Even in the brittle grip of winter, Amare Creek wasn’t as cold as the heart of Solterra. Not this year, when the gods returned and set to collecting souls and punishing those who remained.
Already he can’t remember what excuses they’d made, to slip away here like giggling yearlings while the rational world ground to a halt. There was a girl beside him with a gaze that made his heart catch in his throat, colored a gold that pharaohs would demand to be buried with; what other way could he possibly want to spend the end of the world?
The last time he’d come here, also in winter, he’d met a strange girl with ribs like barrel-slats and eyes like wells, who had asked him about death. She seemed hungry in general, but starving especially for that – to be killed, to be ended. Acton had never met anybody like her, for whom madness seemed not a question but a foregone conclusion. When he glanced at the river, sleek with ice, he saw her in it, pale as a wedding-dress or a bleached bone, saying the water was no water but blood.
Best not to think of that now.
But the girl had been right about this: his hands were hardly clean, any more than Bexley’s were. What sins had they yet to commit?
For the first time other than that first time, they were truly alone – no brother-Crow, no crowd gathered in a fire-lit market or a flower-strewn festival, no assembly of devout or devoted just out of sight, as at the Summit.
Just a boy and a girl who seemed to enjoy what it felt like, to burn and be burned in kind.
Still the bare limbs of the trees leaned above them, and the river laughed beneath its veil of ice, and birds sang even in the winter. Acton paid none of these any mind; his gaze was still too full of gold.
“If you were a god,” he asked languidly, smiling as he traced his lips along the curve of her spine, “what would you create?”
Ah, but there was the second part of the question, unspoken (perhaps even unthought – but then again, likely not, not for such as him), hovering like the cloud of his breath in the cold.
If you were a god, Bexley Briar, what would you destroy?
@
I know the good die young
so let's let it pass, let's grow old and wither
