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Already tense, the cavalier nearly jumped out of his skin when the raven spoke. Marlo could hear him bite off his fear: shi -- before once again he reached for the sword that wasn't at his side to take. Mud-splattered and violent with sadness already he was whipping around to confront the speaker. No use. The speaker was a black bird.

"Yeah?" Knowing Tartaros the raven was part of the fabric of everything, the warp and weft threads of the dreamworld, but he was angry and his and Marlo's hands were bleeding and cold. He was not inclined to patience. "Because as I see it her place is with her scalp attached and alive and not pinned up like Bambi in some dirty boondock witch hut -- but that'd be too easy, am I right?"

Wishes were horses was an unpleasant echo, but he ignored it. "Tell me where my brother is."

Marlo had jumped to his feet when he'd heard another voice. Then he just made a ******** face.
"Hector." He tried to rationalize what he was both hearing and seeing. "There is a raven." You could not rationalize this. "And it is talking." It most certainly was. Marlo was winning no points for pointing out the obvious. He was just looking at the bird. "If it starts spewing out emotastic poetry I am going to call shenanigans."

All that work for a hole...for nothing. ******** his fingers were cold. Still eying the bird as if it might start into a emo version of some Disney song, Marlo addressed it. "Then what do you suggest we do with the remains? Leave them on the side of this path for anyone to just stumble across?" He kind of wanted to ask if the bird did know any poetry. Just for the sake of knowing.

Marlo wasn't sure to feel upset over the fact that the raven was just taking a bird bath in the hole of if he even cared at all. His emotions were conflicting at best. "The soil in the sense that plants don't always need sunlight to grow. Plants have been proven to grow without sunlight, though they rely on other means to produce nutrients." Nerd alarms, Hector might have felt them go off. Marlo certainly felt nerdy for knowing that fact.
"While I'd rather not upset any colored deity, I do wonder, if the Green King has given us protection, why, and, does that mean he is allied to the prince, our goal?"

Not that he was about to trust a talking crow with red eyes. He just wanted to get an answer of sorts.

"Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, save it for a rainy day," suggested the damp-faced bird.

It took wing and flew away south down the path, looking back at them just once.

Hector closed his eyes briefly. He looked tired. He looked as though he was thinking things over. In the end, when he opened them again -- they were that peculiar lavender colour -- and looked at Marlo. "If we follow the road, it'll at least take us somewhere," he said. "And we'll be able to retrace our steps, not lost in the woods."

It seemed like a second vote. He stood up and wiped his bloodied hands on his pantaloons, then picked up the stained piece of cloth that held the girl's scalp in it. "Let's go," he said. "She needs a conclusion. We need a conclusion. And if we meet whoever did this I'm going to wring their neck, you hear me?" He looked the very picture of damp, sullen vengeance. He looked fervent. Hector really did look like the type of person who swore that kind of thing and carried it out, carried it with him, bleakness already souring his mouth again as he thought about it. "Remind me later how I vowed that, Mr. Xanis."

The path led either north -- back where they'd come -- or south -- where the raven had flown off. It looked equally as rainy and miserable in either direction.

He looked confused for a second, as if trying very hard to recall something but it never quite being remembered. "I want to say how it's better to be near s**t then s**t upon? There is a saying like that I think. Can't recall it right now. Point is, I guess things could be worse?" Marlo phrased it like a question. He was walking next to Hector, one the side away from the bundle. He could have mentioned how they might have run into the girl's killer, (or killers). Or how they might get a rash like poison oak. Which he had gotten once, and knew from experience to be painful in more ways then one.

So far however, thing hadn't gotten much worse after the whole 'discovering a dead girl' thing. In someways, you really had to ask, what really was worse then that? What was rain compared to a dead body? Yes. So far, not so good, but not worse either.
"You said this is your brother's dream-something-or-other." Very descriptive. "You also mentioned Destiny City. Are you one of those supposed terrorists? I mean you are wearing this elaborate costume with maroon pantalo- er, breeches." The tail end of his sentence was clearly a muffled chuckle. No matter what Hector might say, Marlo was clearly going to see Hector's version of 'breeches' as pantaloons.

Hector had laughed with Marlo when he'd done, though had jabbed a middle finger in his direction for the obvious start of pantaloons and the chuckle that had gone with it. It was raining. They had seen the leavings of the unspeakable murder. If their laughter was a little wan, at least it was laughter. I'm a Cavalier, he'd said, but had then been broken off by the appearance of the raven sitting beady-eyed and waiting on the stump.

The axe was a new object. The so-called cavalier immediately advanced towards the raven, reaching out to touch the handle of the axe. "Road less travelled by," he said. "Which road looks less travelled, Xanis?" (They both looked equally untravelled.) "Because it seems to me that I'm holding a bag full of hair, so you can pick our doom this time, okay?"

It was obvious he'd want to remove the axe.