[P] kiss me, and you will see how important I am;

[Marisol]

who are you
when it's all over?

If he were a prince she would not want him. Marisol is tired of princes. And princesses. And kings. She is tired of the whole system, its archaicness and the way it has infiltrated every part of her life, everything from designing the paint on the back of her wings to affording her her title. It has designed her beloved spear, it has given her a cold, lovely name: but it has also shorn her hair and iced her blood and left her with a jaw that aches to tear, not chew, and turned her heart to terrible stone. There is not a piece of her that has not turned hard. She resents herself for it.

Almost, she does not notice his aggravation. Her eyes are fixed on a middle point somewhere far over the edge of the world where the sea blends with the sky; the clouds and the waves seem more important than the way Amaroq’s tail lashes over the sand. The black rocks behind them shine with the new spit of the tides. And the cold does not seem so important now that she is fully entranced by the way the ocean stretches out a million lengths ahead of them. It is infinite. It will be here long after they have gone and has been here eons before. How beautiful! How wonderfully infinite! Nothing alive now will ever compare - 

It is that knowledge, heavy as a rock in her chest —  total dread — that keeps her pinned in place as the world starts to close in.

The sharp gleam of Amaroq’s teeth. How his eyes harden like chips of pearl. Marisol’s heart, like a fist, tightens in her throat: as if in preparation it beats faster and faster and faster, blood rushing just underneath her skin with new voracity, chokes her head to blackness, almost, and she thinks she might be falling even before his mouth closes around the satin of her throat.

When it does, it almost makes her feel more alive than before.

Those needle-sharp teeth sink into her veins. Pain shoots all the way from her chest to the back of her skull, so sharp and hot Marisol cannot decide whether to scream or cry and so she does both, choking with an awful, wet-with-blood noise on the cry that tries to escape from between her clenched teeth. Even in her blind panic the years of training haunt her like a ghost. She knows better than to twist or turn, knows that it will cleave her in half like butter; instead she smashes out toward him with a front hoof and they come apart like two comets pulled away by black holes. 

Her head is black. Her vision tunnels. She stumbles on the wet black rock. Blood trickles down her throat and pools in the back of her mouth, hot red salt, and her breaths are garbled with the wet sound of it. Her mouth opens:

By Her hand, Marisol gasps, and plummets into the water.

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