Youth has never suited her—not truly.
It held a weak grasp on her, but she was never designed to be a child. Born of a monster and magic incarnate, she was always designed to be something more. She was pushed into maturity from the very first, her lips upon the cup of it, and nothing that happened since slowed it. Crowns had taken her past the brink of death and only barely brought her back. She had walked him to the edge in return.
The dark thrill of it laced through her and whatever innocence she might have had fled.
So as she rises up onto the horizon of her second year, there is little of childhood in her fine features. There is something disconcertingly adult in the tip of her almond eyes and the slant of her velvet mouth. Something comely and serious—as somber as the promise of death in the ivory that begins to creep over her lengthening limbs and across her narrow chest. Something dark and twisted and hungry.
It’s what gleams in her plain eyes as she walks through the meadow on this day, studying everyone with the slanted gaze of someone who does not look directly at all. It’s only when she sees him, a soldier if she had ever known one, that she pauses at all, her mouth pulling into a simpering smile. When his ears flick, something stirs in her belly and she walks near him, the faint sweet smell of oleander in her hair.
“It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think,” her silvery voice trills lightly as she comes to a stop by his side, dipping her mouth into the cool water to wet her tongue. When she lifts to look at him, she searches his gaze, testing the edges of her enthrallment with the stranger. “Isn’t it a fine day to make friends?”
but in all chaos, there is calculation
@[Pteron]