in my mouth
turning
my tongue into
rivers of blood.
T
he first thing Andras thinks is that Somnus looks old in ways he's never seen: not world-weary as much as rooted too deeply in it, like his forest god has stretched out hands to hold him to the ground. He wonders, if that connection was severed, would the man simply... float away?The second is that he looks like Oriens has been holding him down, marked with the handprints of divinity in all ways that matter. Andras had stood next to Oriens, almost shoulder to shoulder. His magic had stroked the side of his rib and begged for more. He had not felt, or even looked, so divine. He would not wish to repeat it. The king's reverence is built on a foundation of fear.
After all, Oriens had looked at him, all his black dogs with gnashing teeth, the boiling cauldron of his rage, and he had said: I will let that out.
"It is entirely what I meant. It was just a question."
He looks, through the shield of his glasses, guarded against both the curl of his lip that be bites down on to keep it from curling at all, and the clackclackclack of a barn owl with round, black moon eyes looking back at him.
Andras pauses for a moment, stares at the scarred, blank, white eyes of the former king, newly come down from the mountain, and then turns away, crossing the room to a shelf full of books bound in linen with clean white lettering stamped onto their spines. The first book pulled off the shelf takes some wrestling before it falls into the palm of his wing, but the second comes more easily.
How does one ask a stranger how to do anything? Andras does not know. Instead of trying he sets the smaller of the books on the counter, a surprisingly frantic motion, and folds the other open, busying himself with flipping through pages, comforted by the sound of the rough fiber on its equally rough brethren. A nervous habit. Pages that fold far too fast to have been more than glanced at. Andras forgets to care.
Finally, he looks back to the dunalino and his owl. "What's that like?" he asks, almost noncommitally. Almost. "Does Oriens take his tea with much sugar?"
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
