A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
Abel had braced himself for the cold and the dark. For the rooms far below the castle, the ones he’d heard low whispers of when he’d been running with the band of orphans among the shadowed streets after the tidal wave battered his life like an old ship. It had been a reminder to themselves not to get caught, that talk of rats, of hunger, of damp cellars far from the sunlight.
But the unicorn-queen’s prison is a paradise.
Oh, it is still a cage - but Abel feels trapped less like a dog and more like a bird. The smell of burning still clings to his skin, and his eyes are still red-rimmed with smoke, but as the day dawns the air is filled with the scent of flowers unfurling, opening to the sun. Light streams through glass high above him, and though they are bars they are more trellis than cell, wound with ivy, blooming with trumpeter-vines. How strange to be caught and yet to feel safe. There is no one he can hurt here.
The boy does not slink like a tiger beneath the shadows of the bars. Instead he waits beneath the wide leaves of a flowering palm, and even his relief feels like an anchor. Abel wonders if smoke still hangs over the city from the previous night’s trespasses; he wonders if the golden stallion has already informed Raum of his capture. Though his body aches and his bones are bruised, though his throat is raw, though his fate is a question he can’t answer -
Abel feels almost free.
@Isra
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