[P] a word and a flower

[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.

 

The creek babbles merrily in the background, the hum of summer slipping slowly on. Sunlight pours down through leaves and dapples like liquid light upon the ground.
 
Raum found her beneath the shade, her dusky coat brightened by the sun, her hair swept by the idle breeze. Upon her page, the creek and the home it meanders through is just as Raum sees it, and yet, it is something more.
 
Though he stood behind her for too long, silently watching, silently listening to the scratch of her tools across the paper, she is not surprised when he speaks. There is no ripple of shock that slips like electricity up her spine. No, Fiona is as unperturbed as a swan upon an empty lake.
 
This creature is grace, she is the softness of summer mornings, the glow of flowers mid bloom. At her back, Raum is the poison of mercury, slick shapeless, dangerous. Fiona looks to him, as if he is a flower and not a creature with death in his veins and ghosts in his past. His daggers are weighty upon his legs, they are fierce within his heart. Maybe it is a portent then, that this girl who looks to him like he is merely a flower she paints, is merely a symbol for what is to come: the day his daggers turn to flowers. The day he tastes the blood of the coming Night Queen.
 
Then the painting is gone, its leaf fluttering in the wind. She turns to a new page, blank and white as freshly driven snow. She takes a pencil and brings the paper to life with a cursive script that curls with elegance. He says nothing as she writes, but he feels the words as though etched upon his skin. “No.” He murmurs when her first sentence is drawn. “You draw what you see there.”
 
But Fiona is already asking him, through her perfect writing, if he sees the world as beautiful. The Crow does not smile, he does not even flinch. He watches her write of her weakness, her muteness. Ah, a girl who could not scream for help? She was indeed the perfect victim for a silent monster such as he. But, Raum has no business with this girl and her lovely paints, her naivety in the presence of horrors such as he.
 
Yet all the same his muzzle tips down to the shell of her ear, “No, the world is not so beautiful to me. See, there,” and he directs her gaze to a tree barren of leaves, jagged, gnarled and angular from a lightning strike – was it one from the Stormsinger Aislinn? “A tree struck by lightning - death residing in life. Go to the fringes of the Day Court and Night Court and see the poverty of their people. There are stark lines drawn. There is the disease, the suffering, the poverty. Go and see the scar upon Bexley Briar’s face, made by a blade and the hatred of an enemy. Go and see the corpses that litter the fields and paint the meadows red with blood and fill the air with cries. See the orphans who are starved of food and love… Is your world still beautiful then?” He asks of the girl, the one who sits in beauty and draws the most beautiful thing she can find. That voice of his it never rose, it never became anything but silk, though each word cuts like a blade.
 
Raum is the one who paints the world with blood, whose blue eyes are deep enough to drown, whose scarf ties about the throat of his victims, his lovers. “Go paint those pictures and then tell me if the world is still beautiful then.”

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@Fiona