"upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty."
The second crow materialised like an afterthought.
Less—worse. Like insubordination.
He had not summoned it, yet there it was, balanced precariously on whispery claws atop the bone jutting out between his scar-laced shoulders. It was all wrong. He had not summoned it, but it had come anyway.
The girl had not drawn back, and neither had he. Instead there was a swinging in front of him, back and forth, little controlled arcs of red-rose gleam; his eyes followed it, back and forth, thick with despair yet cold with apathy. It was a charm. Crescent-shaped and carved all of red. Red, like his blood; red, like his crow; red, like his eyes. Everything was about him. Nothing was about him.
"Because. Nothing is ever the same after it falls."
And just like that: it shattered. (A star through the atmosphere.) The spell she had worked over him, that he had not known he was under, that she, perhaps, had not known she had cast—once again: quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris. To dust, to dust, to dust.
There was only but a sliver of space between them. Caine could see the red of his eyes reflected in the swirling silver of her own: pupils in pinpricks, bathed in blood. It entranced and repulsed him in slow, methodical turns. Entranced, repulsed, he looked and looked. Agenor had not done this to him. Raum had not done this to him. He had done it to himself.
Finally.
To Warset it was only an instant, but to Caine it was hours and lifetimes. Within her eyes he studied himself, without shame, without regard, and without mercy. The crow on his shoulder opened its beak and shrieked to an audience deaf to its cries.
"You speak as if from experience." Through the red that had painted his world, he watched her, like the crow on his back watched him. There was no smile on his lips, but it was there in the dryness of his voice. His hair, slick with seawater, covered all but the last of the symbols cut into his forehead. Water traced gullies down his cheeks. Had Warset not been there to see him climb out from the sea, she might have mistaken seawater for tears.
She had drawn so close (or had he?) he could feel her breath warming his skin. Blinking, Caine brought his nose just shy of the collar, woven with diamonds, that sparkled with every bob of her throat. Moved so close, he could see every facet. Two thousand red eyes in a thousand bright surfaces.
Slowly, though it took only moments, a twin materialised below the hollow of his own neck. It was identical down to the facets, save for one glaring difference: all of this collar was red, as red was all its wearer's magic knew.
Perhaps he did it to prove to himself the control he still held over his magic (the unsummoned crow was nothing, a mistake, not a sign of anything slipping) or perhaps there was no reason. Perhaps, because he had fallen, actions had lost their reasons. He could not admit to the girl how chillingly she had gotten it right. How, in a half-breath and a whisper, she, a stranger, had placed in front of him the truth he had struggled for weeks to understand.
If nothing was the same after it had fallen, then it was death he had plunged into. Death at the bottom of the sea. There was a reason the spirits of the dead were so feared, and he was slow, so slow, to realise. It was this: the dead had nothing more to lose.
(Would Warset ever know of how the memory of her collar had stirred the memory of another, worn in the same fragile place, that Caine had never seen but imagined many times by the mark it had left on another girl, in another kingdom, in sands as golden as theirs was pale?)
When he knew the illusion was complete he stepped away, so that she could see his creation in full.
"Forgive me." A lie—(dead) men like him cared very little for forgiveness. "But which, do you think, is better?" A breath—he did not know her name. (Which is better, Warset?) "Mine, or yours?"
