. "HEY! You! You seen a giant pig?!"

The dog's heavy head swivelled up, setting him into a spiral of vertigo from which he did not immediately recover. The blood loss, the exhaustion, the heat--he jerked too fast and before he knew it Polaris was spinning, and he was tumbling, falling, the rock soaring up in an arc to meet his head.

He felt a heavy thud, vague pain, and saw a black squawking thing hop-running toward him in rather graceful little leaps.

From his position on the ground he stared at her, before responding simply.

"No."

________________

@Eve

Shit. The crow looked left, then right - she even looked up in case the pig had somehow managed to climb up onto the ceiling. Eve did not know much about boars.

She looked back at Black, almost critically. "You look pretty hurt," she squawked. "Shouldn't you be in the tunnel?"

Black huffed and slowly rolled to his chest. He lay there a moment, head low, acknowledging the crow's words in a magma flow of exhausted, slowed thought.

"...Yes. I have been."

He watched her uncertainly, reality flickering and returning as his body struggled to remain conscious.

"I am void," he explained abruptly. The words were distant even to him, a long-ago memory, as was the attempt at magic he followed up with. Unlike his wounds, his stone heart seemed intact and strong; he felt the darkness shroud him, cloaking him, displaying to Eve in visual terms what he could not quite put into words.

He was darkness.

________________

"Oh," the crow said simply.

"I can make things shiny," she then chirped, and off she bounced to find a rock.

She decided not to spend too long on finding one, and in fact simply leapt on the closest rock there was, which was only a few feet away from Black. Her gem talon began to glow gently as the rock, too, began to shimmer with pale yellow light.

The crow rolled the rock back to the void-dog using her beak. "Here. You can have it."

Black rolled further upright, staring intently at the glowing rock, suddenly entirely focused and alert, awake.

She is light. I am darkness. Black lifted his head to stare at Eve, awed; she was a small thing, unlike him, but black, very much like him.

When he had been born he had decided at once that he had a purpose. He had leapt to that purpose and fulfilled it to the best of his ability since then.

Now, he immediately assumed that this, too, was his "purpose."

He felt the swelling within him, the welling of magic; he felt his heart-stone skipping magical beats as it began to cleave a smaller portion away. Thinking that he was dying, still unaware that his magical gem lay within his chest, he managed to choke out a few words.

"Then our magics are meant to be. I am wounded; you must..." Then he was coughing, hacking, wheezing, and a small black stone slid from his jaws and clattered quietly to the floor.

He stared at it, stared at it where it lay beside Eve's glowing gift.

He was still alive, but what was this? He looked up at her.

"My form provides this gift, in return. It will be a weapon, and it will be insurance," he added, suddenly certain that this bird, and this strange stone-occurrence, were the answers to his earlier thoughts.

________________

@Eve

The crow briefly wondered if she had something on her face, judging by the way the dog was beginning to stare at her. She barely had time to open her beak before he hacked up a piece of black rock.

"Well-- WOAH. WOOAAH, OKAY THEN," she screeched, wide-eyed. "..Okay?! How did you do that?!"

She shifted and then she concentrated, feeling the magic bubble up inside her. She concentrated harder, and then the nail of her stone talon simply... fell off. It didn't hurt. But it was absolutely tiny. The crow peered at it and then nudged the tiny stone towards Black, contentedly.

Then she peered at the piece of onyx on the ground, consideringly.

He lowered his head to snuffle gently at Eve's gift, glancing briefly up at her with pale blue-grey eyes. Then he planted his massive paw over the tiny white moonstone.

Eyes drifted closed.

He had just given a piece of himself, yet he could feel the darkness within him respond to her light: coalescing, drawing from him, pouring void--pouring life itself--into her stone talon-shard.

At length he pulled away, peering down.

There seemed to be no change, and yet... the stone felt alive. He looked up at the crow, simply staring--as if waiting for her to respond. Then, abruptly, he spoke--voice soft.

"Thank you."

________________

@Eve

Eve tilted her head before she nodded. "Thanks? See you."

She croaked a further goodbye and picked up the stone in her talons, beginning to fly off. She'd put it in Cetus, by her tree, only to accidentally flood further magic into the stone until it felt wholly and completely alive, unlike the other stones in her nest.

How she accidentally managed to create a child was beyond her. But it didn't matter much as the crow looked around before she flew back up into her nest to nap.

[exit]