we must always be willing to be
more savage than angels
You think they are beautiful?Vercingtorix cannot help the secretive smile that flits, briefly, across his face. The entire effect is like a small cloud passing over the sun on an otherwise cloudless day; mysterious, vague, there and then gone so quickly it seems imagined. It is a private smile. A private knowing.
Of course they are beautiful.
Their beauty comes from the thing that dooms all men. Their own obsession with the things that can kill them; with sharp blades and tigresses and women’s wily smiles. She is staring at him as if she will see the smile; as if she will see all the dark knowing beneath his turquoise eyes, semi-haunted, but mostly jewel-bright and beautiful.
Beautiful.
That word again.
“Tigers are beautiful, are they not?” The analogy brings to mind Bondike’s unforgivable flank stripes; the red against the black, psuedo-melanistic, strange.
There are water horses that I love. But some I wish to banish. The way she says it bespeaks of intimate familiarity. Her eyes are tortured. Vercingtorix feels as if he is not looking at a real woman, but a tragic figure walked straight from mythology, as brutal and inexplicably elegant as a wounded deer.
“How do you decide,” he says, softly. “Which to love, and which to banish?”
The question, too, makes him think of Bondike.
Boudika.
One and the same.
But Torix’s emotions do not surface; he smiles cooly, as if politely ignoring the agonised tone of her voice. He turns away from the water horse as if it does not require a certain wrenching of his attention, a delicate severing of passions. He tears his eyes away from it easily, as if—
As if he is not obsessed.
As if he is not as agonised as her voice had been.
But he heeds her request. Vercingtorix begins to lead her deeper into the garden. There is a moment when he comes to an issue: to lie, or to tell the truth. He is uncertain which he would rather do. It would be easy—flippant, even—to choose a statue and weave some elaborate, poetic tale as to why he loves it, the most.
Instead, he decides to be earnest. The journey is short, a weaving path through foliage heavy with flowers and fruit. The garden is so green it seems to throb with its own essence, its own heartbeat. The statue Vercingtorix stops at is understated and sad, in a somber kind of way. It is a black marble stallion, adorned with a lion’s skin made up of bronze foiling. The entire thing is luminous and dark all at once, reflecting light with the absoluteness of polished stone. There is a sword at the stallion’s feet, and the lion’s skinned head is bejewelled with topaz eyes.
“I suppose this is it,” Vercingtorix admits, appraising the statue. The warrior’s head is downcast, his ears pinned tight against his skull. The marble seems alive, as if a breath away from stepping into life. “It seems more honest than the rest.”
"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.
