Bonebound are welcome to view/join this thread though it will likely get knocked out real quick!

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.

"You are, so they say, meant to wear clothing once you start walking on two legs." The voice was smooth, rich, the accompanying click of hooves light as the Collector stepped out from behind the nearest shelf of bones. "Don't ask me why, of course. I'm afraid I've no idea."

Oh, he'd been watching these creatures. Ever since he'd uncovered the surviving Altar. Ever since he'd set the other fool dog to find it. He'd expected him to show others, of course--but he hadn't expected him to drag an entire group down with him.

How excellent his silly "friend-making" had turned out to be.

"Here," the Collector added, pulling a loose swathe of black cloth from his robe, and stepping delicately around behind Black to drape it softly over his shoulders. Clawed hands traced the new musculature there. "That one's free. But the next... that will require payment."

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 paused, for a beat, staring.

"Do they-?" he asked, without a clue who the black hound meant. The whispers, perhaps-? They were clinging to him, after all. "Ahh, do you mean the voices, born of chaos? It is quite... something to see them unleashed, isn't it, my good hound? Ahh, but it is best not to succumb. Not in this case, at least; I have something--many somethings, in fact--that could benefit you."

He came to stand before the Black Dog, towering over him, and pulled his hands from a position of clasping one another to palms-up, offered out, as if welcoming offers. "I have been waiting for you all to learn the true meaning of that Altar. There are many things that could benefit those who have been graced by its touch. Something more than flimsy cloth, perhaps-?" he added, reaching out to pluck briefly, critically, at the cloth he'd laid like bait over the beast before him. "But, of course, everything has its price..."

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."

"Oh, it's likely to be either-or, Black," came the oily, overly-familiar voice. There was a grin in it. "I think I have something in mind. Something that would help a guardian such as yourself. And I will gladly gift it to you, of course, once you've done a little something for me."

He reached into his robe, drawing out a roll of parchment; he turned this toward Black, its myriad glittering-black letters indecipherable, a blank space at its bottom.

"You've always been a child of darkness, black dog; what I ask is minor, really. Spread the shadows you so swear by. Ensure a certain cave is full of them, both so that all may know of what now lies beneath, and that all might hear the call. They all deserve this-... opportunity, Black Dog."

A sweeping bow, the glint of leering teeth, and the parchment was presented with a flourish toward him. "If you agree to these terms, just place your hand--fantastic new hand, by the way--just place your hand-... no, no, I have to say it."

A step closer, a sinister deepening of the voice.

"Just sign here."

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's clawed handprint seared into the paper with a flash, leaving the firm, clear print of a black hand behind.

The Collector looked at this, turning the parchment toward himself for a long moment.

"How ominous," he intoned, after a moment.

The scroll was rolled back up in a flash, tucked away with a glimpse of claws and gray fur. "The pact is sealed." There was satisfaction in his tone, but then--as he spoke further--a mischief to it, too: "Oh, and Black Dog..? Make it Polaris."

With a flash of bright light, the Collector--and his contract--were gone.

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.

exit Black