[P] devil's in a rush

[Acton]

Acton these violent delights have violent ends If he was wiser, he’d have gone to bed about three drinks ago. But it was autumn, and the nights had grown long, and every evening great bonfires were lit and the people of Denocte did what they did best. The world was a stage and they were all performers, each citizen actor or audience, and Acton would never, ever grow tired of it. Tonight he’d done none of his own tricks, but he’d watched dancers and throwers, fortune-tellers and fire-swallowers (though none of the last as good as their king). Now he felt languid, veins cooled by wine, the spark of him soothed to a smolder. Sense said to find sleep – though it didn’t have to mean alone. His blood hummed slowly, sweetly, as he wound his way through the streets, and at first he thought he imagined the true humming that accompanied it. But then there was a flash of gold, a spill of blonde hair – a girl, always a girl. He felt his smile draw across his lips, and quickened his pace to catch her. “That sounds like one of Reichenbach’s,” he said, and fell in step beside the golden girl as the notes worked their way beneath his skin. For a moment the sound of his hooves on the cobblestones joined them, a percussive counter to her hum, but then the scents of Denocte began to diffuse. Beneath the campfire smoke, most pungent of all, and beneath the dry-leaf smell of autumn, and beneath the perfume and the sweat and the sweet-sharp of wine, Acton smelled something else. Something that made him think of his meeting with Raum on the mountainside, and of sand and bleaching bones, of long-buried pharaohs and the endless, blazing stare of the sun. His half-drunken interest sharpened to something different than that initial attraction, and the buckskin looked at her - really looked at her. He wondered how he could have missed it, when she wore the desert all over her. He never faltered in his steps, and his smile blazed on. “But it’s not quite right, is it? You’re no crow.” He paused to nod at a group of revelers, ones he half-recognized from past audiences, and used the opportunity to slip in closer to the mare. They were nearly touching, now; heat to heat, if not skin to skin. Sulfur and sand and ah, he did not feel drunk and sleepy any more. His anger is a flame inside him, and her presence alone has breathed it to life. “So,” he said then, low and sweet, and his eyes were molten gold. “What’s a vulture doing here?” @Bexley clearly he is eager