veer
It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be.
But you understand, don’t you?
But you understand, don’t you?
T
here is a moment, only a brief one, where the golden apple is brighter than him. It comes to him like an epiphany that he is more wicked than a apple, more wicked than a million different sins. For a moment, that tiny silver in time where the moonlight loves the apple instead of him, that he might taste like freedom (sweet and bitter and like a god) if she was brave enough. But then the moonlight shifts and returns to him. Once more he's bright and hungry and alive, alive, alive. Soon he only wonders if she is as hungry as he is, if she might look at him, count his feathers and add all the number of him to a list too.
Veer doesn't think he'd mind, not tonight, not when it suits him to be counted and claimed.
Yet the night still ticks ever onward and each moment rings to him like a shovel against a coffin. Clang, clang, clang. Veer feels like a legend, a creature of the night that instead of drowning in an ocean decided to drink it until he was bloated and full of all the secrets of the sea. Fitting then, is it, that she whispers and rings out through the darkness like a siren song.
He lifts his wing from her spine and rises both wings above their heads. He imagines their bones like altars and his feathers like gods, a million faces peering down at their mortal flesh and imagining all the ways in which they might repent. And perhaps that is what makes him bury his nose into her silk and her mane and coo, “There is no promise I would make to you that I do not intend to keep.” Najjad reminds him of the list and they both know that those little things marked with mine are all promises too.
Already he has forgotten about the apple and all the gold (except the gold that is on him). The only art he cares about now is blue and red and bone white. He is shallow and wanting and his laughter is full of hollowness, like a great-bellied snake that circles a world and waits to consume even the religions of that world. He laughs and he wants and he drags his teeth in a kiss down her neck.
“It's only the cleverest of devils that make you think they can't feel, love” He does not deny that he is a devil, although he ponders again that he would be a better god than a monster of the dirt and magma. Isn't it obvious, he thinks, that he is made to fly above the universe and anything in it? “But inside they feel. Oh they feel so many things.” His lips and his teeth would etch the words into her skin, tangle them into her ribbons if only she was brave enough to sink instead of flee.
“They can feel rage, want, desire and hate.” What he doesn't say is that they can feel satisfaction. That they have never learned to feel. He pulls back, holds his breath and meets his gold gaze to her ocean deep ones. He thinks mine, mine, mine and his lungs quiver with the need for air as he lets the night tick onward like shovels against coffins.
“Even a devil can learn to love.” And when he finally takes a mouthful of air his lungs ache with the sweetness of it, of her.
Veer has always known the sweetest things in life come after suffering.
@Euryale | "speaks" | notes: <3
