Sulfuric yellow smoke and scents broke the night air, clearing away with a gentle breeze that followed. There stood but a man, robed in black cloth with leather boots and gloves with a terrible silver mask obscuring his face, a hood drawn about his head. He appeared wizards of the old style did, dark and mysterious - warrior-scholar rather than just a scholar. There were no visible weapons on his person as he stalked through the gloom of the gathering night with a waning crescent providing just enough light to send metallic beams springing off of his metalic visage; but then again a proper wizard's weapons weren't those you carried on a belt loop.
Darcia was his name, 'Dark One' in the old Elvish tongues that both the wizard and the associate he was visiting still knew and kept alive between themselves. As he trudged up the circular stones laid as a pathway in the grass up to the door of his host he took a pipe from his cloak, putting it to a slit in the mask of his mouth. Flame sprung at the tip, illuminating the ornately carved wood, as well as the dreadful stare of the man's emotionless head-gear before it sizzled away and long, circular puffs of smoke left his pale lips. He was early still...and it would be rude to come calling before his hosts were ready.
The pipe gave Darcia time to think...to search within his prodigious memory and pull out every obscure fact about his friend and his family that he could recall. His host's wife had died, and now the man was left with a Half-Sidhe daughter named Meredith as he recalled, who the Elven Magus had seen when she was a small toddler but not since. As far as his friend was concerned though, they had gone to school together at the same academy centuries ago, and had seen one another off and on as the Sidhe Lord grew into his noble estate and required services from his old friend Darcia. Most notably, they had fought together in the recent Azulian War with distinction. No doubt they would regale each other and their dinner company with stories of the war utilizing dinner plates and trays of butter to represent friendly and enemy battalions.
The Elf perked up, his pointed ear twitching under his hood...hitheto there had been bursts of activity inside - furious cleaning, the moving of chairs...but now that all seemed to have finished. If that was the case then there was no sense standing in the dark anymore. Darcia took his pipe, snuffing it out with his breath before placing it into his pocket - a finger went to his cheek and the silver mask that he wore dissipated as if it had been made of dark smoke the entire time, fleeing his features in small wisps. The hood fell back, and his absurdly handsome face with its platinum blond hair and intense, infinitely deep gray eyes could be seen perfectly, even in such poor lighting. A hand raised to the wood of the door, and his knuckles wrapped softly on it.
It was time to go to dinner.
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