THE MOON IS MY SUN
THE NIGHT IS MY DAY
THE NIGHT IS MY DAY
H
e studies her as she approaches warily, his pale gaze as smooth and coolly contemplative as the bubbling sapphirine waters she stares so intently into. He wonders what she wishes to see reflected upon its rippling surface.
He also wonders, with slight amusement, what she wishes to hear when she asks him for asylum.
“Carnage as a permanent fixture, possibly not,” Caine replies, a thin smile spreading wryly across a raven sleek jaw. “But I’ve found that Solterrans harbor a peculiar… taste for blood, so if you are looking for a place that is peaceful, you will surely not find it here.”
With a light shrug of vast obsidian wings, the boy’s shifting silver eyes drift to settle mutely upon the fountain’s sparkling marble statue, as Caine appears to consider the girl’s question for a sincere moment.
A compelling act, entirely fabricated. The Illusionist's specialty, turning imitation into persuasion. Each gesture is as artfully spun as a spider’s gossamer web, as meticulously alluring as the flourish of a calligrapher’s pen. It is almost an obsession to him, how perfectly he can pull off each lilting smile and lyrical sigh. How convincing he can make it, until not even Caine himself knows for certain if any of it was ever genuine at the end of the night.
It is a game to him. Everything is a game to him, because it is so much easier when there are only two ways for things to end.
“Asylum?” he begins, rolling the word languidly, gracefully, across his tongue. “Pardon me, but I think you are mistaken, miss. This city is as foreign to you as it is to me. I arrived just a week before, myself, and —” he pauses, a rueful smirk lifting a charming chuckle from his dark lips. “Perhaps we’ve both chosen the wrong time to visit.”
Perhaps they’d all chosen the wrong time to visit.
With the flick of a velvet ear, Caine shifts his keen gaze towards the figure who’d appeared as silently as a shadow across the courtyard. He focuses just in time to catch the stranger’s heavily accented words before they fade to echos along the wall.
"What a curious place to take - asylum, hm?"
There it is again. Asylum. Such a sobering word to be tossed around before the sun has set, Caine thinks with a snort.
He’d sensed the skeletal-masked man’s lingering presence at the edges of his mind — there is little, if anything, Caine misses — yet he hadn’t expected for him to stop, much less stay. It is odd for him, to be in the company of those who don’t have death nestled like a sleeping dragon along their slender necks. Yet rare occurences carry that much more interest, and the boy's curiosity is quickly kindled by the both of them. The living have so much more to say than the dead, after all.
“Another wanderer hoping to settle?” he muses, all traces of macabre thoughts vanishing from his eyes like fog in the wind.
“In that case, it seems that introductions are in order — if I may, I’ll begin.” A smile as beautiful as black silk flickers fleetingly across his angular cheeks. “My name is Caine, and I welcome you both to Solterra.”
@Vanora @Káin | "speech" | notes: pshh all y'all writing is spectacular <3
