i aim to be lionhearted
He awakes to the sound of screaming: for once, it is not his own.
He had been dreaming, he remembers, of the ballroom, decked out in gold and jewels as nobility had circled around the dance floor. He had been dreaming of Winifred’s face, all curves of laughter and dark, dark eyes, so-serious as she had agreed to the magic-imbued suggestion, as she had sealed her own fate, as he had doomed her to her death --
He shakes the edges of sleep off like a tattered cloak, his amber eyes peering through the darkness of his room until he realizes the screaming is not in his proximity -- the words are muffled through the layers of the scarab, a cacophony of panic outside his door, and he rolls to his feet with his tail whipping through the air for balance.
Fire!
He charges from the crowded halls of the Scarab as quickly as he can get his feet to move, unable to turn away from the fires that lick at the star-strewn sky: these are not the nightly bonfires that chase away the winter chill, no, these are something darker, born of malice, and it sends a chill down his spine even as he grabs for the closest bit of fabric with his telekinesis.
He ends up with a canvas, large enough to beat the fires out, and he is quick to race to a well and douse the heavy fabric until it is almost too weighty to carry, drip-drip-dripping water with every frantic step he takes. He does not notice the Queen, nor her Emissary stalking off into the shadows -- all of his focus in on the flames before him, of lifting the fabric and trying to smother the flames beneath it every time he brings it down, his tail swishing behind him like an angry cat.
He had been dreaming, he remembers, of the ballroom, decked out in gold and jewels as nobility had circled around the dance floor. He had been dreaming of Winifred’s face, all curves of laughter and dark, dark eyes, so-serious as she had agreed to the magic-imbued suggestion, as she had sealed her own fate, as he had doomed her to her death --
He shakes the edges of sleep off like a tattered cloak, his amber eyes peering through the darkness of his room until he realizes the screaming is not in his proximity -- the words are muffled through the layers of the scarab, a cacophony of panic outside his door, and he rolls to his feet with his tail whipping through the air for balance.
Fire!
He charges from the crowded halls of the Scarab as quickly as he can get his feet to move, unable to turn away from the fires that lick at the star-strewn sky: these are not the nightly bonfires that chase away the winter chill, no, these are something darker, born of malice, and it sends a chill down his spine even as he grabs for the closest bit of fabric with his telekinesis.
He ends up with a canvas, large enough to beat the fires out, and he is quick to race to a well and douse the heavy fabric until it is almost too weighty to carry, drip-drip-dripping water with every frantic step he takes. He does not notice the Queen, nor her Emissary stalking off into the shadows -- all of his focus in on the flames before him, of lifting the fabric and trying to smother the flames beneath it every time he brings it down, his tail swishing behind him like an angry cat.
