with criminal mentality
The entire forest seems to tremble, each time the distant clouds crash with thunder, and the electricity flashes across both the sky and the Warden’s skin. Andras is like the storm, he thinks; and for just a minute Ipomoea lets himself resent him for that.
The trees are whispering to each other as their branches shake, and once he would have shaken alongside them. But today he only stands, and he stares, and even when his heart is racing he does not flinch, or quiver, or look away from all the ugly parts of the forest. And only now that there was a reason to feel afraid, and when he thinks the forest would not save him if a monster were to try to cut out his heart, only now has he outgrow his fear of the dark. And he doesn’t do anything but wonder how many trees he uproot before all the beasts of the woods were exposed.
Today he doesn’t feel much like a king. Kings shouldn’t be allowed to be so angry, or so helpless; all this rage, and he is not strong enough to wield it.
Maybe that’s why he left his crown of flowers on the path here, lisianthus and buttercups and yarrow and dahlias left in a scattered trail behind him, picked and tossed one by one. Now the wind blows them apart, and the rain begins to wash them further away, and a bramblebear tramples them under foot.
The wind from Andras’ wings sweeps over him, but it is not strong enough to blow him away, as much as he wishes it might have. So Ipomoea only turns and, with his heart beating out a song of rage inside of him, follows the pegasus deeper into the forest. He can fit his entire hoof within the tracks; and so he lengthens his stride and tries to think of what it feels like to be a murderer. And he wonders what the poacher would have been thinking, when he walked this same forest path (because the tracks made it obvious: he did not run from the storm or from his pursuer; he walked. And that makes it all the worse.)
”Andras,” he breaks the silence, but he does not lift his eyes from the ground, not even when the first drop of rain falls like an omen against his back. He swallows, the air tasting like iron and rotten things. ”Why do you think it’s taken so long?”
He dares a quick glance, but only one, at those blue-gray eyes that look so much like another storm cloud. And while his mind is racing, and the leaves are screaming out a thousand reasons, he does not voice his own thoughts, not yet. Because his own suspicions make him feel like he’s gone mad, or desperate, or both.
@
"Speaking."
