Alecto Vermillio Raptis
✧
I
n motion, it is like watching sand slipping through your fingers - you want so badly to stop it, to hold onto it, to hold onto him, and yet it flows by so freely, so easily despite your wishes and desires. The blue rivals the stars, the gold is metallic matrimony of both beauty and grace. Each heartbeat if yours is another he swallows, another he lets go, lets pass him by even as he dances from your sight. Alecto doesn't mind the smoke that ensnares the markets, swirling overhead every evening when the patrons awake, coming to the street to fill their bellies as much as their souls. And he hungers like they do, like a dog salivating over a steak just out of reach. But he is not a dog left to be trampled underfoot, kicked about the world and starved.
The man could be many, many things, and a dog would never be one of them.
Now, aureate eyes dance over the many bodies as his feet dance upon the cobbled streets, he listens to the singing of the stones, to the swaying of the bodies. All his wares are stashed in the room he rents, paid up for the season with extra for charms and protections to keep all that he has left safe.
Tonight, he is naked among them, his jewels and crowns, his capes and gowns all exempt from his skin. He shivers with the chill, a breeze from the Armas embracing him as it would a lover. When the smoke hits his nose again, when the scent of pine and fresh-cut cedar mingle with it, when a girl beckons him near with her too-bright purple eyes and fragile faerie wings barely set aflutter behind her, he can do naught but answer. One merchant to another, one living, breathing beast to another.
She smiles prettily when he approaches her table of carved wood, a boy still whittling another piece (of which there is a collection set off to the side) nestled in a blanket. They must have come early enough to find a central stall.
His smile rivals the cosmos, his hungry heart left a black hole.
"Hello little dreamer," he purrs into her stall.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you
