Acton, she greeted him, and to him it sounded like no prayer at all but the soft guttering of a candle, a bend between darkness and light. He extended his pale muzzle to meet hers in the briefest of meetings of silk-soft skin and warm breath, and it felt like they were the last things alive between these cold rough walls – but when he pulled away he felt a little more like himself.
When she smiled he wondered if he’d ever seen her wear the expression before; he couldn’t remember. Other than that first night (so long ago it seemed now, a different world) their time together had been a haze of smoke and weariness, and all through the long trip to the Dawn Court he’d been too occupied with his own anger, his own black hurt, to pay attention to anything else.
They hadn’t been among his finer moments – though he’d never been known for those anyway.
Her words drew him away from his thoughts, back to the night around them where the wind sighed around time-smoothed corners of the castle. His gaze on her then was a considering thing, a gleam in the moonlight. “I never tell anyone everything. It’s only the endings that matter.” But of course he thought of his own arrival (a secret, now, to all save maybe Raum), a skinny colt newly ashore, alone and fiercely hungry for all the world had. Reichenbach had understood; their beginnings hadn’t been so different.
Acton has never done well with this kind of self-reflection; deep thought had never suited him, and now was no different. It made him restless, made him regretful, blue thoughts that turned to black ones. His emotions had always demanded action, but there was none now to take –
Again Isra leaned in, and his gaze caught the glimmer of moonlight on her horn as it slid like a tear-drop down a twisted knife. Did she think of it yet as a weapon?
Her touch surprised him more than her confession. He wanted to lean into both; almost absently he reached for a strand of her forelock, tugged it like he might have done with Sabine. It was a softer gesture than the buckskin often made, and still that restlessness grew in him.
“I’m not, not anymore.” More surprising to him that the truth of this is that he had been afraid at all – but he realized it now, how half that disastrous, hungry anger had been fear. If Denocte could change so terribly so quickly, what other truths might be undone? But for Acton the worst had already come to pass – everything he knew, dissolved like sea-foam. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much bad left to happen.”
He shifted in the darkness, his shadow leaning away from hers, and twisted an ear to listen for footsteps that would never sound again in these halls. Acton wondered when he would stop missing ghosts, and the thought tightened his jaw; at last he shook his head and glanced at her, a brow rising in a familiar arch. “Has anyone bothered to give you a tour yet? I’ve got something to show you that probably wasn’t on it.” His smile then did not feel like just another memory, and his shoulder brushed hers as he stepped past her in the corridor, glancing back over his shoulder at her the same way he had in the market’s crooked alleyways not so long ago. “Follow me, my Queen.” With a wink, he turned away.
oh, good lord, they've all gone belly-up
@Isra
