Erasmus is not a thing of heart. Indeed – it flourishes in his chest, a muscle of vitreous properties that shudders and groans with the weight of its might – paper white and floundering in confectious delights. But it does little but to whim his woes like a greedy thing of teeth and claws and a withering depravity that founds itself by appetite. It sentries steadily as the war drum it is – palpable, a creature on its own that acts of its accord; it exists. By ticking hours lost to millennia, a festering wound that eats and eats, this piteous ode to greek gods' tenement. But beyond things that revolve in its quarters that call to an age of bloodshed and primitive tastes, it is little to be said of for compassion. Even as he admires that great beast perched at the rail, or marvels in his mind the wealth at the heels of an oceanic ambassador, it does not move to coddle either but persist with curiosities. Things that scrape his skull and reach for their being, but shrink back for the thought of words to paw at the air with tactless child wonder. his bones ache, they wonder if they may be reduced to wood. Or pearl. Or bright clouded quartz. he wonders, he wonders. Endless mind that whispered through corridor breaths, syllables that crawl up his throat and slide back down like creeping spiders.
Yet she seeks it. Can she hear it, beneath the folds of cast iron and muscle, entangled in webs of gold and slick venomous tendrils of pulsing vein? She does not hunger for it as a lioness, as the ocean, as a dragon. And so he does not relent, for these things are the few of the things he knows – he does not know her softness but for all things maternal, things that slip back in the deep of his skull and itch a prying company that chases itself out of sight. It is beyond his reach, but he does not waste the struggle reach for it. The sweetness, the calmness, the succor of yearning that makes of itself every measure for pity and sorrow. He sees it in her eyes but he does not know what it is or what it is for. But it is for the boy that stands before her (and if he did see he may also pity her for the pity she gave him) that she cries out to what is but a husk and mask, a smiling thing of plasticized youth and and pretentious revival, something fresh and bright and simple and everything but; something that existed by some small moment, suspended like a stamp on time.
How deep did she look? How deep in the dark did she pry, dig her fingers in, like sifting through rich sod and cinder and dust and kerosene? Would she pull her hands back out from the ruin in blackened despair, the horror? Was it disgust that hid somewhere in the smoke behind her glassy eyes, their sheen dampened with doubt? With sadness? With derision?
Her words broke between them, a frothing crest of a wave that washed over their tense silence. He searches them for insult, for something condescending, impulsive. Wings whip behind him, fading, caught in growing distance until they hissed on the clouds like wind. But he isn't a mind for the dragon now. He sees the moon in her smile and listens, not unlike a child awaiting lullabies. Unladen with circumstance, with something darker, something he craves – her teeth glisten like stars unveiled from the tapestry of night, each one plucked with purpose. An ear slides forward, and every syllable sighs with a fantastical nuance of hope. She is brilliance in that moment, framed in glimmering tiles that spark and sheen beneath her, twinkling gleams in fortunous stone. Erasmus remains, unequal to this vulgar display of valiant goodness, he simply is. A festering cloud of twitching smoke, hovering shadow that leans and shivers, cracked with grinning starlight. He does not move to question her meanings, as most her words kept to them multiple insinuations, words within words within words that he crept between curious to their natures. He dreamed for a moment that she was not soft – that these were treacherous words, perilous threats, as if she willed him from stone to something tender with a diplomatic rage that screamed out to him from a whisper. His blood boiled. His skin crawled. But he remained.
Finally she moves to gesture a passing guard closer, and there are words that he can grasp tightly, something tangible that cropped up from a sea of ambiguity. He did not mistake the way it tomed like a weary death bell. There was something sad there, as if she sent him to the guillotine. Doubt crept between the spaces she left, doubt that anything she wielded could be harsher than the turmoil he had already succeeded. The pit. He did not have training grounds, he did not know the formalities of civilization – the softness, the softness still, it existed even in her nuance of war. It wrapped itself around his ears, his cheeks, it caressed across his neck like silk and stroked a fire to rise – but he remains silent, observant. If all things she suspected of him had failed her test, one was certain: he was stone. A harsh, polished surface that gleamed with promise and perseverance, cultivated by the waning erosion of a listless river course.
Had she desired him anything less? He feared so, as he chased the darkness in her eyes still, grasping desperately for the shadows he watched loom and retreat into the arms of gentle things. The more she beheld him as a pleasant child and not the thing that he was, the more he craved to tempt those unholy shades, the more he desired she were a lioness, hungry and bleating victory. And as she receded back against the ivy she unspun from the doorway, he found himself drawn to follow and watch, stopped only by the twitch of a heaving shoulder beside him.
She dreams a dream never told; one of innocence and diligence, of a boy and a wooden sword that shirks his thirst for the lap of fortune. And it is then that he knows what she wants, though he knew all along – as he pursued her darkness, she searched hungrily for the light. There they found their vicious cycle in wanting, a nightmare more than hope. For a moment frustration tiptoes the rough of his spine, dancing along the precarious edge with an awful disappointment. But then a grin slides across his features – gaunt, a shadow of cleverness and handsomeness that speaks leagues beyond youth. The shade grins with him, and webs through him a curse of curses that laughs at her feat. He thinks for a second that he may eventually know what she knows, that she may one day tell him – one day when he is old and tired, weary and battleworn.
But we, the dark, we know better.
And so erasmus stays quiet besides the unsound chuckle that follows her form as it fades against the shadow of a dragon. As she turns away from him, he feels the magic of their encounter torn away with her, and the aftertaste of its engagement is bitter, a loss. He turns to follow the guard to the training grounds, and he too refuses to look back again.
@Isra finite, thank you for this excellence <3
