A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
He might have cared.
He might have nodded at her, understanding - or at least as close as he could come. Might have said Most of the time I feel like only bones, like all the rest of me has withered up and blown away, rattling my ribs as it went. Might have asked Will you be afraid to die, when your quest is done? Or are you eager for it. (Sometimes he feels like he is eager for it, like he is only a golem of mud and bad luck, only moving because nobody has told him to stop. It might be a relief to die.)
But she says nothing, and he says nothing, and when she smiles at him he does not return the expression. How can he? She is something alien and fierce, more powerful than he could hope to be even without whatever it is that withers the scant plant life at her feet and sends it blowing out into the channel of the canyon like chaff.
Oh, when her gaze shifts and narrows, when it turns into something a wild animal would wear and not a girl, Abel is glad that she looks away. There is still curiosity gnawing at him, a restless coyote at a well-worried bone, but nothing about her had been inviting.
She did not want him, and he could not blame her.
“Good luck,” he tells her, and it sounds sincere. And then, for a long span of moments, he only watches her pick her way nimble as a goat down the ledge, watching her stripes and gold and swaying horns until the canyon swallows her up from view.
When at last he turns away he feels no less like a shadow than he had before.
@Angharad
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