A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
He does not meet their eyes, does not look up, even when he can feel the burn of the paint’s gaze on him, the violent promise in her stare. He finds, with surprise, that all his fear is gone; maybe he is too weary for it, or maybe he has used it all up, these last few weeks, these last long months. It would be good, if terror were a thing you could run out of, if even dread (round and heavy in your belly like a cannon ball) flaked away with time and familiarity.
Then, of course, there is the knowledge that he deserves all they heap on him.
It isn’t until the light in the bar changes that he turns his dark eyes up. Then the air feels too dry on his tongue, all the moisture burned out of it, as the glass turns to iron and becomes a cage. He knows what it means, he knows who is coming -
he presses further into the wood, but when the queen speaks he looks her in the eye. Just for a second, long enough for those words to fall around him like two dropped coins, or like a sentence.
Raum had convinced him that she was the monster, the unnatural thing, both savior and source of Denocte’s woes. See what becomes of a fairy-tale? he had said. To Abel, magic was a frightening thing, rare and strange; he had been a child at the fall of the last regime and well remembered the stories of the gypsy-king and his regent’s dragon. When word had passed up from the inner city that the new queen had found a dragon of her own, it was perhaps the final stone to tumble from Abel’s altar.
But when he looks at Isra all he sees is a unicorn. And when she turns away from him, he is relieved, but he is something else too.
He hopes it is fear. If it isn’t, this dark and barbed emotion crouching within him, then he knows it is something worse.
There is nothing now to do but wait.
@Boudika @Morrighan @Isra
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