like fishhooks; an old kind of hunger
Would you escort me back to the pits if I were? Or would you offer me a fight here, instead?
Unhinged is not quite the word. It takes Vercingtorix longer than he would like to recognise the expression in the appaloosa’s eyes. They are alight with a fire he has felt on more than one occasion; anger, wrath, fury. A cardinal sin.
The line of the stallion’s jaw turns hard and that tension settles all the way to his eyes. They’d be beautiful, otherwise, Torix thinks. This way, they are gnarled up, twisted in the way of vines strangling the life from their host. Vercingtorix does not divert his gaze, however. He only raises his brows and listens, in the background, to the screaming crowd.
(He knows, of course, one of the gladiators is gutted out on the sand. He can smell the blood and excretions of fear, a sick mockery of a real battlefield, of real war. Why, he wonders, do men feel the need to play at dangerous games? The whole of life’s suffering is not enough without the pitted competition, without the striving for self-made, self-governed wars? This is all the Colosseum is, he thinks: a small man’s war.)
“Is that what you would like?” He asks, at last. Torix’s voice is uncharacteristically soft. He knows, better than most, the contesting parts of the inner Soul; the way a man’s own inner conflict can rip him apart. The magic dagger is something beautiful, and violent, and terrifying in Ipomoea’s grasp.
“Or is that what you need?” There is nothing threatening in the way he speaks, the way his turquoise eyes measures Ipomoea’s. He is not there to fight, only to watch, only to learn.
And he cannot help but wonder what is unfolding before his eyes, right now. What kind of personal, moral dilemma. He remembers the first time he was blooded—the first time he had stepped onto the black beach to fight against the Khashran—he had come away forever marked, forever changed. Bondike had grounded him, then. Bondike had always grounded him.
But that grounding was gone.
And he wonders, now, what was left without it.
The memory of blood, Torix thinks.
The memory of fear, and pain, and loss, and chaos.
What a pleasure, he thinks, it must be to play at war instead of sell your soul to it. He is furious, too; and for the first time it enters his eyes as he appraises the pits beyond Ipomoea’s shoulder.
