A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
He is watching the ground when she steps closer, and he sees a blossom become more like a weapon, petals turning to knives, all the life leaching out of it and leaving it more beautiful, more dangerous, more dead. Even now the boy wants to say See, see what you are doing, what things you leave behind you!
But she is a queen, and she is a unicorn, and she is speaking to him again and he cannot meet her gaze (so colored like the sea, which surprised him at first) without fear of drowning there. Or being turned to something not-himself, something dull and dead inside but beautiful, oh beautiful, and sharp.
Maybe it would not be such a bad change, to become the lovely dead.
And maybe his father now wears pearls for eyes (but no, he knows that isn’t true, he’d seen the body washed up with broken wood, slats of buildings that once sheltered families. No pearls, no pretty stones, only dead-rot, only saltwater bloat. His mother, now, her body is a mystery still. Ashes, or charred dinner for wolves?)
Part of him wants to laugh at her words, then. Instead he only drops his head further, tarnishes the silver flower with his breath. “Everything makes a fool of me,” he says to the dirt, to the roots, to whatever lies below. It is better than a desert, it is better than a cave, this prison he’s in. He could die here, he thinks, and be content.
He only lifts his head when she draws away the blade of her twisting dark horn. He only lifts his head when roots become bone and jut up from the ground, and memory fills his head with the sick low buzzing of a thousand hornets, mindless but wanting. He is afraid and he is a fool but he is too weary to care for either of those things; there is white shining around his eyes and his breath comes quicker even as he tries to drag it slow in the face of this magic. But he does not flinch beneath the ash that falls along the bars of his back. That, at least, feels right.
Her angry words, her angry mouth; he wants to back away every inch she closes between them, but he stays as though rooted by bone. Not alone, she says, but oh! he feels alone as she touches her horn against his cheek, and when his breath shudders out and his eyes settle closed he thinks of Sabine. Her clear eyes, her crystal horns, the steadiness they looked at each other with, orphans together, and there should have been hate between them (if she knew more of him, and he of her, she would hate him) but there wasn’t, only strange sorrow, only thirst.
Like a hare beneath the shadow of a hawk, like a boy with a blade to his throat, he doesn’t move - except for his throat and the wide curve of his nostrils, working to inhale the smells of ash and brine.
“Did you save that flower?” he asks, so softly it might only be another drift of ash upon the wind. “Did you save the bee that might have fed from its pollen? Can you feed a city on gemstones or drive out hate and fear with a dragon? Raum found me, fed me, gave me something to work for. He isn’t good, he isn’t right. But I’m not sure anything is.”
Now they are staring at one another, now he is breathing harder, now he, too, bears his teeth, and they are a lion and a cur and between them there is nothing but living roots that have become bone.
“Why ask me what you should do, queen? I am only a fool.” For a moment his bared teeth becomes a gallow-grin, like his throat’s already cut, like his eyes already see nothing - and then he shakes his head again, turns his face away. Out, beyond, to blue sky. And then, flatly: “You should kill me.”
And then there would be nothing left to be sorry for, and he would know they were the same.
@Isra
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