He doesn’t want her pity nor her mercy. It burns black in his chest like a fire he has left unchecked, and he chokes on the bile that rises in his throat, on the way the scent of copper rises in the desert heat, on the way she still doesn’t give him what he needs to make the voices screaming in his head silent. He strikes out and she takes the wounds he offers, and it only stirs his fury all the greater -- he thinks of Jetsam, how the stallion had fought back until he hadn’t, until his lover had given up on him as well. He thinks of Elysium, who had held him down and forced him to accept her affection, who had beaten sense into him time and time again, who had promised him she wouldn’t leave him again and then had vanished when he’d mentioned the vulture that followed him. There has only ever been one truth in his life, and it has been that everybody leaves in the end. Eventually, Teiran will too, and the thought makes him want to howl with bitter rage, because he also knows that he will be the reason she leaves. “I am a monster,” he snarls out with the certainty of one who has been told that until they have broken beneath the weight of that word, monster, the bastard prince, the harbinger of a war he had been born into, the ruination of his queenly mother’s holy campaign, and when he lifts his head to stare at her, there is a voided soul within his eye. “Why won’t you leave?” |
@Teiran welp
