It is unusual for him to be here.

He  risks it all by coming here today; exposure and his own self-proclaimed omnipotence (a facade, a fallacy at best) unravelling in a sea of blood and groans should the contagion take hold of him. Today, however, he feels like gambling; testing theories he ought to leave well enough alone. There is something about the danger in it that attracts him (like a manic, seeking out another high before the fall). Or, perhaps, he is more simply pouting — reeling from the cold and quiet assaults of one small mare who shouldn’t affect him in the ways that she seems to. One small mare who somehow has become an ideogram for all of the rejection and adversity that life had thrown him that then, over the years, putrefied and festered like rot under his skin and left him gangrenous.

The latter seems more likely.

The meadow is still quiet, and sleepy. There are no songs spilling out of the heavy boughs of oak and maple trees yet, and while a gentle breeze combs through the long-grass and thistles like waves of an ocean its beauty is lost on Elektrum, who breaks the stalks of wildflowers as he trundles carelessly through beds of the wild things. Even as the fragile morning light drapes across him like a veil, and refracts off the silvery strands of his mane and forelock as they play in the wind he does not stop to wonder about the magic of these quiet moments.

He is a god, isn’t he?

He’s seen a thousand sunrises more extravagant than this one. There are worlds that exist with so many different scales and types of them, some with a brilliant kaleidoscope of colours, others still with multiple suns. It can’t be his fault that earth became so much uglier when you saw so much more. And so here he waits, a festering sore amidst the striking scenery, until the distinct crackle of atoms splitting echoes in the silence and then on the breeze comes the smell of sweat on her skin tangled with something he knows and appreciates better than wildflowers and sunrises; time.

As soon as the sigh escapes her lips he is beside her, in his wake a desperate mess of broken stalks and weeping flowers, bolder with every breath he takes.

“I see you,” he says, intentionally vague. These are the kinds of things he loves. Let her interpret what he is seeing, be it the bend of her hips, her unusual character flaws (the eyes, he notes with a pang of disgust), or the way she dabbles with time like they are old friends. Let her wonder what he knows that she thinks is secret. Let her think him as powerful and eternal as the tides, or magnificent, like the mantarays who hunt bioluminescent krill in the night through waters so lightless and without end that it looks as though they’re flying through the cosmos swallowing stars, unconstrained by the trivial and mortal matters of gravity or physics.

Because, in a way he is.

It’s a shame that she is not meant for safekeeping, or one small, greedy individual.
It’s a shame that she has fled one danger to find herself before another.

The rise and fall of her breath moves him.

And now he is close enough to feel the heat as it radiates off her skin before it’s lost somewhere between the dew and morning mist, close enough to do with her what he wanted if he only chooses to want it. The knowledge alone is enough to carve the beginnings of a rakish grin of satisfaction across his lips and through his otherwise solemn expression. It’s always been the feeling of control that he liked best, and so in these few quiet seconds he flexes the hard line of his jaw as he admires his own good standing while thinking that the way his face hardens with every clench must make him look even more commanding, and powerful, and in control. How long, he wonders, before she realizes that she’s in the presence of greatness?

They are parallel in more ways than one.

He wasn’t always what he is now. Power, control, was in its own way a blossoming contagion. Once he was only a boy damaged by the ruin that was his mothers’ love story. All he had wanted then was his family made whole, his life made stable — but he kept wanting. He wanted and wanted and wanted, and took and took and took until the things that had meaning once lost it; until he wanted everything and nothing was enough. It became a vicious cycle and a self-fulfilling prophecy and here he is now: A god and a wreck all at once.

I see you, too.

He can tell by the way that she says it (obtusely oblivious) that she doesn’t. She can’t see the staccato hum of power that reverberates through every inch of muscle and fat on his body. She can’t smell that he, too, reeks of time and worlds and dimensions. If she could, he assumes, her mouth would be wide agape with her wonder instead of the straight underscore he sees now.

Am I not supposed to?

Here he smiles, and then he tilts his head as though in careful consideration of her question though every piece of him already knows the answer (not that he will oblige her with it, though). Glossing over her question Elektrum shakes out his silver mane with the casual swing of his head and a few minutes of silence he allows to span between them until he is ready.

“What can you do?” he says, turning his interest now towards the extra eye nestled in along her forehead, nearly hidden by unruly wisps of forelock that fall across it here and there. In spite of his ego there are parts of him that yearn to know why she wears time like perfume, dotted carefully against all her pulse points. Perhaps she would be useful to him.

“Show me.”