[P] I want your money but your money ain't right;

[Acton]

Acton these violent delights have violent ends   If things had gone even a little differently, this might have been his home.   The thought had dogged him all the way north, worked its way into the back of his mind like a burr in his coat. Raum had been right – he would have belonged in Day, with the sun pressing fingers on his burnished skin, the sparks already behind his eyes. Acton had not been made for shadows, though he could wear them like a second skin.   But Solterra could never have embraced him the way that Reichenbach and the Night Court had. He was not made for following orders, and gods knew the trouble he’d be in with someone like Maxence as sovereign.   And so Acton longed even as he loathed, banked embers just waiting for a touch of breath to ignite.   This afternoon, the buckskin wound his way through the corridors, sunshine into shadow and out again. It made the act feel furtive even though he wasn’t trying to hide; Raum had told him visitors could come this far – though Rostislav’s seizing might have changed things. Acton wasn’t worried (though that was a poor measurement of anything, as he never was). All he wanted, today, was to look around.   Just a crow’s inborn curiosity, nothing more.   At first his mind glided past the sound of hoofbeats, marking them as nothing more than the echo of his own. This canyon was full of strange sounds; the wind moaned low and mean, or wailed high and soft, and slow-circling birds called down insults or greetings, and occasionally some stone came loose and clattered down a sheer rock face. This last always made Acton’s blood quicken and muscles tense, though he knew well enough of such chain reactions to know any damage would be done well before he could react.   But when he paused to draw in a breath – two – and the footsteps continued, he could feel his hair rise like a finger was being traced down his spine. He felt like he always did moments before a performance began, a twin mixture of eagerness and apprehension, sweet and strange as one of Mila’s potions.   The buckskin put on his best smile as the ringing footfalls neared, and a shadow fell around the corner ahead. @Seraphina