the sun shines low and red across the water,
She likes them better like this, with teeth flashing in the dark like panthers in the shadows and the moonlight. This feels like the realist moment in her young life. In Denocte everything is gemstones, stories and sorrow. There is the church-tree and the gardens with jasmine twisting around copper archways like comets. The touches her skin has ever known have all been soft as a wish and tainted with love and affection. But this is cold as ice and something in it sparks ice-fire in her blood. It feels like freedom.
Avesta is almost surprised to discover that she likes the darkness and promise of violence more. Her nerves are sparking wildfires across her skin and her heart is thrilling a war-song under all her sinew. And when his teeth flash white as her mother's arrows in the dark crease of his lips something in her is saying not to show him all the ways in which she wants to be as terrible as a storm. Instead she only watches with that strange look on her face and the darker look gathering shadows in her eyes. Like death on a wave, all curls of white froth and brine worn ropes.
And when he says, yes, it sounds to her like that wave crashing on the shore of a mortal man. It sounds like a riptide heading back out to the deep with the sand and rocks held tight as a heart. “We must be.” Avesta thinks of the girl by the sea with her legs begging for a race, she thinks of her mother stringing up an arrow to burn away the blackness. She thinks of all the things she's know that are beautiful and violent enough to take the world (like fable, like the sea, like her heart). Something in her small chest bellows and makes her skin tremble like a leaf learning how to turn belly up for the rain.
His teeth come calling at her throat and even though she wants to snap back, to let her wolf learn all his secrets, she only stays still as father often is. She remembers asking her mother about the scars ringing her throat, of how they looked like shark teeth marks instead of horse. Avesta knows what to think of boys who reach for the throats of beautiful things and so she only leans back enough that the point of her horn can swing towards his own throat.
Avesta does not think of forgiveness in the ways that her mother once did. She doesn't think of it at all. Nor does she let herself think of how his smile looks warm enough to case away what little chill there is in the air.
“Half of your castle of ruins wouldn't be enough.” The tip of her horn almost waivers in the wind, but when Foras presses his shoulder against her knee it steadies. Below it she smiles and the looks is no less strange than the storm pulling at shadows that's caught in her eyes. “But I never said I had any real interest in your fortress at all.” Avesta quivers when another cool wind comes rushing through the trees.
Only in the taking, her tongue and her storm beg her to say in the silence. And for the first time Avesta does not listen.
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