Resting a broad-palmed hand on Amara's shoulder, Marius walks steadily in an arc, skirting the corpses, giving Amara room.  He knows she's been with the Crimson Band, and he knows something of their exploits-- theirs, and others like them.  Mercenaries, Task-masters, Sell-Swords, Questworthy-- those talented in combat, those of ideology.  Miniature armies, small enough to be handled by law enforcement rather than military force and, therefore, tolerated.  Their unified goal, their mutual desire, became their binding ideology.  Here, a cleric would sow peace, there, a crusader would slaughter villages.  Where at one flank a band of blade-wielders would turn the tide of battle for their king, on the other flank they would break and run with their coinpurses clutched tight at the first sight of blood.<br/><br/>The lure of gold, the promise of glory, the draw of a god's righteous battle-lust--  Marius has none of it, nor did Amara.  They are drawn as if by the line and lure of an invisible fisherman, drawn into wode-tracks as smoothly as the ball of a child's toy in its wooden trench.<br/><br/>Unquestioning, Marius begins to loose the facets of the huntsman's armor.  It has its advantages, certainly.  It is lighter, though not so flexible as one might think.  It is cheaply made, boiled hide and tanned, softened joints, and it can turn a boar's tusk or a bear's claw.  It could not, however, stop an arrow or stay a blade.  Now, Marius was being presented with a finer set of armor than he'd ever held-- fine aside from the gaping, brown-staining rift under the arm where Thorius' companion was run through.  The barrel-chested, short-bearded man was ruddy with gore, having been spitted from his under-shoulder through the ribcage, left to gout his heart's blood through his throat.  Marius knows enough of mending to know that, with their time constraints, there would be no time to mend the severed links between the disks, though wet rawhide strips would serve just as well to draw it shut.<br/><br/>Marius eyes the rigid, gape-mouthed man that Thorius had stripped to his armor-padding... a squiggling-lined tattoo of the islander's style disappeared into the shoulder piece, a woman's name-- 'Briusa'-- emblazoned forever there.  Perhaps Briusa will never learn Ymir's fate.  Or, if she does, perhaps she would remember him fondly, at least, for a time.<br/><br/>The cuirass first... unthinking, Marius has stripped to the waist. Ring and scale, he knows, requires less padding than chain or plate, but needs it nonetheless, so he is fishing from his pack the wool-lined jacket and breeches he retained from the mountain campaigns.  They would be terribly warm, but, turned inside out...<br/><br/>He realizes that Thorius is watching him, his short hair like the thick, short grass that bristles in tufts, but is thick and soft, the broad back and chest visible at the open neck of his shirt, semi-transparent with sweat.  Somehow, he doesn't mind, nor does he feel embarrassment or the stirring that, as a younger man, he'd have certainly known.  Somehow, his body's become a tool now-- no more worth one's notice than the rest of the gleaming, blood-duled hardware spread on the grass before him.  Something to assess for weaknesses or advantages.<br/><br/>As the shirt passes over his head, it's clearer than ever just how far he's come from a lean-bellied, wiry farmboy... his back is host to a long, pale scar, rimmed with the white dots of what must have been hasty, inexpert stitches.  In red-brown ink, under and in the skin of his right arm, is emblazoned a primitive pictograph as of a wolf as broad as a grown man's splayed fingers over thick ship-ropes of muscle, the faint trail of short, still youthful hair, black as that on his head, but thin, like a trail of smoke from a distant fire up the middle of his chest.<br/><br/>He dons the remnants of his coat inside-out after ripping the sleeves off by popping the seams at the shoulders with the jagged fang of a hook-tipped skinning knife.  Then, with a quiet acceptance, he uses the removed sleeves' thick, fleecy padding to scour off some of the thick, congealing blood from the metal plates of the scale armor before he eases it over his head.<br/><br/>The weight settles on him, and like a ghost-hand, straightens his back, pulls his head erect.  His body knows the weight of the armor, knows how to hold it.  And with each selected piece he becomes more of what he once was.<br/><br/><i>He'd begun as a pikeman-- fodder for the teeth of the war-beast.  Every friend he made from that unit-- those he shared wine with, played stones with, told jokes to-- every one of those young men is now dead or crippled.  He'd survived one battle's press by being ground so far into the mud that the trampling horses passed him by, just barely missing his head with their steel-shod hooves.<br/><br/>Then, he'd become a legionaire, his leather and wood traded for actual metal.  The survival rate was higher, so long as the commanders were tactful in deployment, but there was a time when he rose from a barbarian's hewn corpse to see nothing but an ocean of bodies around him-- a bristling field of arrows like summer bog-bulbs at the river's shoals, only they writhed with gurgling cries and shrieks of agony rather than the peaceful whisper of the river's ceaseless pull.<br/><br/>Success and survival at this had earned him special assignments... he volunteered for scout duties, but his size-- years of labor on battlements, entrenching, hefting armor and training ceaselessly to give himself any chance of survival at the front of the ranks-- marked him not for stealth, but for more incisive, personal tasks...<br/><br/>It was not long before he'd longed to be a pikeman again, after those years--</i><br/><br/>Pushing them from his mind, he focused instead on cinching the facetings tighter, making the armor his shell, disappearing into that aspect of what he was made, because when he lifted his brown eyes again to survey the ruin of the town, they came to rest upon Amara.<br/><br/>Somehow, he had always known that this would be his place... beside her.  Hopefully, he thinks,<i>between</i>her and... something... what ever was hunting her, whatever stalked from the dark, as if his presence alone would do any more than distract it from its headlong path toward her.