we must always be willing to be
more savage than angels
The woman does not reply with words. She is gilded in trinkets, in pearls and wildflowers. Through her thick hair she appraises him, a nymph through the tangles of the wild. Vercingtorix does not know yet—no, not quite—that she is the very thing he hunts. He only suspects in the otherness her beauty, her wickedly veiled eyes, that too-slim body and the primitive essence beneath the surface. He feels he is staring at what equines once were instead of what they are; as if he is staring at mythology evoked, a goddess brought to earth or an angel fallen.
It is wicked, she says at last, and even her voice is a song.
But it is a song that awakens a deep relief within him; it combats his feelings of inadequacy and lostness, of uncertainty and fear. Deep beneath the surface, beneath his conscious recognition of what she is, exists the hunter that has known from the dawn of time the difference between predator and prey, hunter and hunted. The careful pinpricking of hairs which, at the moment, seems unexplainable. Vercingtorix smiles a slow, smooth smile; a smile like caramel, sweet and flowing, deep and warm.
“Beautiful things usually are.” Vercingtorix comments. “Does that mean you aren’t fond of water horses?”
There are many other names for them. But this is the ambiguous one he uses, beneath the stars, swathed in a garden of mystery and promise. This is the one he uses as he asks himself, and what are you?
She wonders if he could hate her more than she hates herself. Perhaps she will find his hatred is his essence; it is woven into every fibre of his soul, ever cell of his flesh. He is a prisoner to it, an advocate of it, until the hatred feels as strong as love and replaces whatever love may have been.
"Vercingtorix," he had said, with the guise falling away; the magic sloughing like a dead skin. “I love you.” But the person who had said his name and confessed their love was not the same; somewhere the guise of masculinity disappeared and Bondike became Boudika before him. “But I have to tell you the truth—“
He gestures toward the deeper garden. “There are many more statues, if you find this one too… wicked.” Vercingtorix suggests, his voice kind.
"Speech." || @
rip up their flesh and reveal them to be nothing but the dreamy, worldess haze of lavender and godhood with your virtue shredding teeth. do not weep when their wings thrash. do not be surprised when there are nothing but ghosts in their heart.
