She glows. Her heavy strands of black hair slide /
☼
like serpents over somber, blood-red plush.
His intensity was unguarded, and she, ever a creature of mirrors, met him half-way. The hoary white of her eyes shone beneath the desert night, the ripples of the water between them reflecting within those twin, moony saucers. She gauged him with a languid appraisal, like inspecting the finer aspects of a meal, but she did not dare let memory surface.
She could feel it there, an aimless creature beneath the surface, inquisitively probing the confines of its cage before she, ever brutal, shoved its head back down. If Hälla remembered him, she would not yet dare let that knowingness come to light.
Locking eyes across the chasm that split them apart (time, sand, water), she was unflinching when his words split the budding silence echoing her own. The corner of her mouth twitched at his pleasantries, a juxtaposition to the aridness around them. But befitting, perhaps, of the oasis.
And like the rare water that lay before them, she wondered, too, if his niceties were a mirage. She was no lady, the string of pearly scars she wore about her throat betrayed as much. Between his courtesy, whether feinted or true, and the nature of his reply, she could only smile.
As always, the fangs were put away—but the venom still remained, heady and thick within her gums. She saw no reason to use it.
“Anyone native to Solterra, my lord,” she demurred carefully, still lazing upon her bed of sand. “Knows the desert will sap you dry, heedless of where you come from.” His point was made, even so, she knew Solis people to wear their pride as stripes of sunlight upon their skin—she knew, too, that her arrogance had entrapped her within a tomb of would-be glory, with nothing but false triumph to rot her grinding teeth over the years.
He spoke again, and this time, Hälla huffed a snort of dry laughter. “So very kind,” she concedes, the pale highlights of her forelock spilling across her brow, curling around the base of her whetted horn. He continued to stare, even as her parched lips found the reprieve of the Oasis, and so her slit eyes caught upon his beneath the fringe of her lashes. Calculating, careful.
It was with bitter resentment that she found herself missing Avallac’h—or at least, the sincerity of his pleasantries. The self-admission was enough to make her choke on frustration, though she kept her features calm as she watched this stranger.
And what is your name?
Her head lifted from the water, her lungs drawing in a mouthful of cooling air, the dryness of the desert saturated with the sparse, verdant splendors of Vitae.
Zayir—
Her eyes flashed, a jolt of… something tightening her muscles. She could’ve perused the many corridors of her mind, and she knew she would never fully unearth into what story this man, this Icarus boy, belonged; but she knew that name.
Like a passing breath—spoken in tandem with a command, issued from the word of a fellow soldier. Not known intimately, perhaps, but nonetheless ringing with stark familiarity.
She knew him—
No. She would not let herself know him.
“Hälla,” she answered slowly, gathering her legs beneath her. She did not rise shakily as she had that day she’d crawled free from the tombs. Her strength, gruelingly, had begun to return. A head shorter than he, the Unicorn’s chin lifted slowly.
“You are Solterran, then.”
It wasn’t a question.
