[AW] little pilgrim;

[Apolonia]

TIL THE PROPHET'S ARISEN -

Anyone else’s wing against her chest, as a rope, a warning, would have sent O into an indignant rage. Still now feels a ghost of affront twist in her chest. 

But the wing is Elif’s, Elif, sharp-eyed and beautiful, and so the girl merely grits her teeth and leans a little back, though the hurlbat does not stop its feral spin against her shoulder.

Sunlight turns Caine’s silver eyes to a strange yellow amber; O frowns as she catches sight of the glyphs that sear their dark lines into his forehead, curious, suspicious, and then almost wants to smile as she thinks of what rests, winking, on her own forehead, hidden behind a deep, dark curl.

It watches, as always, but he would never know.

And then her two visible eyes narrow and glower as he says her name, or tries to - It’s O, she half-snarls, and the hurlbat picks up speed for a millisecond before dashing back to its container at her hip. Oh, her blood has always been so easy to boil. He should know better. He should see it in her eyes - in the bare of her teeth, the curl of her lip as she lets the syllable finally drop. Dark hair shimmers against her neck as she tilts her head at him, canine and dissatisfied. Yet she does not even think of how he might know of her - Solterra is a small enough island that strangers are hard to come by.

What is bothersome is the confidence with which he calls her by a dangerously wrong name.

And wha is worse than that, even, is that O is discounted from their conversation within the next minute. Caine throws Elif a dagger and waxes poetic about the thing like it isn’t the size of a toothpick, and as instantly as she is wont to appear O is suddenly outcast from the pair, from the conversation, watching with hawk-eyes both worried and jealous.

Oh, there are things she could say - get away from her - a spear would fit you - but the jealousy that rises against the inside of her chest is so bitter she can’t quite find a way to speak around it, watching them play together like old friends on an empty battlefield. Breathing through a slightly clenched jaw, O stands stoic and uncertain just behind Elif, tilted away like a dune of sand by the wind.

As Elif launches the dagger back at Caine, O locks onto it. Her lips curl into a lazy sneer. The blade goes tumbling through the air and with nothing more than a blink O shifts the air around it, and suddenly it is half a foot longer, a foot, two feet now, no longer a dagger but a sword in its entirety, no more than a centimeter from scraping at Caine’s chest - 

She blinks again. Before it can hit him the weapon shrinks back to normal instantaneously, lands with a clatter on the wares table.

O does not look at either of them. Instead she turns her gaze innocuously to the weapons array, no more than a bystander.