aghavni
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rise like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number / shake your chains to earth like dew / which in sleep had fallen on you
A
ghavni. At first she thinks: how dare he. How dare August just appear like that, like Solis' Deliverance, golden as all Midas, pretty as a well-spun lie. She had not summoned him. There had been no lamp, no genie, no magical excuse—no reason for him to be there.
And then she thinks: the bastard!—because, like a doll, she has been slammed back against a wall and hears more than feels something break. Her ribs, she thinks, with a twist of horror. Or the traitorous little organ beating beneath.
But it is neither. A glass bauble of a galleon, complete with six sails and a figurehead, lies smashed to smithereens beneath her hoof. It would almost be funny, if it were that type of situation. One that could be funny.
"Who is that?" hisses the boy, the bastard, jerking his head away to snarl—and that is his second mistake. With a snap of the neck, a flash of the teeth, Aghavni dismisses August as a figment of her desperate imagination (like a marquess dismisses a diagnosis of hysteria, as one does) and slices her fan upwards into a pulsing throat. He howls, though he shouldn't have.
It was nothing more than a nick. She was being gentle. (His first mistake: humiliating her by choosing a tattered cloak as an assassination weapon.)
"You're here for me, don't forget," she chokes out. Warm blood rains down in a gorey baptism, spattering her face in a red constellation; the boy retaliates by twisting the cloak constricting her neck so tight she sees stars. White ones, bright as diamonds. The saber on his back begins to stir, a snake shedding its skin, grating against its rusty scabbard. "I've played with you too long. Time to sleep, princess."
It is not supposed to be like this. Black edges Aghavni's vision. She gasps for the breath that does not come. In her head, a younger her screams: this is not how the story goes!
And that isn't how the story goes—because when Aghavni unscrews her eyes, lash pulling away from lash, she finds herself staring dazedly not at molten gold but silver. Cold silver, like the moon, like—
"August." She starts at his presence, stumbling in the sand, and forgets to be mortified by it. This close, he smells like salt and musty cabinets and the sun. She has never smelled like that, the sun, however sun-born (and sun-marked) she is. I’ll assume, had I not intervened, you were moments away from gutting him like a fish. Though his tone is buttery-light, she hears what he doesn't say. Picks away the accusation clinging to his tongue with a chisel, because she knows him too well not to do it, and perhaps that is the problem.
Perhaps that has always been the problem.
She inhales shakily and wipes blood from her mouth. "He underestimated me," she says slowly; half of her still believes the August standing in front of her, shadow blotting out the winter sun, is but a ghost conjured by fear and—her tongue knots in her mouth—a banished specter of longing.
And that is all it takes for her to remember how to be angry. Malice straightens her bruised spine and darkens her fluttering eyes. With one short stride she closes the distance between them, rests the tip of her fan (still bloody, like the rest of her) on the curve of his cheek. This close, it is easy to make out the tiny flecks of gold swimming in silver irises.
This close, it is easy to become an amnesiac. "So this is really you," she says ruefully, "or I died and entered some demented sort of afterlife."
(This close—is dangerous. And she has always realized danger too late.)
@August //
is it true that a reunion between Scarab kids requires a healthy anointing of blood (?)
is it true that a reunion between Scarab kids requires a healthy anointing of blood (?)
