[P] STARLINGS

[Raziel]

Raziel is still thinking about them when the stranger replies with a fruit-thick voice and a smile that looks as ripe as the curves on the girl Raoul had coveted. The nausea is writhing like a maggot in his gut now and with each squirm it is growing harder to contain his need to scream. All he can see is his brother's mouth parting in what he supposed had been pleasure, his lips damp with her sweat.  What if he had been the one with his fingers pressing into her skin as though she were butter and he were the knife? Would that have sated his jealousy? His discomfort? He had never kissed a girl. He had never even courted a girl. It seemed likely that he never would. But that had never been the problem, had it? Young Raziel, handsome though strange, bore no interest in the fairer sex: they were but toys to distract his brother. A means to an end he had never wanted anyway.  “Well. Thanks for sharing your shade. Guess I’ll head on.” The Solterran stares, knowing he should say something. He can hear his grandfather's voice like a bell in a churchtower (your brother says too much and you don't say anything) but his mind is theatre playing movies of dead people (you don't say anything) and he can't bear to look a moment longer at this man who makes him think of his brother loving someone else (you don't say anything). So he doesn't say anything. It is Gahenna that moves, rising like a black sun beside her stallion. Her body is a great shadow looming, her eyes a mark of something too old to measure. She has had enough. A ballad lifts over the dunes, made from the wind and the desert and it carries toward the triad as they stand suspended in a queer juncture, each wishing that it might soon end. The hellhound might have hummed a snarl had August not quite suddenly fractured the moment with his departure, leaving man and dog stuck in the same silence he had found them.  @august