Erasmus feels him before he approaches, the way its skin crawls and Aether hums in his ears, dulled with the consistency of its use. He feels the way eyes prickle his skin when they fall upon him, and he – it – thinks it loves the sensation, of coyly ignoring when others are watching, while he revels in the way his pores twitch and his hackles raise. This isn't in the usual way however, as most looked to him with a frightful curiosity, as most witnessed the odd ways in which Erasmus was not the Erasmus that he should be. They noticed that peculiar way his gait – at times graceful and powerful, other times hitched as though he must remember the ways in which it is graceful and powerful and not overtly gliding like a haunt – could not choose its pattern. Or the way in which his gestures bore a strange weight to them, as if he were testing each one for appropriateness, and the way that when he grinned it seemed displaced. The way it was hot, sharp, and made wholly sinister in that it did not, could not, touch the vast void that hollowed endlessly in his roving gaze. There is no mirth in it, no matter how broad his lips may stretch and how straight his teeth may rest, often forgetting the way the Erasmus-That-Was chose to hide his dagger-sharp fangs.
Yet this grin, it could argue, may have been more genuine than the others that came before, others which were put on to pacify those who came in greeting. It was the only proper way he had learned to greet: with manners, with poise, and without blood drip, drip, dripping from the uneven crook of his lower lip. This one was not bid to impress the commoners, and certainly not to draw in the interest of the library's quiet guests. Aether marveled in the prospect of ruination, as it was the last thing that it could remember of itself – swallowing worlds, stars, and time, the serpent who devoured its own tail. No, that small caricature meant more than death, its haphazard sketch of a cracked skull and knotted leg bones crossed behind; the Aether knew there was more to death than was finite, but had Erasmus? Did he know of the way in which worlds ate up death and made of it, life? Of the way civilizations crumbled to permit the rampant windings of nature? Of the ways in which worlds, voyager planets, collided with one another and made themselves anew?
Before it could tap into the mind that was, it is reminded of eyes. It turns then, just as the man approaches and engages: “-must be reading one hell of a story.” It forgets to continue the grin, empty-eyes narrowed and his lips twisted with contemplation, and he looks back to the inky datura. Is it a story? This account of its milk-white blooms that spiral open with the dawn, thick foliage that packs itself with water so that the plant may survive its time in the scorching heat of the Solterran sun. A story of a creature which has developed to live by cultivating its own method of death, its own venom stored in the beautiful blooms which may, to the half-starved, long parched straggler of the vast desert, seem an appealing treat at the most inopportune time. It is a story, an old one at that – and it thinks, oh it thinks, that it is one of many it may enjoy.
"Quite," he conceded, allowing that not-so-complacent grin to dement his otherwise dark features. It stretches his lips across his teeth – perhaps too tightly against his double-setted fangs – and catches crookedly to dimple in the eastern corner, but as old it does not spread its warmth to those stolen eyes. They peer and pry, deep waning moons abed a sea of starless night. His voice is eon distant, lofted with a charisma that drapes itself in unknown celestial quarters; between them, it stills itself in reality, and persists with baritone smoothness: "Standing for comparison. There are plenty others, I am sure." His tone loses itself to wonder as his black hole gazing eyes drift to the oak-hewn arms bearing countless novels, and should have, as his guest had, considered it just as much a marvel. But he does not know the nature of libraries or the dominion of histories or yet the patronage of kingdoms. One thing they do share, however, between he and the golden beast, is the inkling that knowledge is the greatest power.
Its intentions unravel before it. It knows the taste of a dying universe. The smell of sulphuric mountains awash with the celestial backflow of a swelling red giant. Is this one just as beautiful, when buckled beneath milky starlight and a hungry sun? Do Novusian bodies break apart as wonderfully (and laboriously) as they are put together? Does the gold of his pelt wither beneath the erosion of death and time, or tan gloriously like ore burnished by daylight? Do his bones look like the ones shewn by the description of the poisonous but alluring Datura? Are they worthy of illustration, the same fine detail as what is used in the sweeping grace of curled petals or the short, sharp penstrokes of his veins the same as those in the broad leaves?
It is the lurching hunger in his core that brings him back from prying memories of art and death in the grasp of Erasmus's mind. It is a deep and winding quarter of complementary tones, but he finds his eyes scrape up, up the tight bindings of the man's musculature before him, and loosens his thoughts of golden bones drying in the sand and sun beneath the spiraling flowers of the blooming Datura. There is something hardened and cruel in the lines that mark the man's face, something the aether sees when it looks into the reflection of Erasmus that looks back at it with those cold, deadened eyes. There is the same toughened, scarred flesh, the swept hair that falls as unequally into place as it is decidedly so; as cultivated as it is unkempt – something feral, something rough. It wonders if this golden creature with cyan eyes knows where to begin in this store of wisdom, how wolf-boys with hungry eyes yearn to be more.
"and what stories do you seek?" predatory tones emit, still distant, still wandering, as if a dream lost in the web of a nightmare.
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