The tests begin...

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Draven Winterling

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It was late, the hour long past that of sunset and yet, so far away from dawn. Draven sat in perfect silence, hidden well within the the narrow fold of a stone gargoyle's fiercly arched wing, waiting. He could hear the massive hands of the iron clocktower ticking sharply beneath him, a sound that encumbered the whole of the building all the way up to the rooftop. He was early again, an accomplishment rewarded only with misery. Rain poured heavily down at him, dreanching his clothes and stinging his face, the frigid chill of the night coating his every breath with the finest dusting of ice.
The night was silent as a whisper and darker than the deepest reaches of eturnal nothingness, the full moon smothered young behind a wall of roiling black clouds so that not so much as a tendril of light graced the world below.
He thought ahead for once, Draven thought stolidly, noting the uselessly dim glow of the lanturn lined streets.
A woman's scream rang out suddenly through the darkness, a sharp, piercing sound of terror and pain. Draven hardly blinked, shifting noislessly into a low crouch instead as he waited. He wasn't like his twin, who could act from either side of morality without a thought, but years of practice had taught him to ignore the screams of the victum. Her tortured screams would ring out many times tonight, and when dawn greeted her again, no sound would ever escape her being again.
 
Ravus followed his new victum like a shadow, his pace slow and even as he strod through the darkness, while the woman scrambled noisily ahead, tripping over her own feet in her desparation. She was surprisingly fast for her short stature but it didn't do her much good. Her fate had been sealed the moment Ravus had laid eyes on her.

Several times he let her slip so far ahead that he could scarsely see her and waited just long enough for hope to flare within her delicate veins... then with one flick of his arm, the long, iron chain in his hand rattled off into the night and dragged her back into his reach. He grinned maliciously with every scream of pain that escaped her lips, his eyes glinting darkly with a cold satisfaction as the urge to quickly kill her smoldered sharply within him. How amusing it would be on this dull, dreary night to watch the light fade from her coffee brown eyes, to taste the coppery scent of her blood thick upon his tongue as he slit her throat, but he held his instincts in careful check. Drawing out the kill had proven to be well worth the wait in the past and this particular victum, this witch, practically radiated the characteristics of the perfect prey. Tonight he could truelly hunt.
 
It wasn't long before the stumbling footsteps of the woman reached Draven's ears, though he spotted her long before he heard her. She was a pretty thing but an odd beauty at that with long pale blonde hair and warm, brown eyes, her skin as colorless as paper in the lightless night. His eyes didn't linger on her long though. He could see Ravus stalking close behind her, a long, thick chain clutched purposefully in his hand.

Draven frowned, his fingers curling into tight fists as the scent of blood wafted up to him, its sharp, heady aroma threatening to entice him past reasoning. This has to end soon, he thought darkly as he rose from his hiding place and crept to the very edge of the clocktower's rooftop, shaking his head as if to stir up the dust of the past and cloud the unnatural sharpness of his vision. I want this done and over with... before we both turn into animals. With that final thought in mind, he jumped, catching ledge after ledge, in his descent to control the fall. As he plumitted within one hundred feet of the ground, he heard Ravus break into song suddenly, his voice soft and rich as the velvet lining of a dagger’s sheath.
 
Run, run fast as you can
over hills, across the sand.
Travel far, travel fast.
Makes no difference, this breath’s you last!
 
The next second Draven landed, his booted feet striking the ground hard enough to break a normal man’s legs but, fortunately, Draven was not a normal man as neither was his twin and this landing felt no different to him than stepping off the street curb and onto the road.

The woman skid to a halt, digging her bare and cut up feet into the cold gravel road to avoid running into him. She didn't try to run around him, gazing up at him with miserable, sad eyes instead. She was beyond terror now and seemed to have resideded herself to her fate.

Draven stared back at her for a moment, then turned his gaze to his twin. "Enough, Ravus." His voice was just as impassive and cold as his face. Against his better judgement, he glanced at the woman again and he regretted it almost instantly. At his words her face had brightened, hope rekindling in her eathen eyes. She thought he had come to save her, that he had the authority to make Ravus back off. She was dead wrong.

"We aren't here to torture," Draven continued, drawing a small, sleek handgun from the holster he had strapped to the small of his back earlier, "We're here to kill."

The gunshot was loud, the woman's life snuffed out in almost an instant but for Draven and Ravus the mere seconds seemed to crawl by in slow motion. The bullet shot from its barrel, a glowing mist of green trailing in its wake and the woman jerked back, a steady stream of dark red trickling from the new hole in her forhead.

Draven shuttered involentarily as a stab of prickling ice exploded through his left wrist. He glanced down at it in cold annoyance, clenching his hand into a tight fist as if it would stop the dreaded sensation but of course it did no good. The mark of the Death Eater glowed a horrid black against his pale skin, a wicked serpent coiled around the shattered remains of a human skull. His veins turned black as ink beneath the mark, and they slithered and writhed like snakes as fire replaced the ice that coursed through him. His rational mind began to cloud, while a labyrinth of instinct and cruelty sharped and took hold. He almost lost himself in that feeling, like so many times before, but at the las second he opened his hand again, his eyes, which had become sharp and gleaming like the eyes of a preditor of the night, caught the glint of the silver band that rested on his ring finger. The feeling died almost instantly then as bitter, miserable memories of the past flooded through his mind.
 
"You'd learn to control it if you'd just give in to it." Ravus muttered, watching his brother with dark amusement. "Clearly suppression is getting you nowhere."
 
Draven looked up, startled as he was woken from an unpleasent reverie. "Having only you as a comparison, I'm not entirly sure that's true."
 
"Are you really in control when you let that power consume you, Ravus," Draven mused aloud, "Or does it simply feel as though you are because you enjoy what it makes you do, what it turns you into?"
 
Ravus grinned. Draven had never been one to beat around the bush, especially when he got into their head enough to know them inside and out. I know you just as well as you think you know me, brother. Such a shame I can't rub that in your face.

"I'm not the one whose here only in search of vengence." He replied instead, but his thoughts remained even harsher than what he chose to speak aloud. Especially a vengence that's five years too late.
 
No. Your here for the fun of it, Draven thought irritably but instead he changed the subject. "A new toy, Ravus?" he asked causually, nodding at the length of chain coiled around Ravus' shoulder.
 
"No," Ravus sighed in mock regret, "It's one I've had for quite some time now, actually. I lost it a few years back on a particularilly...interesting hunt and now that I've found it, and all who might recognize it are either dead or too arrogent to remember, I thought I'd start using it again."
 
Draven rolled his eyes in obvious distaste, and then knelt beside the dead woman's body, scupping her up and hauling her over his shoulder in one effortless movement. "Where are we supposed to dump her." he grunted when he had righted himself again.
 
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