[P] Does it still hurt

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

Hair clings to the slick damp of their skin. It lies in tendrils against their throats, tight against the swell of muscles there. They gleam and glow with each terrible flash of light and rip of thunder. The air pulses with the heart of the storm, throbbing in their ears and vibrating in their feet as the earth rattles, rattles, rattles.
 
The storm rolls in, a beast hunting across the plain. It snarls in every dimly lit corner. Trees become monsters, their gnarled arms reaching out like claws, thirsting for blood and flesh. They creak in the wind that howls and snatches.
 
Beneath the splitting skies the Crow turns his gaze upon his companion. She is shadow - an angular thing, lethal. The skull upon her spine laughs in the light and snarls in the dark. Its teeth are bathed ivory white, sharp as daggers that promise to rip and consume. Its sightless eyes watch the Crow, a lion surveying its feast. Yet the beast Avdotya wears is long dead, its head now a prize now placed upon her slender spine.
 
Raum turns away, his skin turning black as night, black as pitch. He douses himself with Caligo’s magic and is no longer silver. The Ghost is corvid now, all teeth and claws and coarse feathers. He prowls like a panther and watches like a hawk. Avdotya speaks and his skull tilts, avian and dangerous, toward her. He turns his electric eyes upon her too but when they reach her, they are blue no more. Those eyes are pearl and ink, black as the deepest reaches of the earth. He is a darkness that knows no light.
 
The thunder laughs and splits the sky.
 
“No.” He muses with a voice cuts like a knife through silk. There is coarseness too and it grates as sand and gravel might. Had the Mors left a token of sand and dust forever embedded within the Night Court soldier?
 
Through leonine eyes he looks upon her, setting gold to clash with serpentine red. Avdotya and Raum are blood and gold, splattered across the plain. They are the betrayers, the wreckers. Blood stains their souls as war scars their bodies. They have tasted the blood of Solterra.
 
The serpent’s scars are stark slashes pulled tight over the ridge and furrow of her ribs. The Crow wonders how it might feel to be split, as Avdotya once was, by wanton claws. In silence the Crow studies her, a predator carefully regarding a fellow hunter.
 
“Rather like a serpent that never suited climbing so high. Snakes are made to be on their belly in the dust and the dirt.” They were made to bite the ankles of their foe and bring them to their knees. Avdotya had done just that. If he were any other man he would have smiled for her then, but there is only a ghost of a smile left, haunting the corners of his quicksilver lips.
 
“Solterra was poison, even before you bit her.” He looks away, into the grey of the savage plain. He looks through the slanting rain, hard as needles and the winds that howl in his ears. He is aloof enough to contrast the congratulations that slip, surprisingly, past his lips. “Now she is crippled and poisoned. Well done, by the way.”

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@Avdotya