I do not belong here.
I feel like a predator, transferred; a lion might survive in a tiger’s territory, but that does not mean it belongs. This is what I think of Denocte with the bonfire and incense; the stars and moon; the dark nights full of moonstones and their Queen’s strange, turbulent magic. I do not like the dragon that haunts the shore, another beast dredged up from the sea. I do not want to be walking along the docks next to a grey sea, searching for a silver woman, during an afternoon that smells of storm. People watch me as I pass them by; their eyes follow my foreigner’s build, the line of my horns, the scars that decorate my flanks. I dislike the attention, but have no counter, no way to dissuade it. There is nearly a sick satisfaction in knowing the knowledge will return to her, packaged on the lips of her own people.
(The thought itself fills my stomach with vinegar; fills my soul with bitterness. Are we so easily replaceable?)
I turn onto the docks, eyeing the masts as they tremble in the turbulent winter air. Wind gusts through them; and deckhands scramble to and fro as they prepare last-minute goods. Many are locking hatches, securing masts. I do not know what to expect from a snowstorm; I have only seen two in my life, and neither threaten with the same chill or depth as the one that looms above Novus.
Yes, storm; it is there in the angry, blank greyness of the sky. I have spent too long by the sea to not understand it, and I know, today someone would die. That is how it goes. Somewhere there are water horses emerging from the sea with teeth long and bellies famished; the storm chases them from their kelp gardens and rocky alcoves. Even if I doubted it, I feel it in my bones; I feel it in the chronic, resonate pain of my leg. There will be a storm, and it comes with the creeping chill that turns my breath opaque. Wing snags and whips at my mane; it draws water from my eyes; nearly takes the breath from my lungs. But I dismiss it with a shake of my head.
It does not take me long to find her. Locust is aware of me before I am of her; this annoys me. She looks at me over a shoulder, dismissively, and I follow.
So, she begins. You killed that grey bastard.”
I raise my brows in mock surprise. “Hello to you, too, Locust.” Does she see them as trophies, I wonder? As anything other than fodder? I know hatred; I know how personal it can become. But mine is cold. Mine is the seeping hatred that, I like to think, mimics the sea itself. After all, they are not worth their own fucking skins.
I smile for her, but the expression is as flat and voided as her tone. “Death is always painful.”
I thought it was a stupid question.
What did she want to hear?
That I know how to gut a man with the pointed end of my horns? The exact angle, the way it is not so difficult to puncture the soft skin of the belly? The way they don’t die fast that way?
Or did she want to hear how I can rip out a throat and let the arterial blood, bright and throbbing, drip from them as it would a faucet?
His death is one of too many.
His death is one that is indistinguishable from the rest, aside,
aside,
aside from
her.
The thought comes back as briefly, as fiercely, as an attack. “You’re dying because you touched her. You’re dying because—
I snort, and gestures toward the loaded ship. “Are you leaving?”
It was the only reason I am here. I do not particularly care for the silver pirate. She is playing a man’s game with all the fierce bravado of one. But I trust her vessel more than the others; most are too naive; too trusting.
There is only one way through the world, however, and that is with a whetted blade. Such is Locust's ship, in the sea.
@Locust
