[AW] the changeling [fire]

[Diana]

NOW, SMITTEN WITH THE CRISIS
of a love who hates her own reflection, / my obsession won't rest.

I am always lonely, and I am never lonely at all.

I have always thought that you could split me into parts, and I have never thought that you could do it evenly. When I am home, I am lonely, but I am never alone; I am alone in the way that shattered glass is alone, or in the way that one-half of a broken bowl is alone. (That is to say: I am alone because I am in pieces, because I am a collection of ill-fitted segments.) I am empty in the way that a glass is either not-full or overflowing, but never right at the rim.

When the boy approaches me, his long, dark lashes fawn-like over the bright gold of his eyes, I stand my ground. He is larger than I am, and older, and, unlike me, there is something about him that seems to belong in this place – it is in the deerlike curve of his antlers, and the gold trailing from his wings, and the way that he is dark as umber and ebony, like the trunk of a great and old tree. He comes closer to me, and closer, and then closer still, and, though my blue eyes slit, I do not say a single word, even at the sound of his mournful whisper, even when he beseeches me to go with him into the woods like some passing spirit.

I don’t trust him. I don’t trust him in the same way that I don’t trust the brambles, or the trees, or the stars in the night sky. I don’t trust him because I know that this place wants to swallow me whole, and I know that my knowing is not simple imagining. I look towards the forest that he hopes to draw me into, and, though I do not shudder, my heart skips-beat twice. When I look back at him, I don’t see anything less gaping. I see the woods that I do not want to enter, and I see bright, metal-gold eyes that want something from me, and I know that I don’t want to give him a thing-

(I do not think that I will want to give anyone a single thing in my entire life. See, Solis sparked me from nothing, and I’ve always been in pieces; and if there is anything that I have learned of what people think when they look at god-granted things, it is that they always stare at them with expectation. See, Solis sparked me from nothing, and he’s never told me why, or what he wants from me – but no matter what, I won’t give it. I am my own, not anyone else’s bright thing. No one’s. That is what the desert has given me; or maybe that is what I have given myself.)

When I look at him, I am not quite glaring, but there is no welcome in my reptile-eyed stare. I look into those too-bright eyes a bit coldly, raising my chin to look up at him as best I can. “Mother says,” I say, my eyes narrowing, “that I shouldn’t go anywhere with strangers, and you are certainly… strange.”

I am a strange thing, too. I am not quite fool enough to be unaware of that – but I do not say it with an empathetic familiarity. I say it in the way that I might say it to a hunting tiger, or to any other thing that might wish to lure me into a trap. What girl would be fool enough to follow a wolf into the depths of a wood that wishes to eat her alive?

I am not a girl. (I am not a wolf, either, but, if I tried, I think that I could be a viper.)

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@Leonidas || <3 || atwood, "fox/fire song" 

"Speech!"

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