" I KEEP SEARCHING THE STREETS FOR THAT / BLOOD-WINE BATTLESHIP SHE DRIVES. "
This man, whoever he is—today he has gotten lucky.
It’s unusual that O is in the city at all. Recently she’s been spending more and more time in Terrastella, sneaking into the castle to see Andi after hours, or watching her disappear into the waves while the sun sets over the beach. Recently, the carefully cobbled streets of the Dusk Court have become as familiar to her as the ones she grew up on; and nowadays, even in Solterra, she’s more likely to be caught at the oasis or talking to Tuchulcha in the desert. The inner city has lost its allure. Every corner, every building, is stained with memories she’s tired of looking at.
So her presence here—in the city as much as in the library—is a stroke of luck for Martell. Good or bad luck, that remains to be seen.
The building is oppressively quiet. O hears her breath, half-held, as loud as if it were the wind off the ocean; every step she takes clicks against the tile with an independent echo. Dust swirls lazy and light-gold through the air. The bookshelves rise high as mountains on every side, with the many-colored spines of books pressed against one another in infinite rows. It feels reverent, almost: this library is as silent and dim as any of the temples she has visited in service of any of the gods.
But whoever this is, the blood-red stallion she catches a glimpse of out of the corner—well, O knows from experience this is not what a reverend looks like. He has the same cunning, angry, and very explicitly godless expression she sees in the mirror each morning.
O comes to a stop a few feet away. All three eyes train on him, and the fierceness of their kaleidoscope colors serves the same purpose as the bright pigments in a poisonous animal—a warning.
“Well,” she says. “What is it that you want to know?”
He is a little taller than her, a little more properly filled out, and his green eyes are not afraid to meet hers. A long, sharp horn juts from his brow, and O wonders how many hearts it has stopped. And the long, thin streak of white that courses down his face—
She can’t help thinking, idly, that it looks like a scar.
