there are many paths to tread
”That is not all I want from gods,” he says, and Toulouse’s eyes are hungry for more, hungry to know. Silence stretches like a tenuous cord between them, a cord he wants only to snap not once, but a hundred times, until nothing remains of it. He wants to press further, wants to ask what it is the strange pegasus and his stranger companion want, wants to know how they’ll get it (because their eyes and their wings and their laughter promise that they will.)
But something in the way he moves and the way his eyes blaze tells Toulouse already. So he doesn’t ask, not yet - maybe tomorrow, his mind still sings, even though he doesn’t know which tomorrow it sings of.
He drags himself out of the water, and it falls like rain in sheets and droplets as dark as blood. It spills across the sand, a dark streak on a darker shore, a stain across the face of the earth. It turns his coat dark, dark and silver in the moonlight, his frame wrapped so profoundly in shadows that for all means and purposes he could be as black as the pegasus still in the oasis.
The griffin flares his wings then and Toulouse stops - but not from fear. No, his wings sing the same promise as his equine bonded, and Toulouse does not think he’s imagining the smile that glints in the light of his eyes and fearsome beak. Toulouse smiles back, and his teeth are sharp and cruel and bright in the moonlight.
”I would make someone else pay it for me.”
As the two take to the skies, matching tones and matching wings, Toulouse lets laughter be his answer. It drifts into the air after them, oddly light and boyish, like the sound of glass shattering. They disappear quickly into the darkness and still he laughs, even as he turns back to the water and this time, slips past the surface and lets the oasis consume him.
The smallest of splashes, and a quickly-dying ripple is the only sign, before the surface of the water goes quiet and still and reflects only the moon and stars.
