andras
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
H
e doesn't like the way that she looks at him, like she's dizzy, or like he's something to big for his body. Andras already knows. He doesn't need-- or want-- to see it mirrored. It all leaves a bad taste in his mouth.The moon rises with his quickening pulse, the meadow grows darker and somehow still lighter around them, just the colors shifting, just the mumbling crowd groaning into a steady stream of jumbled conversation behind them. Maybe I was just waiting, Elena says, for something incredible to happen. As she speaks, as the warden's clenched teeth tighten far more than they should, over and over, music begins to play.
It is soft music. Joyful music. Flutes and a lyre and the soft pattering of lambskin drums. It does not at all match his impossibly wide smile, his impossibly clenched jaw, or the deafening crack of his magic. It is loud enough to turn a head or two.
"Ambushed," he echoes. "Is that what I'm doing? Ambushing you?"
So quick to take everything personally. So quick to leap at the throat. Andras is so full of anger, full to bursting, but when he looks at her and she tips her head back to look at the sky he does the same. He imagines the void of space, floating endlessly through the black and the cold with nothing but a quiet death before him. He imagines the silence: so much silence, filling each cell of his body, every blank space that is taken up either by anger or magic or the great crawling something in him...
And, just like that, all his anger has nowhere to go. When she looks back at him and he looks back at her it is neutered. It feels worse than he expected.
"Oh--" he stammers, scrambling for purchase as he plummets out of his rage. "No, I have to watch." Andras hates parties. Andras hates gatherings. As more bodies filter into the clearing and the sun sinks ever further Andras feels his skin start to crawl.
She suggests he's the entertainment, smiling at him like he imagines cats smile, or foxes, or-- snakes. He wonders if she knows she looks like she's in pain when she says it. "I resent that."
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
