and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding
that never stopped exploding
'I don't know,' an exceedingly unfortunate concierge begins to stay, looking up from some paperwork or other. He had been charting guests, writing dates and time in fine but easily read script. When he sees Andras, and his own vague discomfort reflected in the Warden's glasses, he says instead, 'That way.' and gestures down the long, quiet hall, 'Around the corner.'
Andras smiles mirthlessly, inclines his head in thanks, and skulks through the foyer like a wraith.
---
The door creaks as it opens. The room that greets him is like a church, not quite opulent but lacking the wear of much use, clean in a way that Andras appreciates and ringing with the sort of quiet dignity that comes with decades of peace--or not even peace, but neutrality, such as it is, and with every cost it accompanies.
When Emersyn speaks it echoes, 'never thought we would be using this room' bouncing from wall to wall, off the table, off the covered windows, off the walls of his raging heart. When the last murder had come and gone the borders were closed, a manhunt was mounted, and still this room sat untouched, poised in perfect silence, empty as the vacuum of space. He thinks of the king and his rigid silence, eyes like a ghost's eyes, the rock that had dropped straight into Andras' stomach, the rock that still sits there now.
Andras takes his place next to Emersyn. There is no crackling static, no humming blue light. He cannot be fire when the room is so cold. "Tracks." he answers, gravely. "Inconclusive ones."
The body count ticks over to fourteen, higher and higher by the day. The--poacher, killer, whatever it is, whatever they are--drop mangled animals on doorsteps, in the open, as if it no longer matters if they are seen or unseen, wanted or not, hunted or not. As if they are laughing. If Andras had had a rock in his stomach it is now a boulder, hard and dark and cold, and the weight of it sets his teeth on edge.
"So they know, then. That we're looking." The room holds his statement in the air as if it does not quite know what to do with the idea. Andras is imagining traps laid out in the open, the smiles of predators, the audacity it takes to toss a corpse on someone's doorstep, as a message? As a thread? Sparks bounce off the static that forms at his withers and leaps clear to the tip of his wings. It extends toward her fluttering wings as they rise out of reach.
Andras doesn't look. He doesn't care. He does not even notice the quiet of a heart at odds, a heart that is pointed like an arrow into the woods, smiling, saying, let me go. He will not notice until much later, after poachers and murderers, after meetings and war rooms, when there is nothing for his rage to point at but itself, screaming.
She speaks again, and Andras levels a grim stare at her, frowning. His tongue is on the back of his teeth now, an unkind glint behind the glare of his lenses. He has been toyed with enough, lately. His patience, barely existent at the best of times, wears thinner and thinner by the day.
He grits his teeth, grits then hard, until they ache. When his jaws creak apart it is to say "I don't know, why does anyone want a magical thing? I've read through your reports, I've seen this--frankly chilling--mass grave and it is conspicuously lacking in squirrels, or deer, or any animal of any mundane sort."
At her invitation, Andras picks up a mug and looks at it pensively, angrily. "What would anyone want with a unicorn?"
@
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
