aghavni
—
« ♡ »
rise like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number / shake your chains to earth like dew / which in sleep had fallen on you
S
he remembered when she had first seen him, reed-thin and half-grown besides her father's proud, noble silence. His dull, pale coat bore the freshly-healed wounds of a fight, turned in his opponent's favor. His silvery hair was freshly washed and still damp, yet the edges of them were stained pink with old blood.She had stepped out tentatively from the shadow of the stairway, careful to hold her head just so, to turn her eyes strange and cold, to keep her long hair fluttering behind—so she made a pretty picture. Minute adjustments, so ingrained by the shrill octaves of her aunts' instruction that she performed them without thinking, habit turned nervous tick.
She had curtsied deeply to her father ('how do you do.'), then stiffly to the nameless boy (hesitant silence). When she stood back up she had almost missed them—the eerie solidness of his gaze.
Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!
Eyes the silver of sea-nymphs. Eyes the luster of sea-change. She remembered thinking: Oh. This boy will never be mine.
"...hasn’t that always been the purpose - to make it better?"
"Sometimes I question if I have the right," she whispered into the sand, hating the tone of her voice. The metallic smell of the sea, red with blood, made her dizzy and heartbroken when he pressed a kiss to her forehead. She barely felt it, and it was agony, and it angered her in uneven turns. How much more she wanted from him, and how unfair it was, because he had always been the one giving.
All her life all she had done was take. Her mother's love. Her father's patience. August's kindness. Even Minya's fire—she had stolen pieces of it to turn her own, never caring enough for the fire-dancer, the phoenix; take away their flame, take away their life: and Minya was not immortal. Nor August. Nor Father.
Nor Mother.
She spat blood into the dunes when she stood, sand sticking to her skin in uneven patches. It paled her dusky coat; she glanced at August's shoulder, and stifled a mad laugh when she saw that they matched. "I'm ready," she said, light as a lie. "And a bath would do you good. I swear I've never seen you so unkempt," she commented stoically, before sweeping her hair into a bun at the base of her neck and stabbing it through with a needle-sharp pin. Her nose wrinkled when it scraped against skin; she had used too much force.
"I live in the castle, but I hardly recognize it. You'll see when you get there," she said dismissively. She had always thought she would enjoy showing him her old home. But swaying in the citadel's hostile mirage at high noon, moving down its cold halls and noting the placement of tapestries to hide the blood-spatter from a torn throat, smiling at chambermaids and armored guards with no return save a blank stare and an uneasy averting of the eyes—it shamed her. She did not know what he would think of it.
"But now," she continued, steering fluidly away from castles and her own misery, "you owe me all the stories of your travels. Were you ever cast overboard? Serenaded by sirens with little white shark's teeth? Tied to a mast by pirates disguised as the king's tradesmen?"
She kept her face perfectly serious, but her voice babbled with the airiness of a spring brook; it was a visceral change but done so honestly through the guise of youthful insouciance that it suddenly became difficult to remember the blood on her face and how moments ago she had been slumped in the sand like an orphan.
The mouth of the alley led out to the sea. As they stepped out, and Aghavni took in the endless depths of heartstopping blue, her gaze turned into something wistful. All her life she had been shuffled from one place to the next: the curtains of her caravans closed, night acting as a blanket between her and the shifting of the world. She would probably never sail out to sea.
She paused and turned fully towards August, seeking his eyes. They were as sea-changed and forlorn as they had been in her memories.
"August. There's nothing but empty rooms in the castle. If you need a place to stay for a few nights, or maybe more, no one will say a thing if you take one." She frowned and brushed a stray curl into her bun. Perhaps it was the stench of blood, or a pump of leftover adrenaline, but her stomach turned suddenly queasy, like she were jumping off from a cliff.
"What I am trying to say is, I wish you would stay. With me. If you would like."
@August // <3
