made in the projects
slave to my progress
slave to my progress
Of course he’s lying! She can smell it in his voice, the way it trembles in the fine, cool air. How his lip twitches just a little as he talks. She smiles back at him, feline and easy. O has never been a good girl but she is not a liar. There is power, always, in keeping your cards on top of the table — it shows that you have nothing to fear.
He talks too much. Far too much. It’s hard to tell whether this is his modus operandi or an unfortunate side effect of keeping whatever secret he has under perfect lock and key. Either way she is not impressed by it; O was raised around people of few words, people who relied more on power than on praying, and it’s almost grating to hear so much at once. She flicks an ear at him but manages to bite her evil tongue.
“The desert welcomes those who deserve it,” O remarks with perfect casualty as she peeks her head into the darkness of the cave. Even up close it’s hard to ascertain the origins of the feathers and the bones — between Solterran creatures there is not much of a difference in composition, built as every one of them is to withstand the heat and the wind and the sun. O herself is nearly the same, sculpted from Solterra itself. She has the light bones of the birds, the hard gold skin of the lizards, the sooty points and hair of the desert cats.
This man does not.
She lets out a series of hums looking over the contents of the cave. “You do not know her, and yet she is your queen?” A little snort erupts from her. “That seems — irregular,” and the bite in her tone is almost humor but not quite.
A crow sounds off in the distance. It is loud enough and sudden enough to shock Apolonia from her perfect focus; she startles just a little, jerking her narrow head back from the pit of the cave, and turns over her shoulder to face Only again, mismatched blue eyes meeting green. Her gaze remains on his stubbornly. Why an axe? he asks, and then she really smiles, wide and perfectly sharp, as if it is a compliment and not a question.
“It came to me,” she says, and there is nothing else to it.
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