little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
They take her whip at the entrance, as if a girl with a strip of leather is anything like a threat to a Ghost.
Elif has only worn it for a few days but already she feels bare without it, as though it were her alaja they had taken. How slight the weight had been at her hip, and how comforting. Even the wind is left behind at the door, the last breath of a breeze cool against her cheek before the throne room doors are pulled closed behind her.
She does not look back. Instead, cat-wary and hawk-proud, she watches the silver king through eyes that spark green and bright, copper thrown on a fire. In this moment she looks less like a girl and more like a dragon, lean-shouldered and narrow-faced, her wings tucked tight against ribs stacked like barrel-slats. Elif is hungry, but she has been hungry before; she is thirsty, but that is nothing new to a Solterran daughter of sand and searing sun.
More than anything she is angry, and while that is nothing new, either, it feels new to her. It feels like a rage that could eat up the city.
But there is nowhere for it to go now, with guards on either side of her and a monstrous king before her. It only lives in her eyes instead, and the snap of her tail, and the wide flare of her nostrils as she stares.
And oh, what there is to see! There is no part of him that could belong to the desert; his is a silver that could only belong to the moon, to cold starlight on a metal blade, to bones picked clean at the bottom of the sea. And his eyes, blue and cold enough to make her shiver where she stands, to make her hot blood steam and hiss in her veins. Elif does not see his monster but she fears it nonetheless, and her fear makes her hate a little stronger.
She forgets what she had come to say, as she paces as near as the guards will let her. She forgets petitions to let citizens flee if they choose, or pleas to stop putting a chokehold on food and water and the very hours of the day.
Instead she curls her lip, and arches her neck, and thinks of the way it feels to have the sun on her back, her wings spread wide, high enough and fast enough that nothing could hope to touch her. And when she speaks, it carries some small portion of the heat of that feeling.
“If you’re only trying to kill us, then you should do it more quickly.”
@Raum ... yeah take that! xD
