“Auxiliary approaching!” a turn of the head over a deeply scarred shoulder, a tussle of curls and locks and a sharp, involuntary movement of the wrist was all it had taken. From perfection of form and purpose to waste and ashes, and all in a moment fleeting as to have never been, save for the fact plainly visible on the flesh before her that it had been, that the damage had been done and that a tiny piece would be forever marred on otherwise flawless creation. “Outsiders hound you, Devlin,” the woman thus afflicted called back towards the courtyard wall and the man standing at attention on the rusted gate of iron bars unceremoniously thrown to the elements for the past near on two hundred years. He shuddered at the reply and, casting a glance over his own shoulder came to understand the nature of his transgression, quickly turning his gaze back to the path leading to their mountainside home of brick and natural stone, quietly counting the number of individuals taking the trail and carefully considering their colors, accoutrement and outfit. She didn’t have to look to know what he was doing. In the Dying Season even a fight camp wasn’t immune to bandits in the guise of Imperial troops. 

“Curse you, Devlin,” she grumbled under her breath as she surveyed the damage wrought by her miscalculation at the sudden call from the roadside tower some ten feet behind and to her left. The face had been perfect, had taken weeks to bring forth upon the brick with her homemade pigments of animal fats boiled down to a liquid and mixed with the sharp pigments in alizarin and ochre which could be formed from the naturally occurring resources around the camp. Where there had been a half formed eye, symmetrical to the other with a precision her usual efforts did not permit her, there was now a deep gouge across the bridge of the nose and upwards, scarring the brow and discoloring the previously blue-black hair. She bent at the knee and withdrew a rag from her small table of yellow and violet plastic, some toy an old world child would have sat at and drank from plastic tea cups filled with dreams and imagination back when the sun shone and the world was well fed, fat and green with the bounty of Astara’s blessings loaded upon them in droves none to include the Bull Emperor of the Crimson Throne could afford in the modern day, in this new world. 

She stood and wiped at the gouge of pigment and binder, but it was plainly clear that she wouldn’t be fixing it this way. Nothing was ever that simple. She would have to wait for the paint to dry, and cut away at it or cover it with another layer before carrying on with the rest of the project. He had been beautiful, Hectyr. Square jawed, strong featured, with those mischievous eyes promising death, deliverance, neither, both. It was a shame, had he kept those eyes on his opponent’s he might have caught the feint in time to avoid losing his to the other man’s punchblade. They had run the drill a hundred times, eyes on the target, don’t forget the off hand just because the main is thrusting at you. Must’ve thought he was real clever stepping off the line and to the outside of his opponent’s guard, holding him with his own off hand at the elbow while sending a diagonal downward strike to the back of the guy’s right knee with his own main hand. Takes less time to draw a blade at the hip, pivot and deliver a straight blow then it does to bring a blade from your own shoulder to your opponent’s knee. 

He had been one of the last to go through the camp’s training regimen at the same time as she had, was going to retire soon. She’d already offered him a commission as an officer of the camp, and he’d been leaning increasingly in that direction rather than his first thought toward buying up mercenary contracts and forming his own unit. What would that fool have done with a mercenary company? Go back to fighting for thirty bronze scales a head per engagement? He’d been offered a thousand bronze scales as a signing bonus for that last fight. It was sitting in an old world plastic container once meant for porting food back and forth in his room, alongside his gear and everything else he had ever owned. He’d never even used the money. She’d heard the man who killed him had subsequently been stabbed in the back by a foreign barbarian woman facing Kull. She kept to the law of the arena very strictly, if she had a religion, a faith, it was in the infallibility of blood and sand. Still it pained her to have lost the Black Rabbit of Astara to a lucky punch and a foolish miscalculation. Still it brought a smile that his killer had been stabbed in the back by his own teammate. 

Neither of these things were in keeping with the law of blood and sand, but she could accept this sinful trespass of her nature against the arena. “Hold!” Devlin again, they must have advanced quite a ways. Could she have been lost in her own thoughts long enough to have missed their trek up the mountainside? Sure enough she was still standing pigments and rag in hand, and sure enough she could see faces poking out from behind the bars when she turned to look. Placing her stuff down on the plastic table before casting a last look at Hektor’s marred visage peering back at her from the brick of the inner courtyard wall she approached the gate as Devlin spoke to the Auxiliary. “You calling [b]me[/b] a barbarian, Ouis’Visean!? How’d you even get into the Auxiliary? Someone buy you for snake handling and decide you were too big to be worth feeding, sell you to the emperor?’ ‘Shut up Devlin. I am the Doctora of the Australos Fight Camp. State your business, sergeant,” she could see a scrawny thing, dark and of healthy color draped in an ill-fitting hide between the assembled unit. It was a girl, of a good age for training, if smaller than she’d like. For her own sake Aibhilin hoped the girl had come to the Auxiliary dressed like that rather than been made to dress this way by the troop. She didn’t need a broken girl to mend back to a new normal. This was Australos, the only need here was for fit killers of men.