IF I CANNOT INSPIRE LOVE,
I WILL CAUSE FEAR.
I WILL CAUSE FEAR.
A
heavy, obsidian-hilted dagger slides as cool and menacing as a viper along the sleek ridges of Caine’s wings. It is a lovely thing, entirely too fine and delicate to fit the role of a reaper’s scythe; yet that is precisely why Caine treasures it so, because it is beautiful and in that beauty, so much more terrible.
A tragedy indeed that it is seldom seen and rarely admired. Tucked securely between the Raven’s first pair of feathery appendages and the second, the glinting blade only makes an appearance when its silver-eyed owner slides it like rippling silk across the velvet of a whimpering throat.
Tonight, Caine is searching for a companion to his starlight scythe.
Despite the countless times he’d traveled from the ruins of Day to the shadows of Night, the onyx-pelted Taeryn had never lingered for more than a week in either court. With a scathing smile, Caine thinks that his endless back-and-forth is akin to what Helios must suffer as he drags his golden chariot from one sunrise to the next.
The smile he wears like a gilded mask is doing little, if anything, to hide the blackness of the boy’s dour expression. His knife itches against his wings like a scab, out of commission for weeks now as Caine had relegated himself to pure reconnaissance in lieu of the Prince’s wishes, stealing secrets from wine-loosened tongues and rosy-cheeked maids alike.
And he is as familiar with Reichenbach’s castle (despite never meeting the man face-to-face, Caine knows entirely too much about the Night King — notably Isorath’s affections for him) as he is with Seraphina’s, and finds the entire affair between the enemy courts pitifully tedious.
Coming to Denocte’s famed markets, then, is an attempt at relieving the droll prospect of yet another night lurking in the alleys like a scorned dog.
Perhaps the only good that’s come of his deployment hence far, is how much of the world he is finally able to see. Pale eyes follow the flashing silks of the performers leaping and twirling and singing under the light of a thousand torches. A black muzzle lifts to inhale the smells of cinnamon and perfume that waft from the stalls he passes. Finely hewn cheekbones angle down to peer at the wares shimmering like stars upon a velvet sky.
Caine aches for his lost magic, grieves for the illusions he could’ve spun like fairytales days and weeks and months after he awakens from this night spent in the Court of Dreams.
“Those extras help you move any faster, or are they just for looks?”
To think, that the gold-mottled stranger would actually approach him — Caine had not thought him to possess the guts — his pale eyes betray nothing as he shifts to appraise the man, his smile stretching ever wider. How interesting.
“I like to think that my speed comes from natural-born agility, more than from extra appendages,” he replies airily, voice as smooth and glinting as his dagger. “Though they are rather theatrical.”
He turns his gaze back to the stall and its jewelry, staring thoughtfully at the delicate chains that he can snap with a flick of a wing. "I doubt, however, that they are marvelous enough to hold your interest so steadfastly amongst all this finery."
@Acton | "speech" | notes:
