[center][h3][color=007fff]Indigo Afina – Frenzy Camp[/color][/h3]
[@Lunarlors34][/center]

A little from experience and a little from intuition, Indigo felt as though something important was headed her way in the form of Ashlyn.  The younger woman just seemed to have that air about her all of a sudden; what she said next, if the librarian's hunch turned out to be true, would be no joking matter.  Accordingly, Indigo filled her face, framed as it was with locks of flax, with sagacity and approachability to let Ashlyn know that she would take what her heart was about to say lightly.

Ashlyn admitted almost immediately that her next words would be deeply significant to herself.  After taking a split second to feel gratified for her prediction, Indigo put her little game aside to listen with sincerity.  When her subordinate guessed that soldiers should not keep secrets from their superiors, she replied with a simple, slow nod of her head.  Like a chronicler preparing her paper and pen, she prepared to commit to memory Ashlyn's tale.

[i]Shadow Heart.[/i]  Around Frenzy Plant, an organization proven to dedicate months of time and its entire manpower into specific campaigns to utterly annihilate evil from Fiore, dark guilds tended to tiptoe or to scuttle like bugs.  The war guild could catch glimpses of their feelers, their tails, the flutter of their wings, and the foul droppings they left behind, but even to an army armed with spies and numerous contacts, a great many stones remained unturned.  As such, many small guilds like Shadow Heart were little more than whispers in its metaphorical ears.  To have a lead on one was valuable, but Indigo knew that Ashlyn was more than an advantage to be utilized, and so she listened in silence.  Her azure eyes watched tears well up in Ashlyn's, and she saw the shaking of the muscles in the young woman's hands.  Words flew together in her mind, moving around as if alive, weeding out ones that wouldn't help or that might give the wrong impression and leaving the choicest behind.  Indigo let the silence linger in the air a few moments.  Then she took a deep breath of her own and gave a slight smile.

[color=007fff]”Miss, it may seem odd, but I do not consider myself a soldier.  I never embraced that sort of lifestyle.  I'm not as disciplined as Sanders, Zander, Hyun, or even Owen.  I've never even completed basic training.  I expect I'd be a laughingstock if I did!”[/color]  A short titter punctuated the remark, but Indigo grew serious immediately after.  [color=007fff]”I'm happiest in times of peace.  I only like fighting for the grandeur of it, and for reward.  If soldiership is about drills and technique, then I am powerful, but unskilled.  That's why I don't consider myself a soldier.”

“Over the years, however, I've become very acquainted with soldiers, and with their lifestyle.  It's become a mask I put on when my guild marches to war.  In your time in Shadow Heart, I suspect you wore one as well.  I also suspect you've killed people during that time.  Some, maybe, you feel bad about.  Some you don't.  Let me tell you this, Ashlyn: what do you think soldiers do in war, like the soldier I become?”[/color]

She held up a hand, smiling even as melancholy filled her eyes.  [color=007fff]”Ah, don't answer.  The truth is that I've killed people, too.  I regret some, but not all of them.  In order to fight -for real- and survive it, you have to hate what you fight.  So I've done some bad things.  We all have.  If we were to lay our records side by side, Miss Johnson, I wonder which of us has killed more people?  Yet you feel the darkness nipping at your back, and I am surrounded in light.  What's the difference between us, if the truth is that we're both robbers, destroyers, and killers?”[/color]

Leaning back, Indigo clasped her hands over her heart.  [color=007fff]”It's ideals—what you believe, and what you want.  If you believe in hate, cruelty, oppression, pain, theft, et cetera, then you are of the dark, and will be destroyed by the light if not by yourself.  If you believe in goodness, justice, freedom, unity, duty, et cetera, then you are of the light.”[/color]  Indigo reached forward to place her hands on the shoulders of Ashlyn Johnson.  [color=007fff]”I may be hasty in saying this, for we have only just met, but then again I have heard the testimony of Thor and Harper.  I believe that you are someone who has turned your back on the darkness and chosen to believe in the light again.  Frenzy Plant is always growing stronger because the battle its members fight is within: to be the best of ourselves.  That makes you one of us no matter your past, and if your past comes crawling, we will grind it beneath our heels together.”[/color]  

Indigo stood, let go of Ashlyn, and stepped back.  She hoped that her message had reached her young comrade in her time of need, and that in doing so she had made a true ally.