he searches the man's face for an eternity but he does not know what. Perhaps it is the villain? The ghost, the monster – the dictator of the day court, solemn repose and something that lurked between them silent and cold. His eyes are prying things. They are penetrative, wild gold, wolf's eyes that waver and quake with a hunger that resides deep in his bones, deeper than anything he can touch. He waits for fangs, for daggers. Almost in masochistic abandon. There is blood between them, blood that sings and courses and screams with heat begged to be split like the night. Blood that is smooth and warm, an aged ichor that swims through vanity with able grace. The veins tuck and quiver beneath his muscles. He shifts, his marrow stalwart while his skin crawls with disdain for the reaping skies – death taken to wing. He sees the raptor in the man's eyes, a reflection of wisdom that speaks beyond anything monstrous but almost fatherly, watchful. Terror. He speaks, that bird whose name sits with it like a casual pendant. Or was it Teryr?
Erasmus breaks their gaze to marvel in the trace of his memory where the bird had once flown. It is gone now, but for how long? He looked back to the narrow ledges at their feet, the way they wound and curved and all but crumbled to nothing in the dark. How long would it be until he found death, if not at the bottom of the gulley then at the talons of some mythological horror? Alone. Eik speaks of hunger, and something listens and rolls in the boy's stomach along with the mention. Aren't we all, it breathes. Aren't we all but beasts and monsters and men?
But he does not have time to doubt. This he knows now.
And so he nods sparingly, light clinging to places where his expression sharpened deftly in the refractory desert starlight. “show me." A tomb whisper, baited breath that speaks through grit teeth and destitute tongue – it is more a request than a demand, though the unruly fiend is oft an enemy of kindness, and his brusque demeanor does little to soften the edge. He is not polite, but he is not rude, he is as a stranger is to strangers, the patron unsaint of rebellion. Heretic prince. In otherwise circumstances he may have preferred to go alone – even if it meant returning to the beginning or another end, or finding himself lost to the middle of everything and nothing. But as he searched the eyes of the pale man, he found few things more untrustworthy than a hungry winged daemon in a treacherous landscape.
Erasmus moves to follow him after another cautious glance to the skies – where he thinks to have seen the glint of beak or feather or a simple twitch in the night sky that does not dare provide relief. But there is nothing there, only stars and chill and the stagnant puffs of what could have been cloud stretching over the spaces between. The air is so tense that it is like white noise rummaged in waves, a silence he hadn't noticed until now, something heavy and dim that rests between them and the grims that reside there. For a while he moves, watching the plates beneath him seem to quake beneath their feet, catching the occasional shift of movement from the deep of the canyon. A labyrinth displays below – webbing paths that entangle and branch, stemming one to three and three to ten and on into the ominous pit that bears back against them like teeth. And he wonders,
“you know this place well.” but he is suffocated by simple things, careless things, as if he only held so much breath in his lungs to waste. There is a reason for each syllable, each motive a changeable nuance of doubt or wonder or distrust or something deeper than he even knew of himself. Behind his lips his teeth sharpened, his tongue rolled over their grit rinds while his mind lolled over treacherous things. He is youth and vitality and something darker, something that crept and wove its way through his marrow and slid between his words in vicarious whispers; but he is nothing beyond this sharpness, an archer with no arrow. “have you ever fought one of those?” his voice is hushed still, resound with its severity, ageless and lovestruck by the woes of horror. His eyes passed over the many silvery carvings that seat along the man's hide, and admiringly wonder each tale wound in their depth.
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