each night as i go walking

[amourpropre]

Who: Lucius Malfoy (Sr) and Severus Snape α
What: Discussions on superstitions, perhaps!
Where: Severus' cottage, Flag Hill
When: Today.
Warnings: Descriptions of monstery gore.

It's a perfectly nice day until someone paints through it. Smoke as black and thick as ink trails along a clear sky, landing with more heavinesss than might have been suggested by its substance in front of the cottage, and trails of transformative magic collapses back in on itself, conforming to the more defined and solid lines of the man in the middle of it. Black smoke disappears into black fabrics, vanishes off pale skin and paler hair. Lucius Malfoy takes a glance around without truly suspecting to see anyone behind him, should he care if he did, and approaches the front door.

He hasn't been overly communicative, lately. A curt word with Lestrange before social retreat strikes. There are, altogether, too many people again. Never mind that he'd find something to bitch about if he were the only one, or one of two. There is a faint hope he doesn't have to talk to Antonin yet, but he wears 'resignation' like a coat.

Thud, thud. Metal against wood as the blunt silver nose of snake-head taps on the front door, although he suspects that his presence would possibly be detected before he gets that far, but it's habit. He steps back, thinking back to the reason that drove him here; the crow's feet lines at his eyes deepen in reflective and subtle wince, but no matter.

Comments

[inkdamage]

"I've treated a number of people for the sickness," he says, somewhat of an agreement. Yes, things out there are entirely disturbed - Severus doesn't go in with the depth and regularity that some do, but his residential proximity means he's... experimented.

Not that Lucius needs to know that.

"But there's a fairy tale come to life?" Unlike Lucius, Severus speaks - and remains quiet - with his gaze firmly on the person he's interacting with. It's something he trained himself into first as a young man intent not to be seen as weak, and then later became unavoidable habit as he learned to shield his mind. It's like a challenge. Is it that I have nothing to hide, or is it that I know you'll never find out?

He unscrews the bottle in his hands.

[amourpropre]

"Perhaps."

This would not be extraordinary for Baedal, or even Wizarding Britain. But--

But Lucius can't simply be unsettled by a singular strong beast tearing through its kin, if one can extrapolate unsettledness from his presence here. "I didn't manage to catch a good look, but the shape of the thing isn't so important. It commanded a..." His glass tips in gesture. "...presence. Intelligence, complex power, they are not often seen out there."

Wildness, mutation, madness. They are more common.

[inkdamage]

"One of your wayward peers, perhaps? Long taken to hunting from the other side?"

Severus sounds speculative, not dismissive. It is curious - and interesting. What could it be, and why would it be lurking around at Lucius? From even a purely academic standpoint, it's worthy of investigation, or at the very least discussion.

"Did you interact with it?" Not seeing something doesn't exclude such a possibility.

[amourpropre]

Lucius tips his head in partial dismissal of the idea Severus presents, but-- he has no argument. It's an interesting thought, and not one that had immediately sprang to mind, and maybe that's why he's here. To speak and speculate, to put that fear he'd known into intellectual discourse, kept in a bell jar.

"Not intensively. It kept a distance--" And Lucius took to the sky before it could want to get closer. "--but I did know the distinct feeling that it was watching me, and had been before I'd taken notice." His tone is a bit bland as he talks of feelings and senses that could sound slightly whimsical in any other context -- but these things count.

"Some of the wards I've put towards the Fog-side of my property have been tested now and again since."

[inkdamage]

"But it showed no outward hostility?" Maybe not a predator - or maybe just one that wasn't hungry at the time. Even intelligent monsters are still monsters (as they well know), and being higher functioning doesn't mean it's not an animal out there hunting. But to be able to be competent in the fog, and not a known member of the circles Lucius moves in, that is something else.

"Perhaps you've caught something's attention." Severus should sound less curious, at that, but - oh well. "My wards are always getting hit towards the east, but such is typical for the area. This high up between the coast and the forest, it just pours out some nights." ... Comforting.

[amourpropre]

A subtle shrug at that first question. Not really. Off-putting enough that it's not ruled out as being a once-off piece of good fortune.

"A flattering idea."

He taps his fingers against the edge of his glass, then; "The only thing for it would be to take a look, I suspect, before it gets overly interested. In theory, it shouldn't be hard to track." Either because it rips things to shreds messily or gives off enough magic for it to be found, and neither of these things should encourage people to actually look for a thing.

[inkdamage]

"It's only reasonable to want to know what's clawing at your gates." Said easily. Because surely whatever the next thing out of his mouth is will be reasonable-

"Is it bad form to ask if you want to go looking while you're drinking?" Sound less entertained at the idea, Severus. If there's any kind of amused expression, he covers it by taking a drink - he should really be over pretending not to be such a lunatic about dark magic and bad ideas in front of Lucius, but he's young still.

[amourpropre]

That gains eye contact in that Lucius chases after possible indications of sass, before he drops his focus down to the vodka he's not had a chance to work through. There is a certain practicality when he brings it back up to drain, and fair to say that it'd take more than a single helping of spirits to actually see Lucius towards drunk.

Agreeable, maybe.

"I'll overlook it on this occasion. Shall we?"

[inkdamage]

He'll take agreeable.

No sass to detect - so far - and Severus sits forward. "Just let me get my coat." Which actually means he needs to stow whatever it is he was working on in the basement, then go change his shirt and get a coat and stick a number of useful things in his pockets, but either way, Lucius has a few minutes to himself while he's gone. Cadie lists closer, belly up, as if she remembers that cranky old man who didn't just drown them all and is pleased to see him.

Severus is dressed more appropriately for the weather than laboratory work when he returns, and is holding what looks like a ring of marble-sized glass spheres threaded amongst rust-colored twine; he offers it to Lucius, and it becomes evident that he's wearing another one around his wrist. "You've excellent timing, anyway, I'd finished these not long ago. I'm not sure if they'll work, but if I did it right, they'll trap harmful auras that get too curious."

Hooray for field testing.

[amourpropre]

The dog gets some attention, a thorough enough rub down that would leave dog hair on the cuffs of his own coat had he not charmed all his clothing into fur-proof oblivion a long time ago. Which is the only reason there is no evidence of his own mutt stuck in the fibres of black wool. Standing and waiting patiently by the time Severus is ready, vanishing the cane sheath on his wand so that he might better plant it in coat pocket for the sake of practicality.

He frowns at the offered item, but takes it without much in the way of hesitation, as interested as he is obliging. "Will they," he says, before fastening the thing around his own wrist. "I suppose we'll soon see. Do you go by foot?"

Lucius usually Apparates, until getting uneasy at the idea of disappearing/reappearing in a chaotic field like the Fog. Then he got a broom.

[inkdamage]

"Occasionally, but as this is your stalker we're seeing to, I'm content to follow your lead."

Dealer's choice, as far as that goes. Severus does have a broom to keep up appearances (not everyone needs to know every single trick the Dark Lord taught him) and doesn't mind flying that way. "I'm mostly familiar with local terrain, anyway." He gestures in a northward direction, implying his explorations tend not to go much further than the edges of the canton he lives in. Lucius is on the clear opposite side of the city.

[amourpropre]

Fortunately, wizarding methods of travel make time and space only a minor hindrance. Lucius leads as offered, the transformative flight of partial Apparation unique among their kind allowing them both speed and a sense of direction. When they land, they're deeper south of the city, solidifying in Foggy terrain different than what borders Snape's home -- this place is more open, dotted with trees, farmland taken over and claimed and signifying the terrifying concept of geography grown smaller. A body of water rests to their left, silvery, its opposite banks disguised to them thanks to the Fog and giving it a sense of greater size than is true.

Moving along its border, Lucius doesn't pay it much heed, but there is a shape before them -- something bony and jagged, still as death, half submerged on the dipping banks.

[inkdamage]

Severus walks beside Lucius and just slightly behind, almost unconscious flanking behavior not quite broken in the face of the first war only behind a short ways behind him (and the habits learned as a child being the most difficult to break). He seems strangely at ease out here, looking at it a little like someone else might look at landscape at a vacation resort - it would be funny, maybe, if it was the bleakness he was appreciating, and not the chaos and innate darkness of the energy.

Something in the weighted air swirls by them, movements lazy, barely-visible and barely-tangible, a transparent ribbon of an eel floating and twisting in nothing. Severus raises one hand (gloves on, maybe they're enchanted) and whatever-it-is slinks by, twisting once around his fingers then moving on, listing towards the bank and its deathly inhabitant.

[amourpropre]

Lucius moves with the sort of long-legged walk that is customary to him, with the only difference is that he has his wand out with a certain amount of readiness, whereas he ordinarily prefers to carry concealed. However much he might appreciate the solitude and bleak strangeness of this world, he has gotten into enough physical tangles to remain wary -- but he is almost apathetic in his fearlessness. Being a natural coward, it takes something more like confidence and nilihism in combination, rather than courage, to affect such a thing.

And no matter what sort of monsters are lurking out there, they're nothing compared to what he's flinched from before.

The shape ahead resolves with proximity and visibility. A creature of strange formation, beastial without definition, although that is more due to the state of it than solely the Fog's twisting affect on its growth. The head is submerged in the murky water, the rest of it sprawled on the incline of rocky terrain. Six legs, vaguely canine in shape, and half-eaten. Tendrils of gore string from savaged openings, bone yellow and grey where meat has been stripped off completely. There is blood, dried and black, a lot of it.

It probably smells bad, too, which is something Lucius takes into consideration when he comes to a halt, probably prone to being more delicate about these things than the potioneer beside him, for all that getting hands dirty is a thing they've all done.

"This one's new." His tone does not match the setting. Conversational.

[inkdamage]

Though it is nearly impossible to disarm Severus, he almost never carries his wand in the open - something that's always been true, but is even more so now when he doesn't need it nearly as much. He will never stop carrying it concealed, a channeling object of that much power is too important, but wandless magic is an achievement he's proud of; just one more chain to Britain's wizarding world that he's severed.

And - yes, Lucius is notably more delicate. The particular scent of flesh breaking down is one Severus is used to. Considering what they're looking at, the absence of it would be more off-putting, really.

"Overkill," is his equally mild observation. "Why hunt something that big if you're only going to eat half of it?" Predators pick what they're going to finish. Unless this was for sport. The little spirit eel winds over towards the corpse, ducking in and out of it in a way that's marginally disturbing.

[amourpropre]

Lucius' distanced study is interrupted as he tracks the path of the incorporeal slithering thing with a glimmer of interest, but he is more concerned with the little task at hand they've set themselves. Uneasy wind tugs at them, now and then, in shifty, pendulous inconsistency, east and west.

"Interruption," he suggests. "Although, it might have returned if so." Maybe it is sport, a test of strength, an idle boredom that speaks of less madness than what usually twists the brains of the Fog's children. "It isn't the first predator I've encountered to gorge itself on its kin out here. The first hunter, perhaps."

[inkdamage]

"I've found it to be a very difficult science, attempting to study any kind of pattern with creatures out here." His tone does not suggest any great revelation; the fog makes everything in it unpredictable, and what is one day is equally not the next. Trying to pin down behaviors is largely futile - for a time, Severus tracked the fog itself, in his leisure hours, like a tide. But even that fell to chaos. He liked it a little.

"Maybe you ought to go wander ahead like a carrot on a string."

You know, since whatever this is happens to be so fond of him. (Shut up, Severus.)