I am well enough lamby-lamb. Thank you.
Those words slink to her through the darkness. They are a knife’s promise upon her skin. Each one is potent and dangerous even as they sing-song with their childish charm.
The Dusk girl’s smile ebbs and fades, her lips tipping until the smile slips and slides from her downturned lips. Oh this boy her heart beats. Florentine thinks she knows this poison of his – but does she? Was Stephen a poison she could ever truly know?
The swamp knows there is no virus in his skin, no venom turning his body into a monster. No it whispers, He has always been a monster. Florentine does not hear their warnings.
The flower girl blinks gold, gold, slow, slow. Her heart is a flutter and yet with golden limbs steps closer and closer to his endless black. The swamp waters ripple, whispering their warning and she hears their babble, smells their scents of leaf decay. Not once does she hear, or smell the gone girl that goes before her, the one who paints Only’s knife so ruby red.
“I am no lamb.” The dusk girl muses softly. Her lips lift up toward a smile and it is this she holds to herself like a shield, a barrier to this boy’s instinctive darkness.
He names her Andromeda this night and she thinks of stars and galaxies and Night Kings upon their throne. Her eyes fall to the knife at his throat. “It makes a change from bringing me flowers, Only. Daggers do not sit so well within my hair.” The flower girl sings, her own dagger feeling cool against her breast. It rises as she gazes at her ornate blade. “Yours is made for other things,” she acknowledges softly, amethyst eyes blinking slowly as she breathes, as her heart flutters.
Only then does she listen to the forest. Only then does she think of how his words are so contrary to the slippery dagger he holds close. “I have died once before you know.” She says as she steps another step closer and sees the gleam in his eyes. Is he so sick, to be so… other? There is no Only here; none of his warm gleam and mischievous smiles. This is not a boy to tug her hair and blow the petals from their tangles at her throat.
Dusk looks to the ground, a petite hoof toeing at the mossy floor between them. When she looks up, they are closer than she ever thought and the blood between them is tangy and sweet and it’s a taste she knows. Her own blood tastes so similar – she remembers with fluttering lashes upon her cheek. Her heart begins to thud, as it too recalls what it is to fall to stillness and it longs to flutter on, strong and bounding and never ending.
Florentine moves to ask him if that is why he is here, but this boy is already deflecting her. He asks of secret loves, of boys she holds close to her heart. There is only one and there is no space for him there, for her heart is already gone and Flora does not know where he might keep it…
“No.” the twilight girl breathes. “I have not come to meet a lover, only Yana.” She will not tell him, she thinks, for each time she has opened her lips to exclaim her love of Denocte’s king only hurt has ever followed.
“He is far from here.” Is all she says to Only and maybe they are foolish words spoken by a foolish girl in the company of her murderer. But truly they are curious words, spoken by a foolishly brave girl who has begun to wonder: “You are not Only are you?”
For there are many other infections of the body than a mere magical virus… and Florentine wonders if this man, with his bloody dagger, will strike her where she stands; so close, so foolishly close.
@
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
