Alecto Vermillio Raptis

✧

ight slips into nothing more than the whisper of a memory. His skin less mysterious and he more visible than ever as dawn’s gentle fingers slice across the sky in pastels of pink and green and orange. Alecto’s lips curl down at last, a whisper of ash upon his tongue from the next conversation he was flitting to, and golden eyes cast themselves woefully along the throng of people that are fish out of water. 


Beneath a moon, they are brave. 


Among a fire, they are bold. 


When their secrets are lain before a god of gold with judging eyes in a place that nothing can hide, they are cowardly and they hide. Few, so few, smile at those of Delumine they’ve talked all night to or danced a ring with time and again.


But he, sovereign son to a crooked man, stands beside none. Bodies once pressed nearer and nearer, both eager and desperate to listen as words rain from him, stories spun as gold past shimmering lips made as much from moonlight as they are from the void. 


One who comes from the dark returns to it. 


Mist and smoke cover the meadows. Further bodies are just shadows now, but soon they will be whole again. Soon they will all wake up from their reverie as though this is all some long dream in the land of Faerie. 


Soon does not come soon enough, not when a white unicorn presses like death through the bodies. Blood red is her horn. Sanguine her freckles. 


She is as opposite to him as fire to water, and how Alecto is drawn by that which is not like him. He moves then, and distance is nothing to a man who eats the world with every thought of every day. Danaë is a blade and he the board she slices onto but never through. 


He smiles his starlit smile when at last the heavens meet the earth. And she is beautiful. And he is fickle. 


”Do you disappear with the dawn as a mist stayed too long?” he croons to her gently, more sweetly than a mother fawning over her child. 


There is nothing sweet about a wolf smiling in sheep’s wool.






✦

my heart broke loose on the wind