veer
It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be.
But you understand, don’t you?
But you understand, don’t you?
T
his time when he walks through the rooms of the castle Veer wears nothing but his golden chains and golden-tipped feathers. He has long since shed his mask and wrapped himself up in boldness. Najjad has already taken himself outside to wander the markets like a rabid beast just to see what interesting things he can shake loose for later. Here and there Veer will break out in brash laughter when the gryphon sends images of horses scattering before him like mice.
Denocte really should have kept their wall.
Each room he moves through is more wild than the last. Most of the mortals have lost themselves to drink and opiates. Singers have turned husky with exhaustion and musicians have grown mad with recklessness. In one room the floor is slick with the aftermath of clumsy horses and fragile magic. It tastes like rotten sugar on his lips and he sneers like a god as he walks through the crowd and smacks horses that stray too close with him with feathers and teeth. Soon they part for him like a sea parting around a glacier (although surely he feels like fire instead of ice).
On and on he moves through the rooms. Veer feels like he's hunting for something to look at, something to stave off the want rising up in him like a snake from a cave. He moves through a checkered room, though a library where couple are bedded like foxes and rabbits in piles of pillow. He even moves through a room that's hotter than the sun and that one tastes like sand and sweat.
And then he wanders into the sea like an orca, almost black against all the silver and the blue. He drags his feathers across the tanks of fish smiling as they swim far away from the foreignness of his form. Maybe they can smell through the inches of water the sun and blood on his skin. Maybe they smell death.
Veer moves to walk through this room too, his eyes passing over everything and pausing on nothing.
Nothing until her.
She looks like the color of old bones, struck through with watered down blood and coated in the crimson color of war. His golden eyes snag on her rubies, on the circlet upon her head and he thinks that perhaps she is pretending to be a queen tonight. Each of her steps sings, cold gold against hot flesh and his heart rises like a weapon in his chest.
Veer does not need to pretend to be a god when he walks through this room.
His steps are quiet as he follows her. He moves like a reaper although he lets his feather whisper terrible things in the pause between one of her singing steps and the next. It's not until he draws alongside her that he tucks his wings, silently into his sides. “Do you think they miss the oceans and the lakes?” Each of his teeth looks like a pearl plucked from the tongue of a clam when he smiles at her.
It's bright enough to blind, a wicked look that even the fish around them know to be cautious of.
@Pavetta | "speaks" | notes: he's awful and I hate him
