for every tyrant, a tear for the vulnerable
in every lost soul, the bones of a miracle
Creatures stir, burrow, hiss through the red brown leaf litter. Black bats, small and blind, swoop across the star-filled breaks in the trees. These small things live their small inconsequential lives without agendas or ideas beyond survival. For them, little mice and many-legged insects, each day is hour upon hour of striving. They eat, and drink and fight for their few inches of the world and rarely lay down to die old and finished living. There is no love or justice in a life like that, not really. When they eat it is not for the pleasure of taste, when they gather it is not for the joy of company, when they fuck it is only to make little future hours of struggle and strife.
The woman casts her eyes about, to catch on these little blurs of life in the darkness, her ears swiveling in a slow and deeply attentive way. She knows the futility that defines those small lives and still she marvels at them, has taken time to notice them so that their presences have become as familiar as old friends.
There is one who is not familiar, and as he slides out of the darkness Kensa turns her face to toward the sensation of being watched. The wane light leaves shadows in the angles of his arabesque features, drawing her attention to the masculine ridges and planes, muscle and bone. She stares, intent. Less a deer caught than a serpent charmed. This is what the forest has given her in exchange for a dark wish.
Leaves rustle like crinolines around her pale legs as she once again drifts through them, this time toward the man. She has not the faintest idea of who he might be. One of these that lingers in the forest waiting for things to wander into their web, most likely, but the Primarch does not often linger on what she doesn’t know. It’s always more interesting to go looking for answers instead. The richness of his scent is on the air between them but she reaches out to pull it from his skin instead, lips hovering a hair’s breadth from the rugged edge of his jaw. Maybe he meant to intimidate her from this place, but she is brazen, especially tonight.
@[Ainlif]
