BEXLEY BRIAR
The winter comes as nothing but quiet.
In Solterra, still the sun burns, the ground is dry, heat waves ripple over the silvering sand. In the recesses of the desert traipses the shadow of a golden girl, aimless in step, exhausted and irritable, so angry that the desert around her seems to heat a few degrees.
And Bexley, enamored with her own grief, does nothing to remedy it.
Skin luminous in the watery sunlight, she descends the slopes with exaggerated strides. The ground sloughs off abruptly. Then she is standing at the edge of the canyon, hair wild and white around her shoulders, peering down over the edge, and just there, in the corner of her vision, a speck near-invisible against the yellow of the desert - Acton, snaking his way into the darkness. Bexley’s lip curls flat against her teeth. Silly fucking flute-player, she mumbles under her breath, almost grinning, and in one silent movement is bounding down the slope with hummingbird fleetness.
Her heartbeat pulses in her ears. What is he doing here? Stinking up her canyon with jasmine and smoke? Leaving a stream of gauzy blackness in what should be the untouchable gold of Solterra - anger blooms within her veins, irresistible, enchanting. Adrenaline drives her. Buzzing, trembling, overwhelmed with excitement, she presses herself against the shadowy side of the canyon and follows, silent, wraithlike, in Acton’s footsteps.
She stops. Does not breathe. Does not even blink. There are two of them. There’s - Raum, and Acton. Holy Solis. Utterly and completely frozen in place, her mind recalls what the court has been so concerned about, the snake of Solterra, the warnings she’s been given, the hushed conversations; her chest seizes, her breath quiets, and, entranced, her blue eyes widen until they are moons in the darkness.
Bexley wonders at the shape of them, backlit - the lines and flowering curves - and, stunned out of her wits, thinks for a moment about beauty, and danger, and their correlation. And then about how she herself exemplifies that connection.
With a quiet inhale, she presses herself closer to the cold hook of the canyon wall, farther into the darkness, and listens.
@Raum @acton YESSSS
