I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
It isn’t difficult to find her, now that he has met Ereshkigal.
The vulture is like no bird he’s seen, and the way it circles above her is as clear as a spotlight - and a little chilling, a little ironic, given what the spiraling of the species usually means. That there is a dead thing, somewhere below.
The surf washes up against his hocks, a warm kiss of foam, and for the moment the waves are the only sound he can hear. He’s grateful for it, this momentary calm; he has never been a fan of crowds, and the impromptu counsel at the base of the statue only heightened his worry, asking far more questions than it answered. If this is all only another game of the gods, then he is sick of playing. The king has no interest in relics, and the only time he concerns himself with is that which Florentine can cut to pieces with her dagger; he only wonders, then, what the rules are, and what the payment for losing.
Bits of strange things washed up by the surf catch his eye, seen only briefly beneath the glass-like cover of the shallow water: jellyfish with pulsing blue bodies trailing tentacles like streamers, and starfish with too many points, and shells that were inhabited by no creatures he can name. The water itself is the most familiar thing, a lullaby he intimately knows, but even the Terminus is small comfort here. Too many voices have joined its lulling tongue, and silently Asterion edges further up the sand.
She has been in his sights for a while, now, but he still draws and holds a breath when she turns to face him, and her hood falls back, and her hair falls free and thick as the long lines of froth at the breakers. She has always had an intensity to her gaze, but the way she looks at him now makes him want to shiver. He had thought it odd, the pairing of her and that red-eyed, mad-eyed harbinger that had been on her back, but now he wonders. And then there are the marks across her cheek, the spacing and length of a rake of claws, all filled in with gold.
“Seraphina,” he says, and her name is weighty on his tongue - but oh, he is surprised by how good it feels to say. “This island must suit you.” For here you stand, alive, he does not add. Neither does he smile, though something inside him is unfolding great, dark wings, and rising up, and opening its mouth to sing (in wonder, or in warning, or in fierce and crooked joy?) -
“Does he know?”
That you are alive. That you are here. That you are coming to kill him.
@
Asterion.
