FLORENTINE
always one decision away from a totally different life
The letter had swept away to sea, little more than a leaf upon the breeze. She does not watch it go, she does not even spare the crimson warrior a cursory glance as she heads for the glowing cut. It hovered electric and bright, sizzling with the static of and infinity of worlds rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.
She had made the worlds weak and the magic knew. Florentine was so close and yet so far from the rift when it began to grow. It reached for the sky and sliced low to the earth. Then it turns as crimson as Raymond’s skin and darker still. The mountains turn blood red and light pours like a fountain of blood to spill upon the earth at her feet.
Slowly the girl retreats. Her dagger is hot, hot at her breast raging against the twisting of its magic. But it is nothing compared to the winds blowing in towards Florentine and Raymond. Oh it is fierce and hot as flames. It breathes across her skin like dragon-fire and the ends of her mane glow and singe. The air is acrid and she steps back, then back again. Over and over and over her limbs work in retreat, but the scar grows and grows and grows.
It reaches the sun and blots it out, now there is nothing before Florentine but a world of crimson fire and a shadow that looms, mammoth and deadly, from within. Her limbs turn to water, her eyes as wide as the midsummer moon.
There is no world in which she has seen a creature such as the one that rips its way through her window. It is terror that has her watching it, that has her standing as still as ice, her heart a thing so fast within her chest, it feels like air. Adrenaline is electricity within her veins and all is slow, slow, slow. The world spins as slow as an eternity and the monster that looms lights the girl like torch paper.
Suddenly alive, no longer a spectator in the wicked events of this strange magic, the girl spins round to Raymond, “Run!” But the beast casts them an icy look, as blue as a frozen sea. There are no words upon her lips, no breath that can easily catch within her lungs. She might have cried, she might have screamed, not even her wings are strong enough to carry her into the skies.
Raymond, when she drinks him in in her terror and her plight, is static, his eyes pained, his body still. But then he moves and it is not to run, but to step in towards the beast. It reaches for him, a single claw the size of an army. The girl’s wings are spread and she is airborne faster than a fly. She stutters, small beside this creature – she is indeed a fly, small and insignificant, a pest to be swatted.
But that touch to Ramond’s skin is both soft and heavy. He steels himself and it gives the girl pause, it chokes the air in her lungs. “Ray,” she wheezes. “Run!”
And then the world begins to tremble with a thunderous purr.
@Raymond | |
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
