[P] roscian

[Raziel]

well fed devils behave better

than famished saints

It doesn't occur to him that he is bored until the beetle he has been watching disappears quite suddenly. 

It had been a slow, fat thing. Easy for his long gaze to track as it scuttled from one direction to another with seemingly frivolous intent until it settled on tracing a circle in the sand with its tiny dark feet. Round and round and round.

Raziel felt akin to it, somehow. As though he, too, was an insipid little insect with nowhere to go, stuck in the rhythms the cosmos had bestowed upon him. He is walking that same circle in the sand, only with larger feet and a heart that beat black. 

And yet, where was the beetle now? 

He might even have tried to find it he not caught sight of Gahenna's hackles flaring in the corner of his eye. He knew what that meant.

They would soon be disturbed. 

Do we know them? he growls inwardly, to which she replies with a short sharp shake of her enormous head. So they wait in a silence that is as comfortable as it is familiar. It is binding. An agreement. A vow.

And always true to her word, his hound is right: for soon the sky swells and blooms under the heavy dance of a young man's wing.

The stranger is a film of blonde hair and drawings intricate enough to rival the tapestries on Saudagar's walls. Raziel wonders if he were to take a knife and peel back his skin, would those prints glint beneath his blood like old, forgotten promises? 

It takes him a moment to register the stranger's question for he is too busy thinking of skin and ink and cartilage, but his lips move reflexively as though he were wholly machine behind a guise of being. Perhaps it is not blood that runs aurous from the cracks in his hull, but oil. 

"An hour," hollowed-violet eyes trace the boy's bones slowly, "for you? Perhaps two."

Raziel Nazaret has seen the desert swallow children whole before and here, beneath the untamed sun, he finds himself hoping he will be there to watch it happen again. 

« r » | @Aeneas