My Warden (COMPLETED)

Rabbit

At least she didn't laugh at him. That was Cullen's only saving grace as he struggled to skin the rabbit he'd more blundered into than snared. They had stores, but Lana thought the coney might serve them better for the night while the rest was preserved for the deep roads. He wondered how long she thought this chase would last.

"Do you need help?" she asked, her voice airy even as she watched him like a hawk that would have made a cleaner job of disemboweling the rabbit.

"No," Cullen knee jerked, then regretted it instantly as his knife skidded across fatty tissue and bit deep into muscle. Blood welled across the rabbit's fur, marking another failure on his part. "You already gathered water and started the fire. This seems the least I could do."

"Well," she twisted her fingers around the jumbled wood pile. From her machinations, the metallic twang of the fade danced upon Cullen's tongue. Flames licked higher off the kindling, twisting not with the wind but her whims. "This part was a bit of cheating. It was about all I could add to traveling for...a depressingly long time. Have you ever dressed a rabbit before?" She turned from the fire to watch him, her eyes burning a hole through every poor cut he made.

"Yes...though not since I was young." And even then most people would chase him away from any butchering, terrified of what remained to work with after he hacked away at it. There was a good reason he never planned on the farming life. "What of you? Not many opportunities to learn how to skin your own game in the tower."

She smiled, "I am uncertain of that. Have you seen the size some of the spiders could reach? You could hollow a few out and make a nice rowboat." Cullen laughed with her from the memory. Neither mage nor templar found the source of the giant arachnids swarming through the crawlspaces of Kinnloch. It was a rare coming together moment for both sides as they decided to wall up the area and never speak of it again. "But, aside from pest control, the tower did not prepare me much for life outside it. Imagine. So, I picked up what I could here and there. It's better you're doing it, actually. I'd have sliced my thumb open by now."

"Oh, well, that's..." he giggled at her admittance, and tried to bite down the blush crawling up the back of his neck. A spider would have been preferable. Lana must have missed his discomfort as she returned to the fire, weaving it through her fingers like a strip of grass. "Here," he lifted the gutted and skinned carcass off the stump and held it out by a still attached foreleg. That felt wrong for some reason. "Um...where do you want it?"

"We'll have to stew it, unless you brought a frying pan with you."

"I'm afraid I left it in my other skirt," he said, lowering the rabbit into the simmering water. While she tended to their dinner, lifting the pot away from any rising flames, Cullen wiped his knife clean of rabbit blood, then his hands. It took him so long to finish the job, the gore began to clot. Crimson globules wobbled in the grass beside his boots, which he tried to not trod through. He sheathed his knife across his chest and turned around to watch Lana sprinkle something green into the pot, her delicate fingers hovering just above the water. She shouldn't look so achingly beautiful in the tempering glow of firelight, her lips pursed in concentration with her lower jaw jutted out. A thick cloak wrapped around her body rendering it shapeless, but it didn't matter. He feared his tongue would trip away even if she were covered in dung and dressed in a burlap sack. A small part of his brain tried to remind him that she was a mage, and he a templar, but the extenuating circumstances about that arrangement sat beside her. When he wasn't wrestling with the rabbit, she pored over the maps, that same enchanting pout upon her lips.

"Perhaps now is a good time to go into more detail about this blood mage we're chasing," he said, clinging to the first distraction he could find.