to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
August doesn’t miss the minute adjustment of the other man away from him, nor the way that the beast (it seems insufficient, somehow, to think of it as a dog) watches not himself, exactly, but more the pulse-point below his jaw. It’s no more comfortable than the stare of Orestes’ lion, though he prefers the milky-white emptiness of the canine’s eyes to the heavy judgement in the cat’s. He might yet end up a pile of bones beneath sand today, and oh, he is growing weary of hostile eyes.
When the unicorn responds, then, he’s a little surprised. Quick as a swallow’s his gaze lifts to the stallion’s (in the shade, it is impossible to see the hint of gold there, along the waterline) and away again, out over the oasis that is as bold and pigmented as a sapphire set in a band of beaten copper.
“Oh, that age-old wonder - water in the desert. Paradise in purgatory. Is this the only one in the Mors?” He hates being nervous, but the last few weeks (murder at the outskirts of town, blood-baths hidden in the desert, wrathful lines traded with the new king) have turned him skittish and sure his luck is wearing thin. Encroaching on a big dark man and his big dark dog, both stoic as Sphinxes, does not seem like an improvement on the trend.
But other than his over-talking he hides it well, at least for now; when he looks back to the unicorn, though his smile has wilted to something faint and thoughtful. Something smells coppery, like blood, and he hasn’t yet realized why. “But now that I’m closer, you two, too, are rather imposing. And I don’t want to impose. Let me know if I should find another tree.”
@Raziel | <3
