For a moment, he likened the man to Eik. For a moment, he likened the man to a worn escapee of heroism, some stalwart brawn of golden charisma – the flickers of a patient grin, the coolness of his balanced tone. All the while he was not so particular to examine the way his grin did not alight in his eyes or the way his words did not fit his mouth. He didn't notice how the skin of altruism did not fit, how it was like canvas stretched too far over a frame that twisted in ways it could just almost reach. Ignorance survived this moment like a frail bird leapt from a cage. It was a small moment, brief and fleeting – and at once, perhaps a mistake. The pretense of neutrality seemed to all but crack and falter in those knowing eyes at the mention of ambition, as if every syllable was a jagged edge that found its ugly sound unwelcome in the man's ears. His response is cold, pinpricked with something that lay beneath the surface like teeth beneath a placid lake; and where Erasmus should shrink in the shadow of politically charged doom, his blood rises to his flesh like a warcry. When he turns his eyes to meet the grey man's, something in them has changed. They are not just the cool, even watch of a curious bystander, too deep to contemplate and too silvery to mind – they are sharp, glinting off the golden heat of the solterran sun with a thunderous liberation. Shade clouds his own, deepening against the cresecent rinds until they are just as sharp and furious, an underlying ferocity not unlike a cornered, rabid dog. He moves to the streets and our hound joins him, the invitation unnecessary.
The man sings of revenge and Erasmus does not flinch at the tune of the song or the way it stops abruptly, not the way his words breathe against the air hot as iron and thick as the thrum of wardrums. It is familiar to him. It is comforting. It is the passion, the rising hotness of rage and vile and the treachery of one tongue against its own pleading gentleness – he walks and listens, and every step is one harder than the last; rougher, heavier, more calculated and tense until his every edge is grating with electricity, bounding and ravenous and curved with a blade's hunger. The hair at the base of his neck prickle slightly, and he cannot help the way the arch of his neck bows in the feral way a wolf acknowledges his opponent. The parade is lost to them now, the hiss of its pandemonium lost to latter streets that fade and bustle with the final hurrahs of a dismissed chaos. All that lay before them now is a village of sideways glances and famished mouths hollowed at the base, dry tongues that rasp with whispers and ribs that rise from the dust and decay. Every eye is a hollow shine of death that falls upon him with greedy remorse.
Perhaps a better man would loosen his grip on his satchel. Perhaps a better man would pluck one of the golden faces of a penny and press it tight to the hold of a starving child. Perhaps a better man would look upon the sallow expressions and sympathize, maybe even falter, collapse at the sight of such deprivation with a willingness to repent. Erasmus is not a better man. He does not know the warm swell of pity that wells up in a better man's throat until it is a knot, a metamorphosis into the better word and a monologue to save what lapses of humanity lay in the cracks of impoverished, empty souls. He sees weakness, sickness, sadness, and all the lesser entanglements of those too shy to rise above themselves. He sees himself, the battered colt with his black eyes and churning stomach, bruised ribs and sprained hock. He sees the dry moors in the midst of a drought, the bones and shrapnel of villages too like this sheltered street to admit anything but their own defeat. He remembers hunger. And he remembers retribution.
The stallion's words have almost all fallen to a hum in his ears, some uncomfortable drone that winds and wheezes and rises and falls, but scrapes its final moments to manifest the words in hindsight. He is too busy watching the boy inhale his pastry. A better man's eyes should be filled with dread and mercy. His are dark, quivering, cruel. To him, war is war by any extent – and a king, tyrant, villain or otherwise horrific beast of a sovereign, does not starve his ranks except with reason. And when Erasmus turned his eyes back to the stallion, he searches those wildfire eyes to see if he knows this. He searches for that dread and mercy, and that is the only abhorrence to him. He has heard the Solterrans chastise their king, praise their fallen Queen. They did not accept a leader who has rightfully claimed his crown in sweat and blood. Why should they not claim their allegiance in their own sweat and blood? Was success not often marked in hardship?
He turned his eyes from the boy with sticky lips to the man with a feasting tongue. There was a pause there, one long enough that allowed the snarling, roaring, contemptible thing at the pit of Erasmus's core to lurch wearily up the hollow of his throat. “the act of revenge is ambitious. but why revenge?” his voice is not so smooth either, in the venomous utterance. it is a low growl just above the tone of a hiss - it is fanged, it is ruthless, possessed with a diplomacy that is but a stone's throw from barbarism. he looked back to the child that is following them now, his cheeks greyed but plump with hope for another pastry or better - and erasmus wards him away silently with a toothy snarl that wrinkles his nose and folds in cracks below his sharp eyes, distorting handsome features for a maleficent display of predatory menace.
It is then that the resonance of his name catches him with a feeling too much like a pebble dropped to the bottom of a watery tomb. The heat that pulsed against his delineation falls back against itself in the small utterance, too casual and coincidental for it to be a mistake, a cognate, some slip of the tongue. For a moment he is cold, and the shadows slick across his spine like thin, tired vipers, nipping for his ears. His gaze struck back to the grey fellow with a rebounding terseness, as if it was an insult that a stranger could dare speak his name unbidden. Suddenly, the heat rises with a doubled fervor, and his entire body could burn with ardent flames had it the means to combust – his arterial composition thrummed with a thunderous hum, high and hot and almost too sharp. His mind rested a hand where a dagger once strapped behind his shoulder, but it is empty and cold and the realization should be frightening but instead it is infuriating. He made long, sweeping strides to cut his companion off, almost shouldering him into an adjacent alleyway that whistled with the breeze. “who are you?” his eyes are daggers. his titan blood is fire.
@Raum
