When he turned, the open cavity of Torstein's chest was closed to her. The two stared at each other unfalteringly—the soldier and the titan—with nothing but the cloud of their breath between them. His shoulders were stiff. From the cold or her intrusion she didn't consider. She rarely considered such things simply because she didn't know that she should. When the red of his eyes fell to her collar she did not cower, did not turn away. Everyone stared at it. From curiosity, pity, uncertainty. Fear. Teiran did not think that Torstein feared her. Was that a mistake? Perhaps he should fear the girl raised to kill but not to care; the girl with snakes below her skin and lions inside her bones. He stared at her with three eyes that she would not flinch beneath the gaze of. Then he stepped closer and the serpent in her coiled, the hunter crouched. The soldier on the surface however, collared by cold steel, did not react. She stood still as the heavy stone walls around them, unyielding to pressure. Then the spines on his chest separated again, exposing nothing but a vein of ruby red flesh from within. Then Teiran, too, took a step closer and in the light filtering through the open ceiling of the Colosseum there was a different sort of glinting in the sage green of her eyes. "Only if you give me a reason to." There was little inflection to her voice to indicate whether she was joking with or threatening the behemoth man with the life source he would expose to the world. If she were a different person she might have smiled, might have gotten some enjoyment from the way her heart beat a little quicker as if in anticipation, or the way the first trickling of adrenaline made her muscles shiver. If she were not a girl who only knew how to do her job, not a girl who did not understand how not to provoke and fight she might not have said, "What were you planning to do if I had?" |
@Torstein
