eyes deep like blackness
black like catastrophe
catastrophic like silence
black like catastrophe
catastrophic like silence
“N
ever,” she says, and it is an answer Caine had not known he’d wanted to hear until it lives and dies on her tongue. He says nothing, nothing at all, because he knows that is what she wants to hear.
She is a lovely, deadly, wondrous thing. The Solterran sun, so fond of creatures like her, paints her redder than blood and halos her holier than seraphim. His eyes ache at the sight.
But he does not — cannot — look away. Closer and closer the girl (who is still mortal, still mortal) draws to him, that bladed tail gutting open the canyon floor. Dangerous, it hisses, like a snake. Monstrous, it sings, like a canary.
All Caine hears is the shh, shh of rain against a windowpane.
Her gaze cuts through him, sharper than the dragon-bone dagger pressed against the slats of his ribs. It slices hungrily through shadow and flesh and bone and comes out the other side, starved. He is not what she is searching for, is he?
The realization lights a gasoline-soaked smile to life.
“What does the darkness feel like?” The last of the shadows tears itself from his skin and slithers away, to a place he can never follow. Thana's obsidian-carved horn hovers precious inches from the white of Caine's eye, but he eases them closed anyways. Considering.
“Cold. Like ice, but without the burning. Ice burns because it damages you. But the shadows, they do not want to damage. They take.” A shiver creeps up his spine when he remembers how it had felt to be taken from. The feeling is not as unpleasant as it ought to have been.
“The absence of heat is cold. That is why death is cold,” he concludes, blinking away spots of black as his pupils shrink against the high-noon sun. The desert’s deadliest sun, bright enough to stun.
Caine turns to her, suddenly, and forgets about her horn sharp enough to blind.
“Do you want to feel it too?” His voice is as curious as only a boy’s — flourishing in an immortal youth — can be.
(As only a boy — who has walked alongside death for so long he has forgotten how to be afraid — can be.)
@Thana | "speaks" | notes: this post is so... odd rip
