He isn’t left waiting long.
In fact, he’s still imagining worlds disintegrating by the heat of his back, his great head curved aslant his shoulders, when he sees her. She doesn’t resemble his usual archetype. She isn’t beautiful, at least, she isn’t anymore; a thousand scars along the ridge of her spine and neck have muddied her (wrote out across her flesh an obvious ruin). Regardless, something about her calls out to him.
It is, perhaps, her general disinterest in the others in their vicinity (or more pointedly, him, because he is as conceited and presumptuous as he is cruel), or perhaps her apprehension and the feeling of concern that settled across her body as plainly as the snow. The agitation festering like a forgotten wound under her skin is clear even through the space between them - the way her muscles pull again and again, the way she faces head-on and never leaves her back unguarded. He’s seen a victim often enough to recognize one.
He doesn’t realize that this is the characteristic that draws him to her, that his own childish obsessions and desires have peaked this particular interest. He doesn’t recognize the heaviness in the back of his chest, buried deep behind his ribs, as pity.
Too self-indulgent to be perceptive, he is also blissfully unaware of the storm overhead until the smell of ozone in the air becomes palpable. Even then, when he draws a breath and lets the clean, crisp air fill him, thoughts of shelter are admittedly not the first to reach him. With glassy eyes he thinks briefly of Her, of Cordis. He thinks about the way the lightning wrapped around her body, as tight and as suffocating as her agony was. Now, years later, he finds some comfort in the irony of it - how lightning could split the sky into halves just like it split his world.
He breathes a quiet sigh, lets Her go, and rejoins his game.
Now, he could walk to her, but Elektrum has never been the type to hide his obvious talents. Instead, he travels through time and space in fractions of seconds all in order to place himself directly in her path just as the thunder claps.
“You look like you’ve made a mistake, or two,” he says, casually in his mind if not a little arrogantly in reality (a byproduct, no doubt, of his upbringing).
“Want to run away for a little while?”
He doesn’t know yet what he wants her for - if he would show her stars, or bones, or both.
ELEKTRUM
how time twines around your neck,
@Lepis