❀
Denocte was having a celebration. He told himself that’s why he’d come. To celebrate, to wash away the terrible past with liquor and passion and star-readings. It was not to look for Anzhelo, or Isra, or even Michael so soon. And it was certainly not to look for El Rey. Rumor had it that he’d been a soldier here, once, not so long ago. But it was rumor, and rumors were not to be trusted.
Toro stood at the center of the Night Markets, skulls and gourds and star-speckled strangers wandering its streets, so many bodies, and for a moment he felt himself anonymous. He did not think about how they watched. So many eyes, so many eyes, but all he could see was starlight. It was everywhere, peering out of tents, shining out of lanterns, glinting off of jewelry. He wanted a piece of it. The starlight could keep him safe, like Anzhelo’s dragon scale, or even carry him off to another world. To the night sky, full of little white lights and planets far away. Tiny, tiny lights in an expanse of…blackness.
A sudden and vile anger rose up in him. It ached, and it burned, and it clung to his chest like a terrible disease. A black bull shadowed Raum. A black bull raised an axe. A black bull severed a wing, chop, and another, chop chop. A black bull shadowed El Toro. It hunted him. He could not escape. There were moments when he could be somewhere else, where the starlight could draw him in, and then it would be gone, and only the black expanse remained, and the terrible, terrible rage. It hurt how badly he wanted to act on it, to quell the flames, but they were contained within him, like a furnace, fueling a heat that would never die out until the end of the frosty night. And then, and then - well, when the chill set in, and the illness, only death could follow.
”Sir?” Toro’s head snapped up. He had been standing, motionless, before a display of shimmering jewels and fabrics. The merchant smiled at him. It wasn’t earnest. Couldn’t be. She was mocking him, for his absurdity, his anger that she could most certainly see, deep down, as if it were a child’s tantrum and not fed by atrocity -
”Sorry, miss. Must’ve spaced out. You’ve got lovely wares.” He turned away, simmering, embarrassed, hateful. It was then that he saw a familiar glint of scales climbing up an autumn-brown coat. His heart ached. ”Isra,” he called, but it sounded as a calf’s bleat, and not so like the command of great El Toro.
@Isra
They give forth such light by night,
that they make the sea more beautiful
that they make the sea more beautiful
