[center][@Hunter of Dreams]
[img]https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/43/00/b4/4300b403bface3af8b4f8a39ff0342f7.jpg[/img][/center]
Rain. He remembered what rain felt like, how it curled around one's skin and cooled the soul. He remembered what stars looked like, how they smiled in the sky, how they felt to the touch. How they tasted.

He remembered a kingdom bustling with colour and life, how the grass was green and how each flower sung with the stories of the forest. How they captured the hearts and minds of his subject with their beauty, though occasionally just capturing them to sait their vanity. He remembered each crystal little heart, fluttering with life in the palm of his hand. How he'd breathed the world into their eyes and saw them light up with wonder.

Wonder. He remembered each wicked dagger twisting through the bodies of the now long-dead. Such a brutal method of adorning his world with magic, but it worked. If only he'd known. Perhaps as time whistled by he'd grown soft, preferring the slow drain of life to the brutal taking of it. He remembered what it was like, in the vague recesses of history, to be savage. To be covered in the blood of the Given, to run free in conscious worlds and to have wild eyes to see through.

[center]Those days were long gone.

All days were long gone.[/center]

Valden stood on the balcony of his palace, alone in pitch darkness. There were no stars and there was no rain. No wild creatures ran through his pristine streets.

In the city below him, occasionally he'd see a few pricks of colour among the black. Sometimes his statuesque subjects would open their bright eyes, and see the world was dead, and dull a little before they slept again...

A horn sounded in distant lands. It crept passed lonely buildings and through winding alleys, it crept up to the Palace. A soft sigh of a sound at first, reverberating off each surface, growing louder till it was deafening to behold. Till the whole city buckled under the weight of it's call.

His fingers gripped the rails as he leaned over the side and stared into a dark horizon - one that, as he peered closer, was painted with the Blood Mark from the neighboring kingdom. A challenge. A tithe. His eyes widened.

A response: a resounding chorus of sweet voices, sweeter then honey, a choir of beautiful maidens adding to the demands of the horn. Far in the distance to the east the sky was painted by the blue Siren Sigil. 

Valden's hands were white. Surely if he gripped the rail any harder it would break.

There was no time. A tithe had come. The first in many years. A hunt! A quest!

A [i]human.[/i] A [b]human.[/b]

With a flurry of movement and not a sound Valden spun on his heels and entered the depths of his beautiful white and gold palace. With a flick of his wrist the rooms and corridors were filled with light; the last of his magic. He went to his throne room, and there he sounded the call. The room was vast and fitted with pillars, a large ornate circular design carved into the woodwork on the floor. It was huge; and here he stood. Here he replied: He would come for a Tithe. He would win the heart of a human. 

The chiming of bells filled his kingdom and those awake rejoiced. They turned their heads to the sky and were bathed in the light of the golden-orange mark emblazed above the Capital, above the Palace.

The Call of Clockwork. Life would begin again. The challenge had been accepted.