It was midnight when Tinea received him, Summer blew warm air in from behind and filled the glades with his smell.
Stranger, it wheezes, the grove trees wail and the water rubbles its stones from the mud in quiet murmurs. Animals silent and still when they sense the invader - the ratfink who dares to upset the peace. To steal it somehow, some way.
Go home, Tinea seems to say with its eerie silences and darknesses far beyond the depth of Only's sin.
Stephan.
The wind sighs its warning to all of those who will listen. To the pale girl he tracks - she is down wind of him. Her hunter is smart and impressively seasoned. He is a part of night that no star can attest to - he is a
danger to them all and to himself as well.
The swamp shudders knowing what it has let in this night, if it could chase this kind of predator out it might have tried to by now. Florentine, the pale one he has chosen, drifts like a phantom through the wet woods. She glows like andromeda and he is a dark, vaccuous space closing in all around her.
A killer hides in the glades of Tinea tonight - there is blood on his brow. With his exhausted mind he clutches a knife to his chest that he has stolen along the way, one he's used not more than an hour ago - one he's not ready to give up to the black murky water just yet. Alligators may come to eat him - lord knows they've been waiting for a sinner like that. But even they know that a man like Stephan won't go away just like that.
Even the gators know he'll find a way to make them scream before he kills them.
His mind is a division of feelings and sensory details, half of him knows where he is going while the other blindly follows. Stephan walks with his head low as if his heart is full of sadness, no one can safely assume that it isn't. It is just filled with blood and it beats for no reason other than to keep him alive. He remembers his moonwhite hydra, the red cup of wine that felt bottomless when he drank from it. When he sees Florentine float in thin air he thinks of her.
That sick, sad, angel of death.
A merciless mauler, that girl.
That unfeeling bitch.
Faida.
Stephan thinks he sees ghosts tonight as Flora floats like a memory, a broken, feverish one that ended all too soon. Her wings attract him in all the wrong kinds of ways. She is a canary to the prowling panther. Stephan licks his lips and slides through shadows and lithely sails over slumps, he is incredibly light on his feet when he wants to be. Florentine goes between wandering and waiting and Stephan both watches and wonders, curious, his attention to her acutely focused.
You are abnormal. Only manages to say.
Stephan laughs outloud in the dark and gives himself away entirely. His barking laughter is loud enough to scurry the vermon from the surrounding brush. They race away, dashing off towards Flora as if she will be the one to save them.
All he feels is hunger for that.
Where will he hide the knife?
@
Florentine
.only
si vis pacem para bellum
There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
For many are called but few are chosen.
