They always chose dusk, for some reason. Perhaps it was for styles sake.
Jivan glanced up at the sky, enjoying its last moments of being brighter than the ground bellow before the sun abandoned it to the care of the moon.
Eventually they would stop sending men to look for him, he supposed.
A glint of steel gave him away. 50 meters past the edge of the clearing, between two thick tree trunks.
Jivan sat, legs crossed and sighed.
“I suppose you had better come out, young man.”
Another glint, then the tearing sound of a thrown blade. It whipped past his ear, reflecting a distorted image of closed eyes and calm, scarred lips as it snatched a lock of hair from the elfs brow before burying itself in a doorframe near the center of the clearing.
Jivan stood, he had lost weight and muscle in the months that had passed; his body had lost all traces of fat and while the definition of his muscles had decayed he retained the look of old leather, of knotted rope- if before he had been forged from steel now he seemed carved from oak. His hair was free of the severe top knot of the past, it flowed freely down his naked back instead; instead of a mask his face wore an untidy beard; patchy where the scar tissue of his face still refused to grow stubble.
“Know that when you walk from the trees you enter our home.” He spoke in hushed tones, no hint of menace, no intonations of threat or anger. Calm like the first frost, all whispers like the tide.
A black blur flashes from above the tree tops, barely visible in the darkening sky, then another, and another, they plume into the air like startled crows and land before the topless figure as silently as the snow kissing the earth. Every face was covered, shadows with glinting eyes.
One speaks, a gruff voice tearing the utter silence of the perfectly circular clearing.
“We have come to collect your head, Jivan Nightbourne, the terms do not specify whether it need be attacthed to your body. Surrender your blades now.” It was delivered monotone, all business, all practice to remove the fear.
“I have cut this glade with my bear hands, assassin. A man such as myself has no use for a knife.”
Purple grass sways as the moon creeps higher in the sky, until the moon and the sun stare full eyed at each other across the curve of the earth. Blades are drawn, there are many of them, but in the mind of Jivan and Titan they are rendered irrelevant.
Druids speak of knowing balance. They flaunt the ability to pervert nature; to toy with forces outside themselves. Inside the one mind, inside the circle of killers, inside the circle of trees, inside the circle of moon chasing sun, there is a point that would make every one of them shiver.
This is not a fight, nor the oft used dance comparison. This is the act of balance in two men and one body. Two minds intertwined; impossible odds halved; impossible movements doubled. The lilac body weaves in the glade, never staying from the center, creating a single point that never varies but is impossible to hit. Defending a millimeter of ground. Glinting blades weave and thrust and find nothing but air, bodies charge and find themselves falling through space to the ground. Daggers tumble and glide through the air, free of their masters hands.
No man dies in this glade. Ever. No blood soaks the purple grasses.
Look into the perfect circle now. See the man that stands in its perfect center. So damaged that he was remade. So insane that he found reason. The hired blade that threw away his daggers.
He will never be the most deadly in the world. He may never be remembered as anything more than a killer. He was not the best or the darkest or the cleverest or the fastest.
But somewhere, where the assassins whisper, where gold stained with blood passes between greedy fingers there will always be one name that is above price.
The assassin that mastered death.
Every man that fights him walks home from that glade, none ever return to see the thatch and the vegetable garden again.
But they always feed a black cat if they see one.
Just in case.
) 
