this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, before even light. this untameable expanse. this blue mirror-of-god. this heaving, churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.
Ah, that is where you are wrong. My first language is death.
When Vercingtorix hears it, he knows exactly what kind of woman she is. The comment belongs to the bravado of general’s sons and the First Khashran Princes, to narcissists and captains. To leaders who get their people killed. He nearly smiles, yes, but to hear such confidence—such dangerous, dangerous confidence—from a woman nonetheless… It fills him with a type of disgust he has never before experienced. But, as Vercingtorix does with all his feelings, he files it away, compartmentalises it. It only ever flashes across his face as mild intrigue.
Should her comment evoke fear in him? A deep, lasting respect? How awe-inspiring, that you have known death before anguish!
But Torix’s face is smooth; if anything, it can be read as curious.
Damascus’s eyes are alight, however, with amusement. The dark opalescent irises catch the light in a way that could be laughter but is not, is only light and, that light, nearly illusion. “Then the only death you must know,” he says, melodic, a voice of primal drumbeats and chants and rhythmic pulses. “Is the peaceful kind. What a blessed life you must lead.”
Torix’s glances at the dark dragon. He adds, as if disapproving of the outbreak: “I think what Damascus means to imply is that pain comes before the type of death we know.”
Anguish. Pain. Despair.
Without that, what is before death?
Sleep? Peace? Darkness?
No.
Death is being gutted at the beach, or a jugular ripped out by jagged teeth. No one from Oresziah ever dies old.
Torix laughs, almost apologetically. “I apologise for my companion. He can be a little… intense.” Smoothly, Torix switches to a different topic of conversation. “I have not been yet to Denocte. If I visit, what would you recommend doing there?”
"Speech" || @Antiope
we lick saltwater stains from our hands, and yes, they taste like all the shipwrecked songs of our forefathers, but also like every sorrow we used to be afraid of devouring until we understood that this is a place of rebirth too
