[AW] CIRCUS CHILD ,

[Rhoswen]

Eik was so present, so laconically tangible, as unwavering as an anchor buried in the very sand beneath their feet; yet somehow, paradoxically, there was a remoteness to his gaze that rattled Rhoswen ( a girl not easily rattled by anything ). His eyes seemed to undulate with that perpetual blackness, as though entire worlds existed in the hollow of his skull, and every minute he spent here was also spent exploring those hidden spheres. A crackle of envy flared in the red girl's chest; who was to say she didn't want her own little slice of escape? Perhaps, though, it was not freedom nor galaxies he harboured in that pale head but instead a ceaseless catacomb that he could not rid himself of. The mind could be a gruesome coffin and perhaps the distance in Eik's gaze was owed to this macabre truth. 

There was a sense of oblivion surrounding this man that saturated the very air embalming them - it both calmed and intoxicated her, drawing her heartbeat closer to a heady meridian. Eik. 

"Aye. - did you know him well?"

Rhoswen stares quite coldly now, unusually emotionless. Her mind battered and bruised the thought of Maxence, a man whom she had met only a handful of times in all of her time in Solterra; she was a fleeting girl, not one to hang at the heels of her superiors. Her initial, and lasting, impression of the man had been one of faint contempt: his arrogance, his crude loftiness, and of course his derision of her brother. Reichenbach would always hold a special place in her heart - no matter the court, the title. Heat rose in her throat, cauterising the arsenic dancing on her tongue, "no."

"I had no desire to, either. He was a fool." Her father had always said it was wrong to speak ill of the dead, but Rhoswen was not afraid of ghosts. She burned, unleashing her incandescent curiosity onto him "you are no native of Novus, what made you choose Solterra over the other courts?"

@Eik <3