In silence he walked at first, with hands buried deep in the pockets of a far too large and having seen better days coat that was patched in places with stitching that seemed hurried and rushed. The cold weather was coming, and though truly he could have done without it. Gale was just happy to wear it once more.

The bitter place between summer and fall had come and gone, and in the last of the warmer days the world around them seemed to shimmer with the moisture still clinging to nature’s last green. This was the phase where amber and orange turned to a bright vivid red, flashed about in the tops of trees like fire, and then burn out with a tumble to the forest floor. The last of the long summer days, hot and stale had nearly done him in with the anticipation of the season. He loved the fall. He loved it when school started again, and he could be back in the place that he loved most. Hogwarts was everything he had ever imagined, and now with it back to its original glory he felt confident he would never see it crumble again.

Having grown up in a Caravan, Nightingale had come to nearly hate the constant travel—the worry of the next meal—the fear of being caught, but now as he moved down the ever changing stairs with Landis at his side he realized how much like the Romani wagons this place resembled. Nothing about Hogwarts was constant, and every day was a new surprise.

“You don’t know what that is?” He asked finally when the night air hit their face, and the flushed the color right out. The heat of the fires  on his face were instantly cooled with the autumn wind, and Gale took a moment to size up his companion. Just as Landis icy glare had cast it’s judgment on him, so too did the silver flash of his gaze cast an appraisal over the gentleman, and though only one was visible to Mr. Morgan—that second eye, blind…still very much judged just the same. “Or you don’t care?” Came his quick follow up question, and through the narrow slit of his eye he waited for his answer.

With the stone path beneath them, and the forest floor ahead, Gale slowed to regard the man who dangerously followed him into the night—fearless as he was, Gale wondered if Landis knew anything of the stranger he kept up with…or if he didn’t care of that either?

“Are you too proud to associate yourself with Muggles Mr. Morgan?” Suddenly, the Picardie accent on his tongue sounded as though he grew up with a crown of jewels atop his head, the silver lacing a perfect contrast to his already pale nature. However, it wasn’t a jest or a tease at all, but an honest question.

"You don't know what that is? Or you don't care?" Kesali looked him up and down, the silver dart of his gaze cool as the breeze which rose to greet them when they stepped outside. Landis only smiled, a bland, bare curve of lips whose subtle humor did not reach his eyes. As if the answer to that wasn't obvious to anyone with - oh, right.

They were headed towards the forest before Gale stopped again. Landis' gaze moved past the other man's shoulder and his shining mane of hair, then flicked to the side, both sides, narrowed and considering. In the warmth of the staff office Kesali's pallor was unremarkable, slightly sickly, unpigmented as he was and dressed all in dark. But out here he drank up the moonlight and it transformed him; his hair turned silver and his skin luminous, and he held a new, more confident bearing. For Landis, it was disconcerting to be standing out in the open next to a man who practically glowed.

So he strode on into the shadow of the trees, forcing Gale to follow him to get his answer. Landis didn't particularly want to enter the forest, but if Kesali intended to stand around and talk it was better than in the sharply-defined moonlight. Here Gale's face was a white poppy in the darkness, his mouth a dark unforgiving slash. Landis could no longer count each eyelash stroke by silver stroke, and that was a comfort too.

"Yes," he said. "I am."

He looked perfectly relaxed and simultaneously perfectly regal, his own pale eyes narrowed in amusement but his posture so straight. Kesali couldn't out-arrogance him. In truth, he was wary. The forest was managable by day but mysterious by night, inhabited by dark creatures and criss-crossed with centaur tracks - not to mention the home of at least one hag who already held a grudge. Only two nights since the last full moon, werewolves also came to mind. So it would be a fool who let his guard down just because he was close to the school. Equally foolish would be to underestimate his company, and though Landis didn't show it he was suspicious of Gale until given a reason to be otherwise. The new hire was an unknown factor. Leading him outside in the middle of the night, ostensibly in an attempt to educate the muggle-hating librarian, was a poor excuse. For all Landis knew, Hogwarts wasn't his only employer. He was accordingly cautious, hands loose at his side but in easy reach of his wand.

He came alive in the light, the moon making him seem like sort of etherial being, but truly it was the way the forest at his back swirled in shadow that seemed as though ready to swallow them both. A wildness in his eye, the other covered in darkness, that glinted in the moon went well with the smirk that pulled over his pale lips at the Librarian's confession.

Yes…Yes I am.

"What a shame," Gale spoke cooly yet his voice laced with the venom of his judgement. "You miss out on the most beautiful things." He narrowed his gaze on the young man, and though Landis was pulled his full height Gale didn't have much trouble meeting his eye. Yeah he had to tip his head back some, but it wasn't too far. Truly this man's ego made him a bit taller, but Gale's madness could break that down. He was confident.

On first step into the forest, the floor seemed to open in their wake to only close again the further they went. Hogwarts was cut off from their path, even the sounds of the school seemed nothing more than just a memory, and only now the sounds of the forest at night welcomed him home.

Goodness child it's been too long. Little whispers on the wind laughed as they pulled on the ends of his pale hair, and though the silver of the moon cast through the trees the light seemed gold in some aspects as it broke along his skin.

"Then why are you following me, Mr. Morgan?" Gale stopped again in his tracks, "Pride will be your undoing, I have no doubt. And I was raised in the Muggle world so I have to wonder if you would have come with me knowing this?"

I'm lonely, but I'm not desperate.

When he took a good look at Morgan, and the way his eyes seemed weary of their surroundings Gale started to laugh; a musical sound that almost seemed as though he were as mad as a hatter, or as conniving as a fox. "Are you afraid of the woods, Mr. Morgan? Or are you too proud to admit that one?"

"As you say." Tch. How tiresome. Landis evened the odds where he could, but only among the nonmagical populace. It wasn't like he was about to sacrifice Kesali on some blood altar to cleanse the stench of Muggle from him. Unless he continued to annoy Landis with these personal prophecies, you have dark circles under your eyes, Mr. Morgan - oh, Mr. Morgan, your pride will be your downfall! "It wasn't such a deliberate decision that it can't easily be undone."

He hadn't put too much thought into following Kesali. Now, standing in the woods as the man laughed like a nutter, he was beginning to reconsider.

"Are you afraid of the woods, Mr. Morgan? Or are you too proud to admit that one?"

"Don't be deliberately dense." Landis tapped his wand once under each eye as he spoke. Neither man had lit their wands when they entered the forest; it seemed that they both knew better. His eyes were nearly all pupil when he glanced at Gale again, green-lit and glittering, flashing mirrored like a cat's. "This is not my first time here."

Several small miracles had been expended in ensuring that he, Dolly, and Dazmond had not died early deaths slinking about here, drunk or worse, on teen invincibility and Dazmond's heady brews. If they had dodged all the pitfalls of the woods including acromantulas and centaurs (the latter whom he never trusted for their classical reputations, edging out of conversation by alluding to the stars) then he knew for certain there was nothing here, clear-headed, fully grown, that he couldn't kill. But though Landis stripped the forest of its potions ingredients several times a season, he could never shake the weight of alien eyes, the inevitable label: interloper.

He was a cautious man with a caustic exterior, mind tuned to the task of endless calculation. Fear was not the same as wariness.

And Landis didn't play silly buggers. Despite his lack of concrete plans for the evening, humoring Kesali's mad grin and newly capricious nature very definitely counted as a waste of his time. Though the way the trees bowed branches to greet Gale was certainly... interesting. Perhaps he had a drop of fey blood. The fey-touched were famously unstable.

’This is not my first time here.’

“No?” Gale looked at him with a smirk, the deadly lace of his voice on his tongue seemed as silver as the light that perhaps now Mr. Morgan’s eyes seemed to tether. A flash of his own in the moon cast an eerie glow over the one exposed, the pupil like drops of liquid silver as it clouded behind the glass like surface. The water there caused the reflection of the moon to laugh, just as voices on the wind, and when they passed a large moss covered tree Gale reached out to her to brush his fingers over the rich bark. The tree itself seemed to sigh, a breath like a lover under his hand, and when his fingers fell away again a moan escaped on the wind.

“You know it so well then, that you have to use a spell to see? Funny, how reliant you are on your wand, Mr. Morgan. That you of all people would know that its best to have a little bit of a back up plan.” Upon the clearing Gale stopped in the midst of it, his hands sinking into the pockets of his coat as he turned to face the much taller figure with a smirk.

“How do you ever sleep at night?” With a flicker of his gaze over the man, he judged him, proud and far too smart to ever be afraid of any shadow, “Look at you, you can’t even go into the woods without worrying what is on the other side of that darkness? Turn around. Go home, Morgan. You don’t belong here.” No, his sort belonged in the darkness of the halls, the shadow under the stone, and like the snake he was—waited for his catch. Landis wasn’t a hunter, not at least on first glance.

“Go back to your castle, away from muggle things; away from night things.” Coward. Any man in their right mind would have been thought to be a fool, but when Gale closed his fingers around the end of his wand he waited. He baited Landis, knowing of the rumors that spawned from his slithering gate, and his horrid reputation for being nasty.

Gale wanted in. He wanted back in that life like the air that wanted to still his lungs, and freeze his heart. He wanted it because Arthur wanted it, but most of all he wanted it because he was born for it.

Though Kesali was busy caressing a tree and thus didn't see it, Landis gave the other man's back an odd look. Of course he'd used a spell - they were wizards. It was sort of their shtick. This was a twisted place, tricksy with magic and inhabited by beasts with a lot of x's after their creature classifications. As far as he was concerned, anyone who might have memorized the Forbidden Forest down to every tree, rock, and hollow - well enough to go about their business in the dark - was someone whose business was probably very unhealthy.

Not that that particularly conflicted with what he'd come to know of Kesali so far.

What a rare thing it was to find a wizard whose arrogance was directed not at muggles, but his own kind. It was curious, even bizarre. But while curiosity had made Landis follow, it was not enough to make him stay. If what Kesali wanted was company, then there were better-suited men.

Gale seemed to have realized it too, and dismissed Landis with some sharp words and a sneer. Landis had no objections to this plan, as by now he'd learned all he cared to know. Well, not everything (after the glowing and the tree stroking and the wind whispering he now actually had lots of unanswered questions) but certainly enough to know that staff amnesty seemed unlikely. This was nothing so exciting as he'd hoped, just arrogance and dramatism and silliness in the dark. But if Kesali simply wanted him to go... why place his hand on his wand like to draw it?

It gave his words more weight - not what he was actually saying, but towards his intent. Was Kesali baiting him, hoping that Landis would go for his own wand so that Gale would have an excuse? That did not bode well, for either him or any other at the castle whom Kesali found lacking. There were plenty of students who also didn't care for 'muggle things' and who, while used to condescending staff, were not prepared to be attacked by a professor. If that's what this interaction implied, if Landis was reading correctly the eagerness in Gale's eyes... ah, but that was the benefit of all his paranoid experience. Landis was usually right. So if Kesali did hope to draw him into an ill-thought duel, why?

He watched the other man closely as he spoke: "I'll go."  Kesali was as fickle as he was fey, but given that Landis himself was the patron saint of snap judgments he felt it unreasonable to point out such a quick character decision. This interaction had actually been quite efficient. It had also given him later food for thought: Gale's peculiar strangeness, his evaluation as a threat. Many wizards were eccentric, but if Kesali did turn out to be proper nutter Hogwarts wasn't so lucky to have his madness be harmless.

Anyone whose eyes could see in this dark was not human, another factor Landis considered. But the brush was certainly thick enough to blot him out even if the shadows apparently couldn't, and so he stepped back into it without taking his eyes off Kesali until the smaller man was out of sight. Then Landis returned to the path, trekking carefully back, disappearing into the castle and leaving Gale to the woods.