Stand face to face with your god
There is this: a flashbang of anger that craters out the center of her chest, a flare of fine, draconic nostrils. To feel him smear his blood across the corner of her mouth, to hear him say these words. As if the Pretty Things cannot also be hunters.
She knows the part that she has played here, the damsel. This is the lie.
The lie is not in her being a Pretty Thing, but being a helpless thing.
She flashes her teeth now, draws her mouth away, plunges it into the cold depths of the water in the hopes the current will cleanse her of his blood.
“Pretty things cannot have teeth?” she asks, her mouth dripping water when she lifts her head to look at him steadily. The anger that had infected her chest cavity does not show in her expression, though the damsel is gone. The big, doe eyes are only reptilian now. They flash some electric color as she considers him.
Whatever magic he possesses is greater than hers, she can smell it on him. She’d felt it in the tethers that had dragged her backward into the water. But she is no small thing. There are entire cosmos trapped in her chest, stardust in her lungs, nebulas clinging to her sides.
No, she is no small thing.
