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]

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.)