[P] GODHOOD & GIRLHOOD

[Apolonia]

EVENING CAME ON LIKE A BIG RED WING -

In the stuttering lamplight draining from a colored sconce a girl watches Denocte with the wrong kind of eyes.

For once she does not try to hide the third orb, unblinking, that sits like seaglass against the white of her forehead. Instead she stand half in the darkness and half in the light (when does she not?) and sloughs her dark hair from her cheeks and rolls her shoulders back to stand as strangely upright as she always does, hips tilted, head raised. 

A soft clarinet wails through the street, singing a song wild and pensive. And O shivers at the touch of it on her spine and the way it makes her muscles curl underneath that soot-stained skin. Torrents of people pass through the streets in every color of coat and gleaming where the light catches their diamonds and ropes of gold and the strange, gauzy shimmer of opalescent fabrics O does not think she has ever seen, not even in her mother’s overstuffed closet. Dragons spit smoke over the cobblestone, smash rings of fire against the ground. The air is filled with a scent so heady it makes O’s skull ring and for a moment she tries to pick out exactly what it is - cinnamon, amber, sweat - but it takes only a moment to realize the task is fruitless, impossible in entirety, and she gives up easily.

It is the kind of thing that should make her nervous but doesn’t. Maybe it’s the Denoctian in her blood - loathe though she is to remember that part of her, how it stains her insides like wine on white sheets - maybe it’s just her and her neverending godliness - either way she does not feel quite as out of place as she thought she might, and her heartbeat slurs in her chest instead of pounds.

A bomb skitters across the street and vanishes into thin air.

Apolonia crosses the alleyway perpendicular to the rush of the crowd. She stalks straight across with little attention paid to the way strangers almost stumble onto her, the stares that follow her triple-eyed gaze. As always O walks with the kind of purpose that makes obstacles shatter just at a touch, and it’s only a moment before she’s weaved her way through the worst of the crowd and toward the dark tent where she can smell incense and see just the barest slit of light bleeding over the ground beneath it.

She shoulders her way inside it with little hesitation.

An old, old woman lays reclined against a seat of crimson pillows. Her eyes are bright, foggy silver, her face grizzled with old age, white hairs sprinkle her mane and tail. She is the only one who does not let her gaze linger on O’s third eye for too long, and the girl has to wonder if she is blind or, in fact, all-seeing.

Sit.

Apolonia folds to her knees. The smell of incense chokes her, sinks into every piece of fabric in the tent. Overhead a lamp casts thin golden light onto the scene, and O watches the woman with sharp, bright eyes, expression unwaveringly cool.

What, she asks softly, Is holding me back?