his rifle, his boots full of rocks / oh, and this one is for bravery / and this one is for me / and everything's a dollar / in this box
Surprisingly—or perhaps not—the pale stranger approaches, and in the receding tide his hooves leave behind clean prints like crescent moons.
Saint Volta buzzes like a live wire in Caine's grasp as he settles back, eyes slit against the deepening dusk, and waits.
In the homeland, the most valuable daggers—of which any of Volta's was sure to be, or risk the Saint's fiery wrath—were cleverly magicked. Words of power muttered over the ore as it smelted; every hammer strike to the strict beat of a hearth dragon's snore; etchings in ancient tongue chiseled minutely between carvings of knights and thorny roses. The memory is fleeting, but as the boy ambles closer, Caine remembers what this dagger's enchantment had been.
Snaking out from every cut the blade kissed open, a tangle of vines animalistic in its hunger for blood and leaking decay. Nothing of the victim would be left for the family to grieve over, except for a thicket of vibrant bougainvillea.
Before the lands of Novus had devoured every magical mote from its polished silver depths, of course, as it had done to him. Caine's mouth twitches when the dagger seems to grow warm in his grasp. He wants nothing more than to toss it, end over end over end, into the black mouth of the sea.
"That is quite a collection."
As much as he knows how desperately he should break the habit, praise of any variety always pleases Caine. His smile creeps thinly over his lips and almost manages to touch his eyes. "You speak like a collector yourself." He blinks slowly, dragging his gaze away from the frothing waves to settle it on ice-white hair and eyes a near mirror of his own. The boy, now comfortably close, is lithe yet not at the expense of muscle; built wiry and agile like a cheetah, or a creature more accustomed to the chase than the actual hunt.
A little like himself.
"But too many? I'm not sure that exists."
"Once, surely, I believed the same. But now—" Caine shrugs, and if he is aware of how closely he himself is being examined, he shows no sign of it, "—now they are dead weight." Leisurely he relinquishes the weapon; leisurely he surveys how it is taken up again, quickly and expertly.
Caine watches, almost in wonder, as Saint Volta quickens under another's grasp; one who knows nothing of it except that is a weapon, and that it is beautiful. Volta's blade shines like mercury beneath ribbons of moonlight, and already he is forgetting its weight in his grasp.
In a way, it is more rewarding than tossing the thing into something amorphous.
At least he has something interesting to watch.
"Should I expect to be cursed now?"
He is in the midst of leaning down to withdraw another knife—wood-handled, bone-bladed, the tragic Saint Rheya—when he snorts, before plucking Saint Rheya out nimbly and spinning her around and around until he is no longer in front of the stranger but besides him, a trick of the night, the scimitar's fragile dulled edge resting lightly along a pale and moon-dappled neck.
A grin flashes across Caine's mouth, quicksilver sleek, before the scimitar is lowered and thrown (into the sea), leaving nothing behind but a half-second memory of presence, and then absence, and then whole, eternal disappearance.
"You should have asked that earlier. It used to be, but if there is any curse left in its metal than, rest assured, I have just taken care of it for you."
