The devil is a machination of menace and manner – the smoothness of his voice, the timbre of a rugged lover lost to the phantasm of a midnight's sigh. How the eye falls so easily to admire, to covet, such boyish expressions that bloom in their handsome youth, shadows cascading over ageless features. Even now – as moonlight falls against his depraved curves, the shallow pools of darkness webbed between his hips, a mere husk of the brutality that lay dormant in those veins – a cold sort of civility humbles the savagery bred into his severe austerity, the ambiguous way his eyes roam and conquer. His shadow is one of courtesy, of regal wine-stained chiffon filigree, tampered with gold fluttering wings of a king moth. A lion purring beneath the caress of twilight; dusk-eyes heavy with mercurial sights. Drink him in with the anticipation of a warm liqueur – as pressed to your lips, savor sweetness and whole-bodied pleasance; but the thought is tangled as the hot fire of whiskey-bourbon prickles along your tongue.
He is not so soft. He is not so malleable, so amiable, so domestic. It is a falsehood that falls along the lines of his existence – a cloak that smooths over the travesty beneath, cool and conserved. The mirror shifts slightly in moments, seconds, a light filtered through the window that catches a glint and exposes the skin beneath. It is a skill he learns, one he has far from perfected yet. Beneath is treachery, beneath is cruel, bitter bred resentment that stirs like a venom and crawls outward, onward. It tangles in his veins and sinew and heat and chill ; it whispers, it drones, what a wicked thing that resides there that scrapes its walls and bids its conjuring through subtle inflections of violence and woe. It is why his eyes swarm with centurial knowing, knowing, as if he was a boy that owed residence to an ancient poltergeist. And as hair settles in fine nuance of civility, his cheeks flush with the arrogance in naivety, and his anatomy is softened with bristling youth, strapping and bold – he is wolven, he is wild, godless, masterless. A heathen weighted with gilded pall.
Those shards of sharpened black mirrors quiver in the ambiance of chaos – in the deceit of their former delusions. At once, he could curse the thief-boy for having lied so far, so boldly, despite having collected a few choice items to barter for a pretty coin. For those quiet minutes that he waited in the entryway he had begun to daydream aloft the starlight of the night court, his mind drifted with the rhythm that flowed about him as half-lucid phantom symphony. Those anxious thralls of expectation, of what he was deluded to believe, even place his gambles in – this court of sanguine comforts, of ruddied orphans turned to priceless jade at the hand of a benevolent gentle-lady. Of diamond smiles and ever tones that rocked him in a maternal sea, glory and freedom in the reach of such a starless child as he. Yet as the distant footsteps grew nearer, their sharpness turned his sharpness to iron thorns, defiant and defensive, his shadows shuddered in recoil like a viper lain against its own in wait. He is no empath but he recognizes the fire and cracking thunder in a voice, in a look - in the way she moves, much predator to behold than lamb!! And he feels all but a dagger to his neck as she questions – no – demands the servitude he didn't quite promise.
Oh, silver forked tongued liar, how far from princedom you have come. Some small, clever twitch comes about her that draws him to the savagery of his own origins – a breath of war, a taste of fury. A lesser child would fall back in terror. He would tremble, he would stutter, perhaps he would chase his shadow back down the cobblestone path that brought him to his consequence – but here he stands. Turns his head like a heron to a murky pool, the gold along his shoulders glistening and grinning from beneath the tangled rivulets of sea-soaked crow locks. He drinks her in, all womanly scorn and dragon's flame, the hell of a queen and the vengeance of a warrior. She is gentle yes, in the way a mother is gentle discipline, the way a lioness rasps her tongue against her kill; perhaps beneath her rage this fragility the boy mentioned existed – far beyond the sights of her audience for her to dare, no. There was a villain to fear, and indeed Erasmus, though diabolic through trade, was not her villain. At least, not now.
He didn't waste her time in letting the silence linger between them for too long. A sigh fell from his lips, deep and forlorn, as his gaze dropped from hers and rolled along the marble floors. “I believe... your guards misheard me." His voice still held the salt-gravel harshness of the seawater rinse, though the dialect of the distant Wilds toned his chords with honey brass, exotic and firm. Here in their slight grate you can almost hear the semblance of what he is beneath such balmy chords – the hissing mamba pit of slithering tongues and gnarled barb-wire lungs, a heart that pounded with bat-wing ferocity. The veil almost slips, just almost, were her keen eye more daggers than stone may she witness how his veins are molten, how his eyes shift like ghosts along a sheet lake, how his body shivers, a furious cage for the lycanthrope thrall. But she sees through him, the weariness leaks through the way she beholds him so insignificant to her foremost desires – that Crow, that wretch whose name crept along the baseboards in festering chill. Is he no more than a messenger then, is this what he has become? A spartan boy, this witch's brood, redundant as the herald that beckons from the bustling markets?
The thought is bitter as bile on his tongue. His pride swallows it like a knot in his throat, and his eyes return to her own. Perhaps there is no need for softness, then. He is all hard angles and hot barbarity, the sharpness of his features line his expressions with a dark severity that reclaim their might – more than an orphaned bastard, more than pigeon scroll. He is gator grins, jagged mountain jaws, deep and lustrous forests long haunted with the ceaseless souls of his mystic ancestry, primal and hungry. And for what he is, he doesn't dare shy from this mount of angelic fury. He is at the steps of Hades, balled fist and grit teeth. “I came for purpose." I came for blood, but he does not speak this, only in his eyes and his lips and the violence that trembles just beneath the surface. Deep, dark within him, that vile spectre grins. I came for blood. I need it. I crave it. I will have it. “I saw the placards posted in your streets." But this motive, too, is a lie in itself – for what purpose he creates. He does not care about good, does not care about the wills of those who menace the crown. War. War is what has brought him here. He hears the drums, he knows their beat, for they are the very pulsings within him. His eyes shine with all the lustre of unravelling wilderness, unhinged savagery that sings from his bones, “I can fight for Denocte." but what does she see? A lone, half starved boy, hungry for violence and paletted pleasure? A liar, bold and reckless? A wolf, unfaithful and famished? A warrior lost in the wreckage of the void? He was all these things, all these things and so far beyond.
@Isra
