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
S
ometime between her falling and him catching her the sun has dipped an arm into the ocean, drowning the streets and everything in it in tides of violent red. Merchants cease their hawking and head home to their wives and hot dinners. Sailors stumble laughingly into dim taverns. Assassins detach themselves from the shadows and creep like cats into empty street corners. A crowd has gathered around them. The whites of their eyes glow with ill-hidden curiosity, and even that is just a sweater pulled over the purring remnants of savagery. She knows Solterra too well to forget how blood attracts its children like sharks to the kill.
Numbly she returns her gaze to August, Denoctian-born August, and knows immediately it is a mistake. His pale, pale gaze holds hers captive, and as Aghavni tilts her chin up coolly, she can't help but think how unfair it is. How unfair he is. How could she stay angry when he looked at her like that? Her pulse flutters weakly in her chest, like a dove with a stunted wing. Harder and harder to kill.
"At least you know what you are," she says, and grimaces when it doesn't come close to enough. Angry enough. Unconcerned enough. She opens her mouth to say something else (something enough) but then—
He hugs her. And—baffled, furious, weary, relieved—she lets him.
In the waning light of a violent dusk, Aghavni's eyes glow green-red-green—eternal summer razed with forest fire. Shuddering, she folds into him like a storm collapsing, run ragged by her own tempest.
She has forgotten what it feels like to be hugged. Father never hugged her. Mother was dead, and corpses cannot hug the living. She had no one else. No one who came without motive, without jealousy, without revenge, without—You smell like home.
Home? Ah, she thinks, reverently. So that's what it was. It flows out of her with each new pulse like a strangled confession: I was lonely.
Fluttering her eyes shut, smelling the salt in his skin, she tries to tell herself that it is wrong. That this is exactly what she wanted to avoid, when she made the decision not to tell him. When she made the decision for him. (Like the hypocrite she is.) She was not a girl born to be virtuous. It was not written in her fate, like it was for the good and the holy and the ones who died to become Saints.
Perhaps that is why she is so bad at it.
You could've just asked, August says, and she shakes her head firmly. "I couldn't." When he draws away she stares at the blood streaked across his dappled shoulder, shaped like a vicious reminder. "I could tell, you know. That you wanted to leave." Her tone comes out too accusatory, too tender, made volatile by the fresh memory of being held. "That came out wrong," she winces, casting her eyes up to the sky in an attempt to stop their throbbing. "What I meant was—gods."
They are attracting too much attention. Eyes beam down at her like lenses over an ant, burning in their focused intensity. Barely bearable. Lips trembling, turning sharply on her heel, Aghavni wrests a chunk of August's mane with her telekinesis and pulls him after her, cagily ignoring murmuring onlookers, cutting through the crowd like she doesn't wish to be noticed.
She turns down an alley she only knows is there because she has walked into it twice in the span of an hour, searching for the harbors. Cats flee when they see her coming. The sun takes the last of its light away as it sinks into the depths of the sea. Her barely braided braid falls apart into a cascade of blood-streaked white when she whips her head towards August, a lone cactus half-buried by sand, lingering despondently in a corner, exploding into bloom.
"I know that if I asked you to come with me, here," she says, gesturing towards the sand, the palace (ivory towers in the distance), the blood, "you wouldn't have said no." She bites her cheek, hard, and folds down into the sand because she can't bring herself to look at him. Golden boy, even in the dark. Shoulder spattered by blood. "Because you don't know what it's like, Solterra, and—call me selfish, tell me I had no right, but—" her voice wobbles as she sucks in a breath, as she swallows down hot, hot tears.
"I didn't want you to find out."
Because Solterra scars all those it touches, August. Because me, my family—we are the worst, and you don't know it yet, and I don't—ever—want you to find out.
@August // <3
