count the seconds [complete.]

Luka sensed the disturbance before it actually came. Something had riled the crows up, and it wasn’t him. He wasn’t shifted into his eagle form so they should have had no need to be so fidgety. Just ten seconds ago the birds had been calm – content with his presence if only to know that he was there. The crows themselves didn’t react badly to him. Someone along the line Luka had reached an understanding with them that was far too simple for him to understand. He never riled the birds up like this.

That’s when he spotted the hawk.

Several of the crows squawked as the bird of prey flew in. Luka felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and had to fight the intense urge to shift and take flight himself. A hawk stood no chance against a harpy eagle. He stood crouched on the branch, the situation having taken all leisure out of his stance and prompting action. However, two things stopped him – well actually three. One, the hawk didn’t actually seem like it was trying to attack his crows. Two, even if it did, with these numbers the murder would be able to chase the hawk off without casualties. And number three came running, no, gliding in not two moments later and called out to the hawk.

Luka narrowed his eyes as he looked down at the stranger from his perch on the tree. She looked distressed – though, in this fiasco of a situation who wasn’t? He took notice that she was hovering off of the ground instead of standing on it but couldn’t afford to pay her too mind heed however. If this hawk was hers, it was in serious danger of getting its eyes pecked out by a murder of, well, murderous crows. Luka turned his attention back to the air and to the hawk. The bird continued to fly around, almost aimlessly, amongst the crows that were definitely not enjoying it nearly as much as the hawk seemed to be.

Luka inhaled before letting out a loud but drawling shush that seemed magnified with the instant silence that followed. The crows, at notice of his intervention, immediately stopped their squawking and fixated their eyes upon him. The hawk didn’t seem like it was going to threaten their livelihood, and if it did, Luka would take care of it. They stopped their fussing and the air immediately calmed. He glanced back down at the floating lady before sighing and laying back against the trunk of the tree.

“Call off your hawk, would you miss?”

Luka watched with dull interest as she called out to the hawk. In the silence created since the calming of the crows, her airy call was far more audible than it may have been previously. So she was an air elemental. Not that it really was that intelligent of a deduction given the fact that she was still floating in the air without purchase. Still, the level of obedience that the hawk, or presumably Talon, responded with was commendable indeed. Luka wasn’t able to call any of the crows by name and rarely did he ever even exchange words with them. His connection to the murder of birds was simply instinctive by both parties – that was how it had started off anyway. Luka would argue that it had evolved into something quite stronger since.

Luka didn’t respond to the stranger’s apology, but he sympathized with her and with the hawk. It was only reacting according to what its instinct told it to. The fact that it didn’t attack the crows was a testament enough to how tame it had become under her care or some other circumstance. However, her question of the crows puzzled him. Did it look like he owned them? From her standpoint, probably. They did respond to his intervention and all of them sat comfortably in his presence considering how close he was to their nests.

“They’re not mine,” Luka responded dryly, “I have sort of a… mutual understanding with them.”

In truth, he had never thought of the murder of crows as a possession. Though there were usually crows watching over him no matter where he may find himself, he didn’t consider them pets or anything of the sort really. If anything, it was the other way around. Luka doubted he would be able to get rid of the crows even if he tried. They seemed far more possessive of him than he probably ever would them. Not that he ever would want to get rid of them – he cherished his bond with the crows far more than he liked to think. Without them he would be… incomplete.

Luka’s attention was once again brought down to the woman, Raeras, as she introduced herself. There was something about her presence that irked him. He didn’t understand it. She looked human, acted human, sounded human, but there was something that told him she wasn’t. Luka couldn’t place it. “call me frost,” He responded automatically to her prompting. It was instinctive for him to always introduce himself by his last name rather than his first. He only liked to let those closest to him have privilege of the use of his first name. It was nothing personal, just a precaution. It was amazing and horrifying the different things that a person could do with your name. He never handed his out for free and she would do herself good to learn the same.

Luka took notice of two things as Raeras moved to perch on a branch somewhere on a tree adjacent to his own. The first was that she seemed wary of him which most likely had something to do with her hawk. Luka had no doubt that the hawk was suspicious of him. Crows weren’t necessarily the angels of the avian world and anyone who was considered friend of an entire murder of them was sure to mean bad news as well. But that wasn’t all, the hawk probably knew that Luka could tear him limb from limb without so much as breaking a sweat if he really wanted to. However, and oddly enough, the second thing he noticed was that, despite her caution, her curiosity seemed to win out. You don’t question people you might think could potentially do you harm unless you have a death wish… or you’re just that stupid.

Yet Luka had a hard time believing that she was ignorant enough to be the latter and he knew that she wasn’t the former. Maybe she really was just that curious. Her question was rather open ended. Ability was the word she had used, not element. If he really wanted to, he could grace that with a plethora of answers – few she would be happy with and fewer still that she would want to hear. However, Luka felt an urge to give her the answer she was looking for, despite his discretion policy. After all, he knew her element and he didn’t even have to ask her. Would it be that bad just to tell her?

Maybe.

Over the years, Luka found that very few people reacted to him very well when the predetermined knowledge of his element. It held connotations that he wouldn’t deny of his element but that weren’t true to him and it really was a pain in the ass to deal with most of the time. Then again, Raeras seemed like she had somewhere to be, something to do, and while that made the subject of her ponderings all the more confusing it probably meant that very little would come of just telling. Besides, he’d probably never see her again. Air elementals could be like that. There one moment, and just gone the next.

Luka absentmindedly stretched his consciousness out into the shadows. The darkness stretched and warped around him, it was subtle but noticeable if one knew what they were looking for – or at for that matter. Several of the crows shifted, no longer able to stay still, sensing the change in the atmosphere. “well, miss raeras,” Luka drawled somewhat lazily, “you’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”

Luka was somewhat relieved at her reaction. Though he didn’t particularly care what Raeras thought of him, it definitely would make the remainder of this encounter easier if not a bit more entertaining. Though Luka himself took no notice, several of the crows squawked in indignation when the hawk relocated. The bird was smart, he’d give it that. His birds, on the other hand, were slowly becoming more riled but it was not so much out of nervousness as it was excitement. The murder fed off of his darkness and relished in it.

He couldn’t help the toothy smirk that blossomed onto his face at her challenge. There were few that ever looked him in the eye and said that with the same silent bidding as she had. Luka strengthened his grasp on the shadows surrounding him. There was plenty of darkness to be had under the cover of the tree line. That paired with his expert control over the element made him nearly untouchable here. Black sparks of lightning spurred from the energy in the air crackled around him. The atmosphere was electric, charged with nothing but the movement of the darkness. It reached so far as Raeras now. Luka’s icy blue gaze fixated on her and the branch she was standing on – cloaked in natural shadows.

Luka blinked, and in that second he was no longer sitting up in his tree but standing right before Raeras. Shadows made tangible from the currents of pure energy and control rolling off of him in waves swirled around his feet. The air had dropped a few degrees and the darkness seemed to pulsate as if alive. “of course that’s not all I can do,” Luka smiled again, but it fell just as quickly. Of course, he could do more than simple hat tricks. If he really wanted to, he could induce pain within her and send her writhing to the forest floor, but that wasn’t an appropriate greeting tactic, so he wouldn’t do that. Distantly, he wondered if Raeras knew, or at least had some sort of idea, as to the extent of his element. Surely, she couldn’t be completely uniformed – no one was – and still she had dared him.

The crows above him were frenzied, flying around in the electrified atmosphere. The air was filled with their calls of excitement. It was nearly deafening by sheer volume. Luka released his grasp on the shadows and as the air calmed so did the crows. Light once again filtered in through the gaps in the trees. The air was no longer suffocating or charged with raw, primal energy. The forest once again returned itself to peace. “what about you?” Luka asked from his perch at the end of the same branch Raeras herself stood upon. “air elemental I assume?”

Luka silently watched her, her brown eyes almost frustratingly calm. She seemed unfazed by his display of power and, though he was never one for stereotyping, he could probably easily overpower her. There it was again. That unsettling feeling in his gut that told him she wasn’t what he thought her to be. After all, how many plain humans did he encounter nowadays? Not many. If he was being honest with himself, he couldn’t even remember the last name he had met someone who didn’t have something crawling beneath their skin.

There was something about Raeras that he couldn’t place. Luka felt a frown tug at the corners of his mouth at her nearly perfect deduction of his predicament. She looked human, acted human, sounded human. The only real hint that she was anything but was the aura around her and her scent. She smelled Elven if anything, but Luka knew this to be false. Her features were too dark, and she was far too short. Her pupils were slightly feline, but not enough for it to really be noticeable. Luka was stuck – never in his life had he encountered a being he couldn’t place. Feeling his stress, one of the crows flew down from a higher branch and found purchase on his shoulder. He paid it no mind but was thankful of its support. The crows understood him better than most.

Luka didn’t miss the glint in her eyes. She was enjoying this, that much he could see. It irked him that he didn’t know, but more so that she knew he didn’t know. Goddamn. He couldn’t even reply to her without admitting to the fact so he said nothing. She would tell him, with or without his prompting.

Luka cast a glance to the crow on his shoulder. Its beady black eyes were fixated on Raeras. The bird was unbelievably calm. Usually the crows didn’t like strangers or just people in general – especially ones that bring predators along with them. Luka had the sneaking suspicion that the murder knew more about their guest than he did. For the first time in quite awhile, the shifter wished he could communicate verbally with the murder. The crow was not one of his shifts therefore he was unable to telepathically understand them as he did wolves and eagles. Though his bond with the birds did not require the use of words, they would have been quite useful then.

Vila? Wasn’t that… some sort of Fairy being or another?

That would explain two things, the first and most obvious being why he wasn’t able to recognize her for what she was. Luka wasn’t particularly ashamed to admit he had never encountered one of her kind before. Raeras’ own skepticism of her species validated that for him. The second was why the crows didn’t seem to mind her presence in the slightest. If she was supposed to be some fabled demon spawn, then of course the crows wouldn’t mind her. It was the same reason they fed off of Luka’s darkness. The crows thrived off of all things considered, well, evil. They were known as ominous beings in themselves.

“I am,” Luka replied to her assumption. Of course he was. He could do many more things with his element past what he had showed her, but he knew she wasn’t referring to that. She probably wanted to know if he was going to try and suck her blood or something. She wanted to know what he was. This really wasn’t a game of twenty questions anymore – it felt more like an interrogation. However, the shifter had little reservation in her knowing. Though, given the chance, he’d much rather show her than explain it.

Luka cast a glance at the hawk who was still sitting statuesque on the branches above them. “is your hawk skittish, raeras?” the question was dry and pure in its purpose. If their encounter so far was anything to go by, Luka wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if the hawk fled or tried to take a go at him if he shifted. Sensing his desired action, the crow on his shoulder squawked loudly in his ear before it flew off of his shoulder and onto some of the low branches beside the fairy. It sent the hawk a wary glance, but didn’t otherwise make any movements.

The shifter himself stood unmoving. He searched his subconscious for the eagle but made no further movement toward actually shifting just yet. There was a time in his early life where he didn’t like to shift. As a young boy, the change was painful. Bones were snapped and rearranged to shift the body into that of the beast and for a time it was hard to even pull it off. Luka was far past those years of his childhood, but there was still something to be said about shifting all on its own. Though he didn’t feel the pain anymore, it was an experience that was just as alien as it was integral to his existence and even to this day, he liked having some mental preparation before making the shift.