As she moves like a knife to his throat, all the shade moves with her – interchangeable, intangible, a lusting gape of peering moons that harbor a disastrous taste for sweeter things, bitter things, all at once chastising their own softer nature in favor of the sharpest. Inside him, the viper pit writhes. It seethes, it withdraws into endless night and bares its fangs in eerie derision; and with a whisper, beckons that sharpened glint it sees in her eyes with a familiarity that seems all the more consoling than it should. While the iron walls around her raise and surround the two, edged with barbed wire and dripping venom, and while her words chase his lies to a corner and loom like the sword of damocles – in some world apart from his own, perhaps he should shrink in the shadow of such a Sovereign. Perhaps, he should tell the truth. Perhaps, he should bleed the viscosity of his crimes and find penance in such an intense stare, bright and so full of wonder and equal graven parts. But he can't – the broken crown sits (though it doesn't exist, truly) atop the smooth roll slope of his skull and refuses to budge, not for any man, woman or god. His pride isn't humbled even in the face of death. All this, and he knows still that he is no threat to her. A dark thing, a jagged thing born of thorns and serpents and the mourning spirits of the river styx, his menace is lost to his ragged appearance. How the brine clings to his coat, disheveling its former shine. How his mane ties in knots beneath the shadow, and how the coral has scraped and cut his willowy form that sadly boasts its former glory in small, miserable flexes of moonlight and golden gleam. A month ago, he was more than this. He was fire and bloodied shoulders, ruddy gutting knives embedded in gilded ribs, so bold and steady, that titan Erasmus. But today he feels nameless. And this incites an emptiness that eats and eats and eats and –
The regal stone beneath her shifts, cracks, buckling coal that glistens as it - moves? an exhausted huff of black dust flings from the gulch and peppers a small plot that is imprinted in the weight of her hooves. His brow furrows to witness, and he wonders to just what extent his unrest has let him slip into insanity; first it was the offhand shadows that slipped from the corners of his eye when he traipsed the dusk-fallen markets, small twirling semblances to smoke that seemed to vanish from his flesh the moment he looked. This was no different, surely? While more intense a hallucination. He moved his gaze back to her own as she spoke, peering into his face as if she strove to drink him in like a spider lost in a glass of deep, red wine. Oh, she questions his audacity. A timid, well-mannered thing would assume that he had been too bold, should he apologize? But the thought does not cross his mind. Surely she did not seek to terrify her citizens, to rile them up in arms, if only to expect their flight in the presence of an enemy? His tongue slithers behind sharp teeth, but slips in between the cracks and rushes against the hardness of his gums. The shadows tangled in his heart scrape against his throat and demand an audience - because I want blood, because I am hungry, I want fed! I care nothing for your own enemies. But he swallows instead, his deep gaze a hundred sharp, golden arrowheads that stir from their quiver, unmoving from her own. The words are bit back as if each is a reluctant pebble that catch on each ridge until finding the bottom of a pond. It leaves a bitter taste on the back of his tongue, grating and acidic. His lips part again to speak, and in his smirk he forgets how his fangs were sheathed, how much more like a gentleman he once resembled in their absence –
tap - taptap
The sudden sound in the midst of the tense ambiance quivers him slightly, enough to jolt his attention to the closest window. In the dark, a form is silhouetted, though he is quick to see the – beak? Nose? Tree limb? - that taps against the glass. Narrowing his eyes, he follows the trace of moonlight that highlights the ridges and scales and – he retracts his curious nose, the elegant curve of his neck arching under his heavy head. While he forgets his brooding, festering rage, he notices the overall feeling of an obscure doom slowly dissipates at this drake's arrival, though in truth a sliver of wonder escapes the pit of his gut at his first sighting of a true dragon. And this mad queen, how she softens like the dying breaths of a passing storm, to warm her sights on the thing like it were her own child! The shards of her darkened features tremble and fall away to reveal a maternal sweetness, those expressions that, while they should have comforted far more than her former actions, only unsettled him at once. Her eyes regard him now in a different light and he wonders what has changed about him – subconsciously he peers back on himself and sees nothing eased about his demeanor; he is still as he is in nature: that underlying sense of ruggedness, intensity, that wolfish stature that picks and pries along the edges with plated wrought iron. The words that meet him are cloying grace, almost a plead that reaches for him with geniality, a genuine kindness he does not recognize. She appeals to his youth and drive for life, she searches those darkened edges for the likeness of a simple boy who dreams of sunshine and books and smiles and a nurtured warmth. For a moment he lets the silence linger there, almost expecting her to delve even deeper, to try even harder, to thumb through the pages of his morality and taste the virile pulsings of his wicked heart. For surely there is softness there, surely there must be more than this bloodied, dirtied child that stands before her, speaking like death and war and pain is all he knows.
If that was her thought, then she was partially correct.
There was more than the roughness hewn in his flesh or the viciousness in his eyes, or the glaring heat in his voice that spoke with a hardness no child should know. There was more than death, war, and pain. There was a hunger for knowledge, a curiosity for witchery, and the consuming want to create – how often he has admired the workmanship of weapons, armor, how he's longed to learn their trades. He knew how to read, to write, how to pick nightshade from between the brush and dry a fragrant rose between the pages of heavy books. Softer things existed yes, small things that were woven between darker appetites, ones that spoke of romance and civility and a boyish curiosity. He was not the blindly faithful servant to an unsullied army – he was not the mindless drone in the ranks of hardened, cold warriors who thought only of blood and the glint of their weapons. However, there was violence in his blood. It screamed out to him with such veneration that the most impassioned lover could never comprehend, it swelled like marrow in his bones and churned his gut with a feeling like glory, but something darker. There was an insatiable hunger that he couldn't name or swallow, one that wrapped those softer things in a skeleton of thorn and shadow, that dismissed naivety for fire and temptation. And as his contemplations dove and wove between all these things, he recognized the same hungers in the reflections of her gaze. There was duality there. She was smooth, jeweled pools of amaranthine waters – a refreshing gulf, pleasant and coolly flowed in each lilting timbre of her balanced breath. He was sharp, raking currents that tore the earth and scoured their beds, that cracked the mud with embedded poison and fanged gold. Both knew the face of their darkness, while in unequal parts.
Whether her search for the youthful happiness in him was desperate or short-lived, she would find no relief to discover such a nature. His god was pain. His tastes, dissonance. The bones that ached beneath his flesh teemed with passion of another nature, another realm of monstrosities deeper than the fairytale grim that scared children into their beds. It was not a choice. It was who he was. He stares back into the leagues that clash in her eyes – he wades through their tides, and drinks in their suffering. He does not question the myriad eons that exist her gaze, those lamentations and blisses that pinprick the oceanic turf like starlight. Even more now, he wonders what she sees. “No," His voice slices the air, drops like a pebble into the bottom of a well. His eyes are starlight now, pure and unadulterated brightness that shines like beacons against the darkness of his face. In his expression there is only shade, as if he could disappear into the far corners of the court, fade into the night that would swallow him up with greedy gulps. “I want satisfaction. And that is where I find it." The boldness of his words do not soften for her maternal croon – they are just as clouded in heat and shadow as they were before, just as intense and grating, and still slightly choked with the seasalt that scrapes his chords. He beholds her for a minute in quiet, before his muscles quiver a slight bit and he takes a small step forward, heavy feathered hoof clicking an echo through the cold room. The weight of his head swings, craning to the side, as if if he changed his perception he may see deeper into those shifting leagues of a dubious sea. The moonlight falls over his features – iberian pride, hard, handsome edges that seem gaunt now in the shadow of their former bravado. Small glimmers of scars catch the shallow beams, quick cuts that reside just beneath the scruff, long faded now except to a keen eye. “And what is your satisfaction?" he does not question Isra, Sovereign of Denocte. He questions Isra's shadow, Isra's monster, that quiet gleaming grin that matches his own from the darkest reaches of her hazy gaze.
@Isra
