that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
It’s easy to turn those like her away from prying further. Perhaps it is a kindness that keeps them from picking at what is obviously an unhealed wound—or perhaps it is simply a good learning that keeps them in the trappings of good manners. Whatever the true reasoning, he finds that he had no qualms about taking advantage of it. He knows that her curiosity has not been truly dampened (he can see it in the hesitant way that she drops it), but he doesn’t mind denying her further access to his anguish.
Instead he straightens, dons the arrogance like a clock and watches her with his sharp eyes. There is not much that he misses when he is not too busy looking inward. “I prefer the morning to the night,” he says before he can stop himself, but he doesn’t flinch from surprise at the way the truth forms on his lips.
“Keepsake,” he repeats her name, mostly to himself, and then looks back to her. Studying the quiet of her eyes and wondering why they look so familiar. “It’s a nice name.” He rolls his shoulder and then flicks his tail behind him, letting the sting of it touch his haunches. “I’m Firion.”
Just a name, but it certainly wasn’t anything that he had ever minded.
There’s a strange tension, and he knows that he is the source of it. He knows that she would be the kind to have a lovely conversation—someone who would gladly slip into pleasantries and gentle exchanges. So the tension is clearly radiating from him. He shifts his weight. “Thanks,” his lips quirk into a crooked smile. “They are like my father’s.” He pauses, thinking of his father’s yellow eyes. The way that they sharpened to knives when they looked at you. The way they shifted between apathetic and fatal.
“Well, sort of.”
Another pause as he considers her.
“What brings you to the meadow today?”
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
