Her voice is sing-song, paramount to the lulls of faerie bones – her voice rings out to him like a chime, and his blood rises to meet it. Heat flushes against the smooth lines of his rippling flesh, tenderly bolted with youthful musculature that professes its scattered scars out-gleamed by the brilliant gold. He is more a wolf than a boy. Was she the shepherd? And so while his childish features engross themselves in the shadow of her whims, something darker rests there, deep and ancient chiding that whispers in his veins. The viper pit nestled in his core shifts at the single utterance that passes as a breeze from her lips, and it mars his ears like hollow bells. Pity. That thing lurches, and spit hits the back of his teeth with the force of a tidal wave. He is uncertain whether its aim was for her face or her feet, but it rose still – hot, thick, and with all the acrimony of acidic venom, as if it willed itself the burning persistence to speckle her flesh and whip the word from her skin. He suffers it back, swallowing it down along with his arrogance, pride, but not for her sake. There was more for him in the Night Court than pity from a stranger, this he believed. Why else was he brought here? Though the thought itself was wound tight with a hope more than belief, a godless boy, a lost boy, the loveless not-prince offered to Denocte's shores. Was it by Caligo, then? He yearns, in that tender moment of bruised ego, to command the recognition. To scream out to her, louder and fiercer than her soft word, that he was here for purpose.
He did not want her pity. And perhaps, he did not even deserve it.
But oh, how the menace lingered between those glacial eyes, how peril clung to her lips and kneaded between each syllable, smugly lounged in the nuance of threat. He craved it each time it was offered, hardly heeding her warnings, but bidding them all the same. Her maternal croons carried the glint of a knife. Double edged, silvery sharp. He wondered how long he could tip-toe the blade before it cut him, and he wondered deeply how it would taste – would it taste of the sea? Of dragon scales? Would it taste of his own blood, the cold ichor of titans and shamans? Would his blood rise from it like smoke, like the coal dust that rose from her feet in the forewarning of destruction? What then was she capable of, if these things were not a matter of his deprived mind? Was it truly gold that was spun beneath her hooves, veining boas of precious stone that bared their fangs to him as if she did not recognize that he, too, was a serpent? A snake of kerosene-slicked coils, fine filigree of golden veins, and fangs that tread the soft line of his lips. Erasmus was a child yet, but the shade within him knew the hazard, chuckled at each mark that glared warily at his existence.
It wondered if it would have suited her better to kill him, instead.
Could she?
He is but a boy with small aspirations yet, some lost thing dredged to the edges of their world and struggled to all but envy their strife. He did not lust for a crown or tragedy yet, it was beyond him at this time, and so the magic that reached out to him was all spectacle to naivety. But his blood knew. It pulsed in his ears and his teeth, his spine hot and raked with needle-pricked hackles that roared from skull to tail. He did not know to want the luxury of sovereignty, the pleasance of aristocracy they once tried to strangle him with by means of culture and couture. He knew survival, he knew the metallic savor of blood, the way bones crackled and fractured with the weight of a battering ram. Part of him did not care to explain himself to someone who could only pity.
Erasmus did not ask for parlor tricks and pities. And even now, as his pride slid down his throat prickling like a ball of barbed wire, he sighed deeply with a drag on the tense air that surrounded them, breathed it in as if the freshest breeze. Waiting, desiring only that shade that dared match his own, hidden far beneath the layers of her patience that stood sentry. She was softness, sweetness, a maternal brooding that cultured itself with womanly prowess – power, that of a lioness. But he was not so naive to mistake the trace of shadows that slid across her expressions, that clung to her in waves and whistled through each clamor. His own chased the hard edges of his delineation, wisping softly against the heat of his frame as they danced against the gold and grinned from the nooks and crags of his mane, his eyes. They steady heavily upon her own, as if he had never been taught not to look a monarch so directly, so forwardly. Where the traces of his handsome features had once feigned the warmth of cunning and pride, they now hung with a haunt of what was to come, an omen of colder, darker things that slept in his bones. He is severe, calculative, and dissects her every tremor that creeps along her elegance. How he craves her darkness all the more she shines brightly. How he strives to goad that monstrosity that rests deep in her, and aches to know the depth of her sins.
Follow me. But he does not at first, as if rooted to the spot, instead watches her as she turns to descend the halls of the Court, starlight at her heels. Each hoof-fall is a glimmer of alchemy, one of richness and protruding wealth that kisses the ground she steps as if the floor itself worshiped her every tender tread. It is curiosity that prods him forward at last, and he trails her transformed path as a wolf that hunts the scent of uncertainty, weary and starving. He contemplated his question to her again, that nature of her satisfaction, no, not hers by damn, but that creeping threat of darkness that rose in her like blood to wound. What satisfied that hunger? What could she possibly show him that relented the truth, vital honesty, and what did she have that could possibly amuse his delights? It was loathed to think that it was another attempt to reach his softer engagements, to despair the loss of youth and cry out to a never-was. That bruised, beloved foal gathered in a weeping mother's arms, who at once learned the price of mercy and the downfall of benevolence, weakness. It came to him in faint, distant memories now, that time when things were simpler. And it wasn't long before even those fleeting glimpses of innocence were washed away.
Isra's magic veins through the stone door and it shifts to unfurling wisps of ruby-strung curtain, leafed in silk tresses that snapped and swayed in the breeze. It is confirmed to him, the existence of something beyond depravity of the mind – and he is at once entangled in many things consumed by awe and relief, and he wonders to what extent her magic reaches (still far too arrogant to listen to the childish voice that asked if she could turn his bones to pearls and his flesh to marble) that all she touched turned to wealth. Could they also turn to thorns? To steel? Could she ask the stars to turn to studded diamonds that rained and cut and belted the ground like indestructible hail? But she was bidding him in now with a smile that dripped of such honeyed goodness that at his double-take made him sick. But there was something else that he couldn't touch, and as his brow furrowed and shadow fell again over his golden eyes, chasing away the wonder. He had missed the spectre that passed flatly across the balcony steps like an eclipse. Her answer came, but it was no answer – and he was disappointed again, his ears spun back as he raised his chin. He did not care for her evasion, and he choked on his awe as he was robbed once more of his satisfaction to learn just what ticked inside her mind.
That is, until the spectre passed again and clutched to the balcony staircase.
Glistening seaweed scales, kelpie shadow, a mass of steely plates that glinted and clenched together as the massive thing knelt forward, great wings outstretched farther than anything he had witnessed before. Erasmus was rightfully caught off guard and it would be a cruel disfavor to truth to say anything otherwise, as well as an insult to the marvel that it was. The brushlands he had survived could have been decimated by the presence of a dragon, were one hungry enough to prey upon them, and so their only existence was marked in lore and frightful night tales that threatened the unruly children not to explore far beyond the horizon of The Wilds. They spoke of grating teeth and breath like fire, fire unlike anything mortals could achieve – one heat that made of flesh molten and bones to smoking coals. As the thing's weight quivered the stone from beneath their feet, adrenaline poured to the surface and riled along the lacings of his dark skin, held his bones still as steel. A boy may have run. And maybe that is what he should have done – and in hindsight could see himself to have done, to bolt back through the shadow-studded halls, clamber over the bounty of wealth that slowly stirred from the tile floors, tear through the streets of the market and find that shore he was spat upon. Perhaps he should have shrieked and shrunk back, cowering and begging for his life. A child would have cried.
He stood, a ward to his own spirit, breathing steadily and freely as the dragon craned its skull to where Erasmus could smell the brine in his lungs. The drake did not smell of ash and cinder as one would think, and it's a peculiar thing that may have been what held him to the spot enough to contemplate. Long enough he did not run or cry or scream in panic, shrunk into the shadow of the sea queen who looked on in question. For a moment he only stood and reclined back against his own thoughts, observing in a manner of inhibition that one could mistake him for a gargoyle perched before the curiosities of a young dragon – teeming with hundreds of questions that may never be answered. Of all things, the drake's wingspan amazed him the most, and he found himself warily eyeing from one tip to the next, before trailing back to its face. It was unlike what he had imagined, but he was far from disappointed. After a brief moment of threaded musings, he stretched the curve of his neck, his feet firmly planted still, offering himself a closer look and a deeper inhale that smelled so strongly of the sea that he could almost wonder if the dragon was, itself, an extension of the miraculous leagues of the unknown. Nose to nose with something that could indefinitely kill him, the thought was left to the back of his discarded concerns (left to the same small voice that once questioned if Isra could turn him to stone, now fretted how sharp the beast's teeth were).
Reclaiming the slope of his skull to tilt just slightly, it cast shadows over the thick lines of his neck that were plated in sea-knotted fibers of mane and gold thread, a misting of perspiration lain over him in a sheen that faintly reflected the dusk. His eyes, deep and fretted with more questions than any of them could care to answer even if he bothered to ask, returned to Isra's, and for a while he was uncertain of what words even belonged in the state of time. Far from a dumbed down brute of a soldier, his eccentricity and eloquence struggled to find a place for intimating anything that persisted as the loud drone of adrenaline thundered wildly in his pulse. Was this her answer? Once hope, and now.... she brings him to the fantastical beast, were it another strike of menace or the cryptic answer to his question. Was the dragon a pawn to her whims, or was it an act of motherhood she sought in befriending such a mythical wonder of terror? He found himself with more questions than he had even arrived with, and it troubled him deeper than anything before. And as these things ran rampant in his mind, there was only one word that could leave his lips, though he wasn't sure how many questions it asked in itself - “How?" almost hushed, but just above a whisper, its raspy tone held with it the weight of all things she had incited. And just as loosely as she left her answers to be interpreted, he left it for her to answer – were it a question of how she turned the tile to glass or the stone to ivy, how she summoned a dragon to her hearth, or how she sought the beast as either an instrument or aid. How did she expect him to react to this thing of nightmares and folklore? How did he come to be brought here, this place of dreams made real?
@Isra
