[color=#007FFF][b][u][h1][sub][sub][sub]Farren[/sub][/sub][/sub][/h1][/u][/b][/color]		    narrowly avoided a grisly injury, not by virtue of any skill, but by sheer dumb luck. The pulse of force sent him sliding, though not terribly far as he snapped his arm backwards to return the Beastflayer to its unified state. Then, before it had even come together everything was bathed in a black less like obsidian and more like coal or tar. A shiver roiled through him, as if he could feel the cold of that vision into the beyond, and for a brief moment he had the haziest of recollections of a Dream. The dream before he’d woken sweating and confused in a small clinic on a cliffside. Woken into a new life.

Then tiny lights, each like a pinprick in the fabric of the endless vastness, the tractless void, shone through. Somehow both ethereal yet blinding, Farren found himself shielding his eyes a moment before they adjusted, gleaming a fierce blue. As if in resonance with the pale orb that he all-at-once saw in Ophelia’s embrace. He blinked, frowned, confused momentarily. It hit him just before the starlit void collapsed–they had won her the prize they’d come for, if not the battle.

The black snapped inwards upon Ophelia and in the next instant a void tipped blade of starlit metal that glowed at its base like the moon formed within her grasp. It was perhaps one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. The incomprehensible expanse of the cosmos, that brief manifestation, had been ineffable, certainly…but it was too divorced from the world he knew for him to properly appreciate. This was simpler, a weapon, a tool that a man–indeed, a woman as well–could grasp in hand and wield against the world. Its shape was elegant, its blade–he somehow intrinsically knew–preternaturally sharp, and its strange otherworldly nature serving as counterpoint to the devastation he knew its incomplete forms could bring.

Alas, he would have to admire its form later, for now he had only seconds to capitalize on the fact that his own boon had yet to fail him. Farren’s eyes snapped to Arrayah and he moved, entering a full-length dash in the same breath that he spun his glaive once in flourish meant to draw the eye. Watching–and listening intently–for incoming strikes, Farren called upon the Old Blood coursing through his veins and primed his muscles for a heavy strike. He’d go for the connection point the arm clutching Torquil, if he got that far, but he was not a train upon a track, and if he could not close such a distance faster than she could intercept him, then he would adjust.