05-14-2021, 09:14 AM
She likes the quiet intensity of the way he studies her, though she mutes the smile that rises to her lips lest he get any ideas of what that delight means. His gaze though is nothing like the smile that reshapes his face - wry and warm and entirely too brief. She wonders how to catch another glimpse of it even as he takes a breath and speaks and that smile grows again.
It is impossible not to smile back at him.
“How do you know it’s important?” There is no judgement in the question, only twin eyes that burn soft instead of bright, the smoldering fire inside the irises muted by the dark. But then he’s looking at her again with a quiet intensity that is becoming familiar, and she cannot help the way she gazes back at him with a level of expectation she cannot name the roots of. She can sense more so than anything else that this man is the embodiment of something much vaster than he appears. That the swirls of silver ore in those amber eyes mean something more than simple beauty.
His eyes harden but not in a way that feels cold or cruel, and when his smile changes to match it she swears she can almost hear him think. But that gift had faded with the growing dark, a silence that swallowed and consumed a mind that had once been filled with lovely sound. A lonely change. He nods and moves closer, and the urge to mirror him nearly overwhelms her as her body shifts restlessly in place, wondering.
She is not left wondering long, and when he reaches for her she is already reaching back to touch her mouth to the curve of his warm neck in quiet wonder.
In an instant, for an instant, the world is suddenly a maelstrom around her. It feels like wind and power and time coming undone, it feels like becoming untethered, untied, but before she can even reach to curl closer into the steadiness of his pale gold body it is already over. “What -” but her words halt breathlessly as she looks beyond a face that is warm and beautiful to a beach that had not been there a moment ago. She steps away from him silently, eyes wide as she turns in a circle to take in whatever it was that he just did. But it is too much to fathom - even with her curious suspicions, and so she returns to him with a touch on his shoulder and a quiet, wondrous smile on the curve of her delicate mouth.
“Where are we?” She says, soft and sunshine and settling in close beside him, close enough that she can feel the tips of those long dark wing feathers brush against his sides. The contact is steadying in the midst of this unexplainable change. But then she does look to the horizon at which he had pointed to, and her eyes search a sky that is only dark and empty, completely void of any crack. “I don’t see a scar.” She whispers, and she isn’t sure what made her pick that word. Scar. As though she is convincing herself it must not have been a wound if there was no mark left behind. “Are you trying to figure out where it came from, or where it went?” Her eyes return to his face again, softer now as she traces the swirls of molten silver in his gaze. Then, her brow furrowing softly beneath the long tangles of dark forelock, “Do you think it hurt when the crack appeared? Do you think the sky felt it?”
aureline
dear wilderness, be at your best
her armor is thin as the fabric of her dress
@[Ten]