the song of tomorrow

[Raum]

 


Raum feels her shiver, the air hot and humid and dusty. Rhoswen shivers, not from the heat, not from the arc of the sun or the caustic blast of sand blowing in from Solterra. No, she shivers for his touch. He might has smiled, were he any other man. He might have touched her again if he did not feel the black rolling off her crimson skin.
 
It billows like smoke and swallows like the dark of a cave. Idly his mind drifts to the specters he left in the bowels of Solterra’s canyon. It is ironic, for it is where his girl’s anger lies too. But she was always angry with him, wasn’t she? Her gaze was always a blade upon his skin, her words teeth in his throat, her legs running and running and running, trampling his heart. Raum wears the scars she inflicts upon him like tattoos. He cares not who sees the way they hurt each other.
 
Oh Rhoswen and Raum were made for destruction and they would take the world down with them.
 
A copse and a chance to talk… His gaze follows hers like a smoke signal back to the only creature that might ever stop them from ripping apart (only to collide again like planets); Sabine. In silence he turns back, his electric eyes upon the copse.
 
They reach the copse at last. Leaves cast them in shadows and the air is cool. Trees press in, tight, as the moon and his sun weave their silent path deeper into the woodland. He is not even still before her words come like a blade in the dark.
 
Each word pierces him with a dagger’s art; The Crow does not even flinch. He does not bleed, there is nothing in the set of his jaw, he is solid, though his skin is mercury. In deep water he douses her flame, snuffing her anger out as it strikes him. He is ice to the scolding heat of his lover.
 
The Ghost regards her with avian eyes and a tilt of his corvid head. There is no spark of surprise, before her eyes – even away from the walls of Denocte – he becomes more staggeringly Crow. Quiet violence simmers, at bay, held down with a metal hand. It is choked, it is drowned, but it is there, wild beneath the surface as it thrashes for release.
 
“You let me into your Court, Rhoswen?” The Ghost asks, soft as a silk scarf wrapping about her throat and pulling tight, then tighter still. Raum would have made a home in Solterra, whether she let him in or not. Yet he is comfortable in knowing she would never have betrayed him – for Rhoswen was too wound up in love, in affection. Ah he had played her love like a fiddle and it was easy, more so when his own heart also drove him forward. He fell more in love with her, forever questioning how he may silence her should she ever betray him.
 
Yet here his lover stands, fierce and wild and again, proving her Crow right. Even now she had said not a word to any other, not even to him… until now. Still she keeps his sins locked in her heart. They would bear them together.
 
Through the dappled shadows the Ghost steps towards his flame. “Do you really need to ask?” He asks of her, those blue eyes impassive as they douse every inch of her fire with water and ice. “Were you ready to love a Crow, my love?” He whispers into the hair behind her ear; fire scolding his nose, his lips.
 
“You were never going to stop me completing my mission for Reich, whether we fell into bed or not.” Intimate, close, he keeps himself beside her, silver skin pressed tight against the red of her. Raum reminds her who they are, what he is: an assassin, a Crow.
 
Finally, with a devil’s kiss left to laugh upon her jaw, he steps away. A shrug pours from his mercurial body, “You know why, Rose.” His gasoline voice says with a sigh of indifference, “Bexley found out about me when I was with Acton. It was her or us, we chose Crows.”
 
A beat of a heart and then another, “Besides, Acton and Bexley seem quite taken with one another.” Again, that indifferent corvid gaze pierces as he regards his sun girl, “What is it with Solterran girls and their love of Crows?”
 
With his lips impassive, with ice in his veins, he waits for the power of her, the heat of her. She is the spark and he the gasoline, with a thrill in his veins he craves her infernal retribution.

@Rhoswen